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Indepth Arts News:
"Vibrant Colours and the Passion of Mexican Modern Art"
1999-11-04 until 2000-02-06
Montreal Museum of Fine Art
Montreal, QU,
CA Canada
From November 4, 1999, to February
6, 2000, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is presenting an
outstanding selection of some two hundred works created by
forty Mexican artists between 1900 and 1950. Mexican
Modern Art, 1900-1950 is the first exhibition in Canada on
modern Mexican art since 1943.
For the past seventy-five years, the understanding and
appreciation of Mexican art have focussed primarily on the
murals, particularly those by Los Tres Grandes: Diego Rivera,
José Clemente Orozco and José David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Although the murals' importance is undeniable, there is much
more to twentieth-century Mexican art.
The exhibition's aim is to show the scope and development of
Mexican modern art in the first half of the twentieth century,
when the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath inspired
overlapping generations of creators in various realms. The
exhibition illustrates this renaissance of the arts with a
wide-ranging panorama of Mexican artworks from 1900 to
1950 - next to two hundred paintings, sculptures, prints and
photographs by Orozco, Siqueiros, Kahlo, Tamayo, Izquierdo,
Ruiz and their contemporaries. The influence of avant-garde
Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism is
readily apparent in this art that is deeply rooted in
Pre-Columbian and Amerindian cultures.
The exhibition is divided into four parts. First is Early
Modernism: Art between Cosmopolitan and Nationalistic
Trends, 1900-1920, which describes the situation of the visual
arts in Mexico at the beginning of the century, while they were
undergoing the influence of the major European art movements.
The second part, The Mexican Renaissance: Art in
Post-revolutionary Times, 1921-1934, deals with the muralists'
vital contribution to modern Mexican culture as well as with the
most prominent artists of the time. Then, Images of a New Era:
Modern Photography and the Revival of the Lithographic
Tradition shows how photography and printmaking also
influenced Mexican modernism. The exhibition concludes with
The 'Mexican' Style: The Continuity of Mexican Modernism,
1935-1950, which provides a view of the artistic plurality and
diversity of these years.
A varied activities programme highlighting various aspects of
Mexican culture is being planned by the Museum for the fall.
A catalogue will be published in separate English and French
editions, with all the exhibited works reproduced in full colour.
The works in the exhibition come from public and private
collections in the United States and Mexico. Among the lenders
are the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago and the
Instituto nacional de Bellas Artes.
The exhibition Mexican Modern Art, 1900-1950 is a joint
project of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National
Gallery of Canada, where it will be presented after Montreal.
The guest curator of the exhibition is Mexican art historian and
curator Luís-Martín Lozano. Nathalie Bondil-Poupard and
Stéphane Aquin, curators at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts,
will be in charge of the Montreal presentation.
A parallel selection of contemporary Mexican art will be
presented exclusively in Montreal.
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