Mexican modernism: documenting the life of the peasant

This show captures the pathos and endurance, the stoicism and the restricted mental world, of Mexico’s peasant masses.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo’s La Buena Fama Durmiendo (Good Reputation Sleeping), 1938

The first appearance of Mexico in modern art is in Edouard Manet’s Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1868-69), in which the blond and bearded figure of the Hapsburg Maximilian stands impassively before a firing squad, in a mise-en-scene that the artist has deliber­ately borrowed from Goya’s great picture of an earlier atrocity, Third of May, 1808 (1814).

How a Hapsburg prince found himself on the throne of Mexico with support from the French under Napoleon III is a long story. Among other things it was a direct contravention of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), according to which the Americas belong to the sphere of influence of the US and are off-limits to foreign powers, but the American government was distracted at the time by the Civil War.

In any case, the history of Mexico is much longer and more complicated, and filled with dramatic episodes. Aztec culture was extra­ordin­arily violent, with its incessant and spectacular human sacrifices, before it fell to the Spaniards’ brutal conquest in the 16th century. Spanish colonial rule lasted for 300 years, until Mexico gained its independence in 1821. The territories the Spanish ruled were much vaster than the Mexico of today: they included Texas, which revolted and declared independ­ence in 1835, and the immense, mostly unsettled area called Alta California, which was ceded to the US after the war of 1846-48.

Like most of South America after independ­ence, Mexico was ruled by a series of military strongmen, both before and after the ill-fated imposition of Maximilian as ruler. The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were dominated by the imposing figure of president Porfirio Diaz, who oversaw three decades of stability, modernisation and economic progress during which the Mexican economy became closely integrated with that of the US. Such rapid progress, however, was made possible only by authoritarian rule.

And, as so often happens, the benefits of progress were not shared equally. The illiterate and landless peasants continued to work for subsistence wages on great haciendas, and the new industrial workers were not treated much better. Even members of the educated elites and the prosperous middle class were discontented with authoritarianism and, as in so many countries around the world, including Russia, China and Persia, demands for constitutional reform erupted in 1910 and 1911. More radical voices wanted industrial and land reform as well.

The government’s failure to respond to these demands led to paramilitary uprisings across the country and Diaz went into exile in Paris in 1911, with the famous warning that his successor, Francisco Madero, “has released a tiger; now let us see if he can control it”. The period that followed­, known as the Mexican Revolution, was a terrible decade of civil war in which almost­ two million Mexicans were killed — about 10 per cent of the population — and almost­ all of the most notable political and milit­ary figures, including Madero and later presidents, as well as the legendary paramilitary figures Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, were eventually murdered, betrayed or executed.

Relative stability returned during the 1920s and 30s, but power was still controlled by milit­ary strongmen and corrupt politicians, with limit­ed reforms for the poorest classes until the nationalisation of the oil industry in the late 30s. Even after this burst of socialism, politics reverted to the business as usual of power, corruption and repression in subsequent decades.

In spite of all this, Mexico attracted many European writers, artists and intellectuals — including­ DH Lawrence and Aldous Huxley — drawn by a combination of factors: the paradoxical co-existence of a modern European urban life side by side with the pre-modern, even primitive, folk culture of the peasantry; the dynamism and uncertainty of social change; and the vitality of the local artistic world, particu­larly the mural painting of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, sponsored in the 20s by the new secret­ar­iat for public education.

All these factors can be discerned in the film Que Viva Mexico!, begun in Mexico by the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in 1930, but for various reasons never completed; a reconstruction by Grigory Alexandrov was finally released in 1979 and can be seen on YouTube. The film as it stands makes it clear why Andre Breton, the leader of the surrealist movement, imagined Mexico as a place where daily life was permanently surreal; he later visited the country and published an article, “Souvenir du Mex­ique”, in the surrealist journal Minotaure (1939).

Breton’s article is headed by a reproduction of one of the pictures in the National Gallery of Australia exhibition devoted to photography in Mexico in this period. It is a shocking image of a young worker shot by the police during a demon­stration in 1934, his features disturbingly serene but his head lying in a pool of blood. Death was and remains a part of daily life in Mexico. Another famous visitor, Leon Trotsky, was murdered in Mexico by Joseph Stalin’s agents in 1940.

The exhibition begins and ends with images by this photographer, Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002), setting up a kind of ring construction evoking the endless cycles of Mexican life, even in what is on the surface a period of rapid change. The final image was made specifically for an exhibition curated by Breton while he was in Mexico: La Buena Fama Durmiendo (Good Reputation Sleeping) presents a young woman lying in the sun, her body partly bandaged­, yet provocatively uncovered. Cactus pieces lie in front of her, their sharp and piercing forms contrasting with the tenderness of flesh.

Many of the artists in this exhibition are foreign­ers, part of that movement of Europ­eans and Americans drawn to Mexico in the years between the wars. Edward Weston, one of the most important photographers in America at the time, visited with his Italian mistress, Tina Modotti, and there are two remarkable images by him: one of carved wooden fish which he has surprisingly brought to life in a composition that is both artful and filled with movement; the other is the dramatic profile of a young woman against the sky that seems to epitomise the idealistic aspirations of the revolutionary years, inevitably let down by reality.

Tina Modotti’s Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle, 1927

Modotti, taught by Weston, produced ­several fine photographs: a portrait of a young American woman, Ione Robinson, absorbed in inwardness like a sibyl; palm trees against the sky; hands pulling the strings of a marionette; and a Mexican sombrero with hammer and ­`sickle. This last picture reflects her engagement with the Communist Party, which led to ­personal involvements with several shady men. One became her lover after arranging the murde­r of his predecessor. He too was Italian, Vittorio Vidali, a vicious thug who is thought to have killed 400 Trotskyists and other com­­munists opposed to Stalin during the Spanish Civil War.

This first wall ends with two striking and disturbing pictures by Henri Cartier-Bresson, made during his visit to Mexico in 1934: one of an inflated pig-skin with faces peering through an open-work tile wall, the other of a young man sitting half-naked, apparently in a painful or ecstatic state. Both images are marked by the disruptive perspective of surrealism.

The next wall is devoted to a series of architectural photographs by Grant Mudford ta

Anton Bruehl’s Mother and child of Taxco, 1932

ken in 1976 — which, although very fine, feel as though they belong to another exhibition.

The third wall has a particularly striking set of pictures by Anton Bruehl, who was born in South Australia before moving to America at the age of 19. Mother and child of Taxco (1932) is a poignant portrait of a very young girl carrying a large baby in a shawl sling. She cannot be more than 14 or 15, and the little boy is perhaps a year old. Hardly more than a child herself, this girl has had to pass suddenly and without transition to motherhood: hers is a world that does not allow for the luxury of adolescence.

Another portrait by Bruehl is a close view of Dolores (1932), whose face fills the whole frame; the scale is large enough for us to make out the photographer and his tripod reflected in her pupil. She seems even younger than the first girl, and yet somehow disconcertingly knowing. But what exactly is it that she knows? Is she already a bride? Yet she is almost certainly illiterate, and her experience and knowledge of the world must be minimal. All there really is to know in her life are the realities of work, marriage and motherhood.

Other questions are raised by the photographs of Paul Strand, who was employed by the secretariat for public education to document life in Mexico and particularly the world of impoverished peasants, largely of native stock, a particular concern of the secretariat.

Many of these pictures, such as Woman, Patzcuaro (1933), were taken without the knowledge of the peasants, who were often superstitious about being photographed. In other cases the peasant subjects are aware, and look on suspiciously. These are clearly people who may feel deep tribal loyalties for popular leaders such as Zapata, but probably haven’t yet gained much in the way of concrete improvements to their way of life since the revolution.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo's Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking worker, assassinated), 1934

The final wall of the exhibition is devoted entirely to Alvarez Bravo, whose work, over a long career­, covers a wide range. Some pictures have documentary directness, as in the case of 1934’s Obrero en huelga, asesinado (Striking Worker, Assassinated), even if Breton discerned a latent surrealism in this image.

Others are more consciously intended to puzzle us, such as 1931’s Parabola Optica (Optical Parable), showing an optometrist’s facade­, in which the negative has been exposed back to front to reverse all the words and signs.

There is a playful spirit in Alvarez Bravo’s Un Poco alegre y graciosa (Somewhat Gay and Graceful) from 1942, with its whimsical musical title: a shot from above frames a dish of tortilla strips drying in the sun, a girl’s nightdress also laid out to dry, and the girl’s lower legs seen leaving the frame on the right. And a much darker evening or early morning shot, 1931’s El Ensueno (The Daydream), shows a girl leaning dreamily, unaware of being photographed, on a balcony opposite his apartment.

Engaging as his pictures are, though, it is to those of Bruehl and Strand that we come back, for they seem above all to capture the pathos and endurance, the stoicism and at the same time the restricted mental world of the peasant masses. Even in a time of turmoil, violence and civil war on a terrible scale, the women in particul­ar seem to live in a timeless cycle, repeate­d generation after generation and barely disturbed by the agitations of history.