An Introduction to the Project

For most of the twentieth century, Mexican art has been almost unilaterally studied from the perspective of a nationalist ideology forged in he 1920s, colored by a single-minded vision of both the country and its cultural production. In the wake of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917, came the perceived need by intellectuals and government officials to forge a national Mexican culture that would restore order and unity to a nation torn apart by profound sociocultural and ethnic inequalities. This ideological construction continues to shape Mexican and foreign approaches to the history of twentieth century Mexican art, despite revisionist historical research of the past twenty years that has highlighted the close relationship between Mexican history and the broader, international context. While this context may not fully explain certain phenomena unique to Mexico, its shed important light on MexicoÕs constant shifts between periods of openness to outside influences and of resulting isolationist reactions.

[Siqueiros]The great majority of Mexican artists, the foreigners who for diverse reasons have decided to live and work in Mexico, and those Mexicans who work abroad, have insisted repeatedly over the course of this century in situating themselves in a specific cultural terrain, isolated from the non-Mexican world. In order to emphasize their ex-centric position, they never fully coincided with artistic trends in the major art capitals, but which did not--as has often been claimed--arise from a totally different conceptual framework. Most often, they stand as either counterpoint or complement to international events and ideas. For example, the insistence in Mexico on the importance of national, regional, and linguistic identities exists not only because of individual struggles for self-affirmation and the StateÕs desire for centralized control, bur because of a continuing fear for the fragility of these identities in relation to those of the outside world.

Artistic production in Mexico is the product of decades of institutional and personal relationships with contemporary political, cultural, and artistic movements in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexican artists were drawn to Europe, and especially Paris. In the wake of the October Revolution in Russia, the Mexican avant-garde embraced the Soviet utopia and eventually transformed their own revolution into a mythic version of the Russian model. This process reached its most pronounced level in the 1930s, at the same time being shaped by the political movements and esthetic polarizations of radical elements in the United States.

These relationships are evident both in modes of artistic production and in the iconographic content of the works themselves. As to the former, perhaps, the best studied example is that of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose fame contributed to the establishment of an equally nationalistic muralist movement in the United States. At the same time, RiveraÕs experience in the industrialized United States, combined with his Marxist optimism, came to influence his own vision of Mexico. Meanwhile, however, critics, artists,, collectors, and museum audiences in the U.S. continued to favor the idyllic rural imagery of the "Mexican school" of the 1920Õs, a style that served to distinguish Mexico as an alternative to the failures of industrialization during the Great Depression, while ironically reinforcing a view of Mexico as unequal, underdeveloped, primitive, and exotic.

[Guston mural]Such processes and influences are exceedingly complex, difficult to describe precisely or to research. These issues have led to our desire for a multidiscplinary research project further revising this history, a project that encourages the complex questioning of the history of Mexican art in this century, rather than a one-sided focus on identity, nationalism, or any other single theme.

This research project is intended to complement current studies of the visual arts in Mexico. But we mean not only to fill gap in the historical record, or to highlight areas purposefully ignored. With the benefit of our own distance from mainstream academic institutions and museums and from an increasingly powerful commercial art market, we analyze the history of art and aesthetic discourse in Mexico using methodological advances and multi-disciplinary perspectives more in tune with current trends and needs. The principal goal of this extended research project is to clarify, to the extent possible, the social, economic, political and ideological contexts that have shaped the construction of twentieth century Mexican art. Our interest extents beyond Mexico itself to include the ways in which Mexican visual culture has functioned to shape an image of the country abroad. In addition, we envision a deconstruction of the varied discourses that have been used to promote and legitimize Mexican art, now examined from a broader global perspective and in light of new theoretical advances and comparatives studies that question the continuing value of Eurocentric and art-centric approaches.

The fellows