MFA exhibit illustrates a revolution in Mexican printmaking

For her first Museum of Fine Arts exhibit, curator Elizabeth Kathleen Mitchell has brought together exciting works by several of Mexico's most influential printmakers of the early 20th century.

Visually dazzling and informative, "Vida y Drama: Modern Mexican Prints" showcases 27 lithographs, linocuts and woodcuts from the MFA's collection.

Artists as stylistically varied as Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Alberto Beltran are represented in prints ranging from the 1920s to the 1950s.

Describing the exhibit, Mitchell said these artists sought to express the "truth of what Mexico had been and what they were going to be."

"I wanted artists whose works reflected their heritage to Mexico. In part these works were inspired by the Mexican Revolution, which sought social and economic reforms," she said.

During an opening day tour she explained printmaking had a rich history in Mexico since the Spanish brought the first printing press in 1539. By the 1910 revolution, artists and activists were adapting traditional approaches to express their call for social justice and artistic freedom.

Located in the Clementine Haas Michael Brown Gallery, the exhibit runs through Nov. 2.

For visitors mostly familiar with Mexico through Hollywood's distorting lens, the exhibit whose title in English means "Life and Drama," provides a bracing corrective.

Artists on display reveal a political and social consciousness in distinctive styles, fusing Mexican visual traditions with then-current European and North American technical innovations.

Mitchell said several artists "gravitated toward printmaking as a means to explore the pre-Hispanic past and indigenous visual traditions and to experiment with American and European avant-garde styles."

"Their prints gave form to the ideals of social, racial and economic equality that fueled the Mexican Revolution," she said.

Without irony, Rufino Tamayo evokes the piety of everyday people in his 1926 woodcut "Virgin of Guadalupe," which is reminiscent of folk art. Rivera's 1932 lithograph "Zapata" employs Western-influenced iconography to express revolutionary fervor. Daring to challenge political orthodoxy, Orozco's 1935 lithograph "The Masses" subverts the party line by satirizing a mob of hungry, greedy people.

Excepting Rivera, most artists in the show are little known to American audiences. But their bold imagery and social activism evoke several crucial decades when Mexican artists used modernist techniques to express pressing concerns about justice, equality and artistic freedom.

The exhibit is organized into three related themes. The first section comprises early prints by Tamayo, Rivera and Orozco whose works fused traditional themes with American and European avant-garde styles.

The second section features prints published between 1939 and 1957 by artists associated with the "Taller de Grafica Popular," or "Peoples Graphic Workshop," which used bold, even provocative images to call for social and political reforms.

Artists such as Beltran used prints, posters and even murals to oppose the rising tide of fascism in Mexico and Spain.

The third section offers striking examples of portraiture in which several artists employed their distinctive styles to capture their models' moods.

It includes the show's single most arresting image, Rivera's "La Mujer (Frida Kahlo)," a powerfully erotic lithographic montage of the artist's wife seated naked on a bed wearing only a coiled necklace and shoes.

Before destroying the stone from which the image was printed, Rivera created a unique proof with images on both sides of the paper now in the MFA's collection. Rather than duplicate the first print, he pressed another image onto the other side, creating overlapping images like a double exposure that appear to give its subject male and female characteristics.

Like its companion show, "Viva Mexico" about photographer Edward Weston's formative years in Mexico, this exhibit examines a similarly crucial period when Mexican artists developed new approaches that still shape their national art.

Mexico President Porfirio Diaz, whose iron-handed rule led to his 1911 ouster, once remarked, "Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States."

"Vida y Drama" celebrates artists who might have responded to trends beyond their borders but finally remained true to their homeland.

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