A Virtual Portfolio of Works in Homage to Leopoldo Méndez
List of Works and Artists
LEOPOLDO MÉNDEZ:
GOYA OF MEXICO, HEIR TO POSADA
Summary:
The Arizona State University Art Museum, with painstaking care and vision,
has organized an exhibition of prints from the powerful oeuvre of Leopoldo
Méndez (1902-1969). Known and revered by vast audiences abroad,
critically praised by curators, artists, collectors, and a discriminating
public, his lithographs, woodcuts, wood engravings, and etchings grace
the permanent print collections of major museums throughout the world,
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA of New York City. Curiously,
the last large, solo exhibition of his work
in the United States was held more than fifty years ago at the Art Institute
of Chicago.
As Daumier was to France; as Kollwitz and Grosz were to Germany; as Goya's prints revealed more than the horror of war in Spain; as Dürer and Rembrandt, earlier on, reflected the spirit of their time, so the work of Leopoldo Méndez was inextricably caught up in the life of his beloved Mexico, its on-again, off-again revolution, and its people - - in its complex relationships, and its surfeit of problems, within and without the country.
Deliberately choosing to pursue the "black art" of printmaking,
in which his visual message would reach the populace far beyond the confines
of a mural painting on a wall, this superbly talented, technical wizard
of the burin and the velo practiced his art on an aesthetic level rarely
attained in the graphic arts. His work moved from abstraction through
expressionism to what may best be defined as "Mexican realism," which
allowed his work to be widely "understood," it ranged from political and
social satire, in the tradition of Posada and those before him, to the
benign
and uncontroversial visual studies pursued by myriad artists before him.
His fertile imagination, brilliant compositional ideas, and aesthetic
invention prompted Carl O. Schniewind, then Curator of Prints at the Art
Institute of Chicago in 1945, to organize a solo exhibition of more than
a hundred Méndez works (77 drawings and 64 prints) and to commission
a wood engraving, "Lo que puede venir," also known as "Amenaza sobre México,"
which was employed in a successful fund-raising campaign for the Institute.
This masterful work reflects Méndez at the height of
his artistic power and cries out its terrible warning of things to come...
In contrast, the linoleum engraving, "El Carrusel," designed for the movie,
"Pueblerina," depicts the dignity of a Mexican campesino family enjoying
an outing at a local fair - - in a tremendous range of "color" - - from
the white of the paper and variations of gray, to the rich, velvety blacks
in the pristine, uncut areas. Méndez, in both prints, uses his
favorite engraving tools, the velo and the spit sticker, wisely and with
discrimination.
His drawings, posters, broadsides, calaveras, corridos, book jackets, magazine covers, engravings and etchings for livres deluxe, and individual suites of lithographs offer themes that succinctly describe his lifelong concerns: there are works devoted to landscapes, trees, cactus flowers, still-lifes and nudes - - both male and female. There are works which bring to life the history and the people that have affected the political and social course of his country, including Cuauhtémoc, Father Hidalgo, Porfirio Díaz, Francisco Madero, and scores of others. He portrayed hunger, maternity, birth, death, social dancing, and the atom bomb used on Hiroshima. His posters, corridos, and leaflets were offered to assist the efforts of the Partido Popular, the CTAL, problems of illiteracy, the worker's university, and other causes on behalf of the Mexican people. Throughout his travels, he created prints of the Brooklyn Bridge, views of Zaragoza, Spain, the Maison de Beaux Arts in Paris, workers in Russia, Texas, Pittsburgh, Poland, Holland, and elsewhere. He made portraits of his friends and family and drew loving studies of his mistress. His works reflect an awareness of his times, his role as a worker-artist, in addition to his sensitivity to real, not virtual reality.
The artist:
Leopoldo Méndez was born in Mexico City in 1902, the youngest of
eight children. His father was a shoemaker; his mother, of indigenous
stock, died before he was a year old. A sketch book and a drawing tool
were always in his hands. At the age of fifteen, he was the youngest student
to have enrolled in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in his native
city, where he studied with Saturnine Herrán, Leandro Izaguirre,
Ignacio Rosas, Germán Gedovius, and Francisco de la Torre. Following
his graduation from the Academy, he continued his studies at the Escuela
de Pintura al Aire Libre (the plein-air "Impressionist " school founded
by Alfredo Ramos Martínez) until 1922.
His intellectual thirst was sated when he joined the Stridentists
(a group of artists,
musicians, and poets, whose goals were not unlike those of the Dadaists
and Futurists) and whose membership included, among many others, Jean
Chariot, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Edward Weston, Tina Modotti,
and Silvestre Revueltas.
To keep himself in grocery money (he was never financially
"well-off"), he designed book jackets, taught drawing and crafts in the
elementary and technical schools, was an assistant to a stage-designer,
contributed drawings and prints to journals, and created visual works
for many liberal and/or leftist publications. Prior to the economic "crash"
of 1929 with its accompanying impact upon the world, including Mexico,
Méndez and many other artists joined the CPM (Communist Party of
Mexico); he was ousted, years later. Independent, liberal thinkers were
not welcome.
Along with a group of friends in 1930, Méndez made his first trip by automobile to the United States. While in California, he was invited to illustrate a limited edition of Heinrich Heine's The Gods in Exile.
His first solo print show was held at the Gallery Posada, Mexico City, in 1932; during that same year he held a two-man exhibition with Carlos Mérida at the Milwaukee Art Institute and a three-person show with Fermin Revueltas and Ram6n de la Canal in Mexico City the same year.
One of the founding members of LEAR, the League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers, Méndez is, perhaps, best known as the leader and co-founder of the Taller de Gráifica Popular in Mexico City, a cooperative printmaking workshop dedicated to serving the needs of the Mexican people through prints of good artistic quality. The Taller lent "its professional cooperation to similar workshops and cultural institutions, to popular or labor organizations and to all progressive movements and institutions."l (Members of the Taller were not recompensed for their work; theirs was truly a labor of love and commitment).
Jean Charlot, in writing about the prints of Méndez, suggested that he "learned to cut wood so fine as to squeeze a content equivalent to that of hundreds of square feet of buon fresco into prints the size of an ex libris."2
Winner of many awards and honors throughout his life, Méndez
was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939 for travel and study
in the United States. He won First Prize and Best Illustrated Book for
his engravings and scratch board drawings for Juan de la Cabada's, "Incidentes
Melódicos del Mundo Irracional" at the IV Feria del Libro in Mexico
City. With Pablo O'Higgins, his best friend, he painted a 69 square foot
mural for the Maternity Hospital No.l, Mexico City. He was appointed representative
from Mexico to the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Warsaw,
Poland, where he met Picasso. He was a recipient of the
International Peace Prize in Vienna, Austria and visited the Soviet Union.
Méndez ran an unsuccessful candidacy as a member of the Partido
Popular for Deputy of the 9th district in Mexico City. He received the
Posada Prize for Printmaking at the Second InterAmerican Biennial of Painting,
Printmaking, and Sculpture in Mexico City and a similar award, a gold
medal, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the invitation of the Association
of Plastic Artists in the Soviet Union, he participated in their National
Art Congress. A major retrospective, attended by the cultural elite of
Mexico, paid homage to his work at the National Museum of Modern Art,
Mexico
City, on the occasion of his 60th birthday. In group and/or solo exhibitions
for four decades, his work has been shown in cities throughout the world.
(An example or two was recently found on the Internet).
As muralist, printmaker, painter, political activist, teacher, administrator, editor, leader of men and women, feminist, speaker, lover, husband, father, founder and co-founder of several artist's groups, Méndez was (to belabor the stolen phrase) a man for all seasons. There is a tiny minority who believed otherwise: they regarded him as a brilliant, talented, arrogant, domineering, sometimes demagogic, wrongheaded leftist, and selfish artist/printmaker. Es la vida.
The exhibition:
The exhibition is the first major exhibition of Méndez' prints
in the United States in almost five decades. Approximately one hundred
prints will span the creative growth and development, the flowering of
his talent, exposing his wry humor and acidic social and political satire,
from the late 1920s through the 1960s.
The catalogue is, in effect, a biography which includes personal anecdotal material gathered by the author, Prof. Jules Heller, when he was a Visiting Artist at the Taller de Gráfica Popular in the 1940s, was a long-term guest in the Méndez home, and from additional trips, in succeeding years, to Mexico City. Heller's most recent publication is North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century: A Biographical Dictionary. co-edited with his daughter; it includes the biographies of more than 1500 women artists from Canada, the United States, and Mexico. He also published Printmaking Today and Papermaking The catalog also includes a Bibliography, Index, and several Appendices, plus essays by Marilyn A. Zeitlin, Director of the ASU Art Museum.
-Jules Heller
1. Meyer, Hannes, ed. El Taller de Gráfica Popular: doce años de obra artística colectiva. Mexico: La Estampa Mexicana, 1949. p.1.
2. Charlot, Jean. "Mexican Prints" The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. November 1949: p84.
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