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Modern Art

In the first two decades of the 20th century, Spanish modernists introduced Latin American painters to European styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including impressionism, postimpressionism, symbolism, and art nouveau. Mexican painter Saturnino Herrán, for example, used symbolism in his mural project, Our Gods (1904-1918, National Theater, Mexico City), in which nobly posed native Mexicans serve as powerful symbols of Mexican identity. Herran’s mural project became a model for the many large-scale public murals that were commissioned in the 1920s.

Modern art in Latin America found its own voice in these public murals created in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). Defining this movement were three Mexican muralists—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—along with architect and muralist Juan O’Gorman and landscape painter Gerardo Murillo (known as Dr. Atl). Rivera in particular developed under the influences of European modernism, studying in Spain and in Paris, France, from 1907 to 1921 and working with Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, who were experimenting with cubism. Cubist techniques such as the use of a diagonal grid as the basis of large-scale organization, abound in the works of Rivera and the other Mexican muralists.

The muralists expressed solidarity with the working and farming classes and shared the obsession with non-European aspects of Latin American culture that characterized the indigenism movement. These interests also inspired a simultaneous movement in photography and the graphic arts toward social realism, or the depiction of common people in a politically charged context. Rivera drew on both pre-Columbian sources and the traditions of Mexican folk art in a series of murals for the National Palace in Mexico City (1930-1932) that depict Mexico’s history starting before European colonization. Siqueiros and Orozco also painted emotionally charged murals for public buildings, expressing their sympathy with workers and their opposition to political oppression in portrayals of Mexican history. Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros worked in the United States as well, where they exercised a strong influence on public art projects of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as on the early work of American abstract expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock.

In much of Latin American modern art, indigenism, social realism, and the stylistic aspects of the mural movement joined with an interest in surrealism. Surrealism, a movement in literature and the arts, emphasized the role of dreams and the unconscious in the creative process. To this, the Latin Americans added an interest in archetypes—images, ideas, or patterns that have come to be considered universal models. These archetypes, which appear in mythology, religion, and art, make up what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and others termed the collective unconscious. Archetypes, especially those found in Native American art, have continued to fascinate Latin American painters of the 20th century.

As early as 1912, Mexican painter Francisco Goitia brought to Mexico a presurrealist style influenced by the satirical art of Spanish painter Francisco de Goya and Belgian painter James Ensor. A blending of social realism and surrealism that has been called social surrealism developed in the 1920s and 1930s in the paintings of Mexicans Antonio Ruíz (known as El Corzo) and Agustín Lazo and those of Argentine painter . This was paralleled by the more personal, mythic vision of Argentine painter and the dreamy landscapes of Venezuelan . Mexican painter Frida Kahlo blended naive folk imagery, psychological intensity, and dreamlike subjects into powerful compositions that have much in common with the art of European surrealists Giorgio di Chirico and Max Ernst. Kahlo’s many self-portraits project a sense of feminine strength, a quality they share with the paintings of María Izquierdo, also Mexican.

In 1938 the French leader of the surrealist movement, André Breton, visited Mexico. This visit, together with a subsequent flood of surrealist exiles to the United States and Latin America during World War II (1939-1945), had a lasting impact on art in the Americas. Among the immigrants were painters (from England) and (from Spain), both of whom settled permanently in Mexico and developed an art of dreamlike images known as magic realism.