Mexico and American Modernism

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15278

In the years between the two world wars, the enormous vogue of "things Mexican" reached its peak. Along with the popular appeal of its folkloric and pictorialist traditions, Mexican culture played a significant role in the formation of modernism in the United States. Mexico and American Modernism analyzes the complex social, intellectual, and artistic ramifications of interactions between avant-garde American artists and Mexico during this critical period.

In this insightful book, Ellen G. Landau looks beyond the well-known European influences on modernism. Instead, she probes the lesser-known yet powerful connections to Mexico and Mexican art that can be seen in the work of four acclaimed mid-century American artists: Philip Guston (1913–1980), Robert Motherwell (1915–1991), Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). Landau details how these artists' relationships with the Mexican muralists, expatriate Surrealists, and leftist political activists of the 1930s and 1940s affected the direction of their art. Her analysis of this aesthetic cross-fertilization provides an important new framework for understanding the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School as a whole.

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date May 2013 (in print)

Print ISBN 9780300169133

EISBN 9780300232684

Illustrations 39 color + 71 b/w illus.

Print Status in print

Publisher (in print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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List of illustrations

Detail from History Mexico (History as Seen from Mexico in 1936)
José Clemente Orozco
Photograph of Noguchi with plaster model for swimming pool (designed by architect Richard Neutra for film director Josef von Sternberg)
History Mexico (History as Seen from Mexico in 1936), detail
Isamu Noguchi shown with details of History as Seen from Mexico
Death (Lynched Figure)
Frontier
Martha Graham
Primitive Mysteries (group)
History Mexico (History as Seen from Mexico in 1936), detail
Members of the New Dance Group in Improvisation
Hy Boris and Ad Bates in Edith Segal's Black and White
History Mexico (History as Seen from Mexico in 1936), detail
History Mexico (History as Seen from Mexico in 1936), detail
The Worker's Struggle Against Monopolies, detail
History Mexico (History as Seen from Mexico in 1936), detail
History Mexico (History as Seen from Mexico in 1936), detail
The Struggle Against Terrorism, center section
Tropical America (América Tropical)
Mother and Child
Untitled (Dr. Entozoan)
Love: Eternal Recurrence
Conspirators
Portable mural for Negro America, Hollywood John Reed Club
Where Vandals Wrecked Paintings
Mural for Proscenium, Workers Alliance Center, Los Angeles
The Struggle Against Terrorism, detail
Ejercicio Plastico, detail
Lamentations panel from The Struggle Against Terrorism
Phillip (top) and Nat Goldstein on the beach in Venice, California
Post-surrealist sill life panel from The Struggle Against Terrorism
Burning of the Jews of Trent
To B. W. T.
The Epic of American Civilization: Machine Images (Panel 12)
Untitled (Number 37)
City Activities with Dance Hall, from America Today
Jackson Pollock painting in his studio
Untitled (Sheet of Studies)
Prometheus, central panel
Untitled (Naked Man with Knife)
Preparatory painting for The Two Natures of Man
Barricade
Untitled (Figure Composition)
Arshile Gorky and his mother
The Artist and His Mother
Photograph of the Pollock family
Untitled (Woman)
Bird
Members of Siqueiros Experimental Workshop operating an airbrush on a parade float for Independence Day
Collective Suicide
Untitled (Landscape with Steer)
Composition with Pouring II
Number 1A, 1948
David Alfaro Siqueiros posing for the figure of the student in his mural, The People to the University, the University to the People
David Alfaro Siqueiros posing for the figure of the student in his mural, The People to the University, the University to the People
{Title Unknown}
Spanish Prison Window (formerly The Spanish Prison)
Figure with Mandoline
The Slaying of Laius, Plate 3 from The Myth of Oedipus
Stenographic Figure
Propaganda for Love
Untitled
Invasion of the Night
Robert Motherwell and María Ferreira at LaGuardia Airport
La Belle Mexicaine (Maria)
The Initiation
Landscape of the Innter Mind
Mexican Sketchbook
Mexican Sketchbook
Mama, Papa is Wounded!
Mexican Sketchbook
For Parajito
Automatic Drawing 1
Espace libre, Space unbound
The Indians
Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive
Three Figures Shot
Dead Peasants
Yellow Abstract Composition
The Little Spanish Prison
Recuerdo de Coyoacán
The Studio
Spanish Picture with Window
Male and Female
Untitled
Inscape
Girl before a Mirror
Joy of Living
Personage (Autoportrait); or Wounded Personage; Personnage; Collage; Large Collage; Surprise and Inspiration
La calavera oaxaqueña (The Oaxaca calavera)
Elegy to the Spanish Republic XXXIV
How to look at a Cubist Painting, detail
From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to the Revolution–The Martyrs and Mounted Revolutionary, detail of left-hand section
Serpahic Dialogue
Portrait and a Dream
Full Fathom Five
Robert Motherwell painting the Reconciliation Elegy
Illustration for Harold Rosenberg's poem "A Bird for Every Bird." Later titled Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 1
Painting, Smoking, Eating
Painter's Farms

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Contents

Contents

Author

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.001

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15279

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Preface

Mexico and American Modernism presents a related set of interdisciplinary cross-cultural case studies charting the impact of aesthetic connections to Mexico and Mexican art on four important mid-twentieth-century American artists. Major contributions by Isamu Noguchi, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell were...

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.vii-xi

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15280

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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Author

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15281

Body Si(gh)ting: Noguchi, Mexico, and Martha Graham

Standard biographies of famed sculptor Isamu Noguchi typically devote no more than a few pages to the unusual carved relief he produced at age thirty-one during the height of the depression in Mexico City...

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.2-33

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15282

Chapter subject tags:Modernism (Art)Noguchi, Isamu, 1904-1988Martha Graham Dance CompanySculpture, Modern

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Envisioning History: Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish in Morelia

Sightseers in Mexico touring the Museo Regional Michoacano de Morelia, a converted Baroque palazzo that was once setting to a brief sojourn by Emperor Maximilian, typically react with puzzlement when they come upon a most unusual feature, an epic mural dating to the mid-1930s that decorates a wall of one of its interior patios (fig....

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.34-59

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15283

Chapter subject tags:Modernism (Art)Guston, Philip, 1913-1980Kadish, Reuben, 1913-1992Surrealism

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Reinventing Muralism: Pollock, Mexican Art, and the Origins of Action Painting

Prodded by interviewers to reminisce about the start of her relationship with Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner invariably mentioned the continuing impact of Mexican muralism on her future husband and...

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.62-87

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.006

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15284

Chapter subject tags:Modernism (Art)Abstract expressionismPollock, Jackson, 1912-1956Orozco, José Clemente, 1883-1949

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Motherwell, Mexico, and Surrealism Revised

In February 1944, just a few months after his startling debut at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century, Jackson Pollock granted his first interview, set up as answers to a questionnaire in the West Coast–based Arts and Architecture magazine. Queried by an anonymous interviewer...

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.89-119

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.007

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15285

Chapter subject tags:Modernism (Art)SurrealismMotherwell, Robert

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Abstract Expressionism and Modernist Identity

The differences in specific emphases and styles notwithstanding, New York School artists took their subjectivity as thematic in their work, a subjectivity they imagined as “interior.” . . . The “subjects of the artist” were the artists as subjects. Michael Leja, Reframing...

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.120-148

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.008

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15286

Chapter subject tags:Modernism (Art)Abstract expressionismSubjectivity in art

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Conclusion

If he wasn’t exactly an “action painter” like Jackson Pollock, was Robert Motherwell a “mythmaker” in the sense of his other colleagues Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman, all of whom reinvestigated archetypes and ancient motivations in their initial...

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.149-166

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.009

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15287

Chapter subject tags:Modernism (Art)Noguchi, Isamu, 1904-1988Pollock, Jackson, 1912-1956Motherwell, Robert

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Index

Index

Author

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.010

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15288