Museum: Mostra "Diego Rivera e la costruzione dell’arte moderna in Messico nel XX secolo" - Musei Capitolini

Welcome to the Exhibition

Welcome to the Capitoline Museums. The exhibition you are about to visit features Diego Rivera as its protagonist but tells a broader story: how modern art was born in Mexico, through what exchanges and tensions it took shape, and in how many different ways a country sought to understand itself through images. That search begins earlier than one might think. Not with the Revolution of 1910, but with Independence in 1821, when Mexico becomes a nation and finds itself faced with a difficult question: what does it mean to be Mexican? Art was one of the tools with which an answer was attempted, and that question runs throughout the entire exhibition. The itinerary unfolds across four major sections. The first will take you to the origins: the academy, artistic training, the dialogue between Mexico and Italy that defined the artistic culture of the nineteenth century. The second follows Rivera and his contemporaries in Europe — in Spain, in France, in Italy — where they engaged with the avant-gardes without ceasing to be Mexican. The third enters the heart of the so-called "Mexican Renaissance": muralism, national identity, the Revolution. The fourth, finally, tells of what muralism did not exhaust — those artists who, in the same years, were exploring the fantastic, the metaphysical, the oneiric. The audio guide will accompany you through the four sections of the exhibition: Academy and Tradition, Rivera's and Mexico's Contribution to the European Avant-Gardes, The Mexican Cultural Renaissance, Beyond Social Realism. Enjoy your visit.

In Depth — The Artist

Before beginning the journey, let us get to know the protagonist of this narrative. Diego Rivera was born on December 13, 1886, in Guanajuato. At eleven years old he enrolled at the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, where he studied under the guidance of Santiago Rebull and then Velasco, the two great masters of Mexican academic painting. In 1907 he left for Europe thanks to a scholarship from the governor of Veracruz, Teodoro A. Dehesa. The stay lasted fourteen years and profoundly shaped his formation. In Spain he studied El Greco, Velázquez, Goya; in Paris he entered the heart of the avant-gardes: between 1913 and 1917 he produced over a hundred Cubist works, and frequented Picasso, Modigliani, Apollinaire. In 1920 he undertook a study trip to Italy, where he analyzed the frescoes of Giotto, Masaccio, and Michelangelo, seeking a key for a painting destined for an entire people. In 1921 he returned to Mexico. The country had just passed through a revolution and the Minister of Public Education, José Vasconcelos, wanted to use art to build a new national identity. In this context Rivera would be the central figure of this endeavor. Between 1922 and 1928 he decorated the Secretaría de Educación Pública with one of the most imposing pictorial cycles of the twentieth century, then worked at Chapingo, at the Palacio Nacional, and brought muralism to the United States. Rivera was also a political figure: a committed communist, he hosted Trotsky and Breton in his home. He married Frida Kahlo twice. He died in 1957 in Mexico City. His legacy lies in the idea that art has a public and pedagogical function, that the walls of buildings belong to the people. That beauty must not be a privilege.

Section I - Academy and Tradition

The Academia de San Carlos, founded in Mexico City in 1783 and reorganized in 1843, defined artistic education in the country for over a century according to a model based on classical tradition, life drawing, and rigorous observation of reality. The Academia opened a direct channel with Rome through the hiring of European masters and scholarships for the most promising talents. Among these, the Piedmontese Eugenio Landesio introduced landscape as an autonomous genre and trained José María Velasco, who transformed Mexican geography into a visual symbol of national identity. Rivera explicitly acknowledged this debt: "First I learned to paint landscapes; without this I could not have made the murals. I owe it to Velasco." The Italian presence in Mexico also manifested through figures such as Pietro Gualdi, who arrived in Mexico City as a set designer for an Italian opera company and subsequently settled in the country. Alongside his theatrical work, he produced urban and architectural views that celebrated the monumentality of religious and civic buildings. Although the avant-gardes of the twentieth century later called this tradition into question, many of the themes destined to define Mexican modernity were already present in this visual culture. The representation of landscape, scenes of everyday life, and the construction of a national iconography anticipated questions that would find new expressions in modern art.

Santiago Rebull Gordillo — The Sacrifice of Isaac (1858)

Santiago Rebull had won the scholarship to Rome with the canvas La muerte de Abel (1851), demonstrating his own ability — and that of his teacher Pelegrín Clavé — to confer narrative structure on academic studies of the male nude. He left the following year, attended the atelier of Nicola Consoni, and became part of the circle of Spanish painters. In 1855 he traveled to Paris, where he met his friend José Salomé Pina; together they visited the Universal Exhibition. In 1857 he fell seriously ill, a circumstance that forced him to return to Mexico earlier than planned. Despite his state of health, he managed to complete El sacrificio de Isaac, the last work he sent from the Eternal City to the Academia in Mexico. The painting, exhibited in the show, is considered by some art historians to be one of the most significant works of academic painting.

José Salomé Pina — San Carlo Borromeo (1853)

In 1853, on his second attempt, José Salomé Pina obtained the scholarship for Rome with the painting San Carlos Borromeo repartiendo limosna al pueblo. He left the following year with the task of stopping in Paris to purchase materials for the Academia de San Carlos. What should have been a brief stay turned into a four-year sojourn: Pina entered the atelier of Charles Gleyre, worked in the museums of the Louvre and the Luxembourg, and participated in the Salon of 1859, where the jury accepted two of his paintings. In 1859, at the urging of the director of the Academia, he moved from Paris to Rome, where he remained for nine years before returning to Mexico to succeed his master Pelegrín Clavé as director of the painting section. The San Carlo Borromeo you see here reflects the quality of this training: a painting of great technical mastery, marked by the European experience.

Salvador Ferrando — La Napoletana (1873)

Salvador Ferrando had already reached Rome thanks to the support of fellow citizens from Veracruz when, in 1848, the state governor requested a scholarship from the Academia de San Carlos on his behalf. The grant came only in 1851. Ferrando benefited from the patronage for six years, but remained in the capital for another fourteen, returning to Mexico only in 1871. In Rome he was captivated by the costumes and regional types of the city and its surroundings, as well as those of the Kingdom of Naples, much like many of his Mexican and foreign colleagues residing in the papal city. Upon his return, he presented five paintings at the XV Exhibition of the Academia in 1871, four of which depicted Italian costumes. La Napoletana may be either an autograph replica executed previously or an original version based on his Roman studies.

Pietro Gualdi — Piazza di Santo Domingo (Mexico City) (ca. 1850)

In 1838, Pietro Gualdi from Modena settled in Mexico City as a set designer for the Italian opera company accompanying soprano Marietta Albini. When the company returned to Europe, Gualdi decided to remain in Mexico. In addition to continuing his work as a set designer, he began producing medium-format oil paintings dedicated to the main monuments of the capital, celebrating the monumentality of viceregal architecture, both religious and civil, and evoking an era perceived as peaceful and harmonious, in contrast with the present. This nostalgia also found expression in the album Monumentos de México, a collection of twelve lithographic prints drawn from life depicting the most beautiful views of the capital. The great success of the publishing venture prompted Gualdi to announce a second edition the very following year.

Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez — The Huntress of the Andes (ca. 1874)

For two months Gutiérrez devoted himself to visiting the monuments, churches, and museums of the city and, in November 1868, according to his travel diary, he took a studio in Vicolo dei Greci — near Via Margutta, where most of the most celebrated artistic ateliers were concentrated — and wrote to María, expressing all his enthusiasm for the start of his painting activity: "I now felt a true desire to begin painting, and to paint the female nude, so necessary for historical and mythological paintings, which at the Academy in Mexico City is unknown and one studies only the clothed figure in biblical subjects and, at most, with bare arms and bare feet up to the ankle. In this situation you can understand the eagerness with which I wished to devote myself to the study of this genre, which in Rome is practiced with the utmost ease." This was the beginning of a series of studies of the female nude, to which he would dedicate his greatest efforts in the following decades, giving rise to a corpus of canvases among which the various versions of La cazadora de los Andes stand out.

Section II.1 — Diego Rivera's and Mexico's Contribution to the European Avant-Gardes

The Grand Tour tradition — once reserved for European elites — became for many Latin American artists a privileged pathway into the international circuits of modern art. Travelling to cities such as Madrid, Paris, Rome, or Berlin meant coming into direct contact with the avant-garde currents that were transforming the artistic landscape of the era. Unlike in the nineteenth century, the journey no longer had as its sole objective the study of classical models, but also participation in the salons, exhibitions, and debates of artistic modernity. Rivera's generation — which included Ángel Zàrraga, Roberto Montenegro, and David Alfaro Siqueiros — actively participated in these circuits, with a presence that was not without tensions: Latin American artists frequently found themselves confronting prejudices and racist attitudes widespread in European avant-garde circles. The rooms of this section take you through Rivera's three great European stages: Spain, France, Italy.

Section II.2 - Rivera in Spain

The young Diego Rivera arrived in Spain in 1907. Having settled in Madrid with a letter of introduction from Gerardo Murillo, he entered the studio of Eduardo Chicharro, a central figure of Spanish academicism. Contact with the local artistic tradition — in particular with the works of Francisco Goya, Diego Velázquez and El Greco housed at the Museo del Prado — allowed him to deepen his understanding of pictorial space construction, the atmospheric rendering of light, and formal expressiveness. Rivera travelled through various regions of the Iberian Peninsula together with Chicharro and the other members of his atelier, crossing Extremadura, Castile, Galicia, the Valencia region, Murcia, and the Basque Country. The elevated views and the complex urban layout of cities such as Toledo aroused in him an interest in the fragmentation of space and the multiplicity of viewpoints — elements that would later resurface both in his Cubist experiments and in his Muralist conception. In 1910 he temporarily returned to Mexico to present part of his European output. The stay coincided with the beginning of the Mexican Revolution — a circumstance that prompted him to return to Europe soon after.

Diego Rivera — Adoration of the Virgin (1912–1913)

Diego Rivera experimented with a new technique by painting the Adoration of the Virgin in wax, an exceptional work that brought him closer to the Parisian avant-garde. He probably used encaustic with the intention of achieving the greatest chromatic purity. The composition depicts the apparition of the Virgen de la Cabeza to a peasant on the mountain of the same name, through a rotating perspective: the Río Tajo and the bridge of San Martín can be glimpsed amid chromatic vibrations. Rivera introduces diagonal brushstrokes and contrasts of pure colours to construct figures foreshortened from above, which recall the style of El Greco. This is a particularly singular transitional work: still costumbrista in subject, but with a rendering already close to Cubism.

Diego Rivera — View of Toledo (1912)

In Toledo, between 1912 and 1913, Diego Rivera and Angelina Beloff continued their research on the rendering of landscape through the modulation of colour. Rivera, like Zàrraga and the regulars of the intellectual circle at the Café del Nuevo Levante, developed a deep passion for the work of El Greco. In this view Rivera constructs the city from the plain of the Río Tajo, from the south. On the opposite bank he depicts the familiar landmarks: the Cathedral and the Alcázar. The monumental view enters into dialogue with the complex compositions of El Greco, but amplifies their monumentality through a modern luministic sensibility: the ascending perspective and the reflection on the river are rendered through a Cubist-derived decomposition, in which the luminous tones are articulated between golden hues for the stone and blues for the sky and water.

Section II.3 Rivera in France

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Paris had become the main centre of artistic avant-gardes. The city brought together academies, galleries, independent salons, and intellectual circles in which some of the most innovative proposals of modern art coexisted. Diego Rivera's arrival in Paris, first in 1909 and then on a permanent basis from 1911, marked his definitive immersion in this environment. Having settled in Montparnasse together with the Russian painter Angelina Beloff, Rivera became part of a cosmopolitan community that included Amedeo Modigliani, Tsuguharu Foujita, Guillaume Apollinaire, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso. Between 1913 and 1917 he produced over a hundred Cubist works, establishing himself as an active protagonist of the Parisian avant-garde scene. Around 1918 he began to distance himself from Cubism, turning his attention to the work of Paul Cézanne and the so-called "return to order." Years later he would recall: "I was one of the members of the Cubist movement… but I did not remain in it. Cubism was a kind of laboratory: from there I emerged to create the murals."

Alexandre Zinoview — Portrait of Diego Rivera (1913)

The portrait that Alexandre Zinoview painted of Rivera in 1913 condenses the ideals and ambitions that the Mexican projected onto Europe, together with his celebrated fabulations about his distant, unknown, volcanic and tropical country. Through a cubist-derived decomposition, while not abandoning figuration, the corpulent painter occupies the center of the composition in a state of trance: dressed in black, standing on a chessboard floor, leaning on a carved wooden stick. His hand points to the sea, a landscape chaotically populated by palm trees, dark-skinned figures, cities under construction, railways, revolutions exploding among the mountains. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who met Rivera in those years, remembered him thus: "Diego used to tell me that the somnambulism, the yellow skin were the consequences of a tropical fever he had contracted in Mexico. Diego liked to talk about Mexico and his childhood. He lived in Paris for ten years and was one of the representatives of the École de Paris, he befriended Picasso, Modigliani and the French, but he always saw before him the reddish mountains covered in thorny cacti, the peasants with wide straw hats, the gold mines of Guanajuato, the incessant revolutions."

Diego Rivera — Portrait of the Sculptor Oscar Miestchaninoff (1913)

Around 1913 Rivera entered into dialogue with the Cubist circle, also drawing closer, through his bond with Angelina Beloff, to Russian and Eastern European artists. This portrait bears witness to both dimensions. It is one of his first Cubist works of great ambition: constructed through simple faceted planes, it divides the figure of the sculptor into two converging perspectives. Miestchaninoff holds a hammer and a wooden sculpture depicting a young girl's head. The portrait is set in Rivera's studio, with another plaster head and a water jug: elements that also appear in photographs of the period.

Diego Rivera — Marine Fusilier or Sailor at Lunch (1914)

Fusilero marino is one of Diego Rivera's most emblematic Cubist works, in which a brilliant assimilation of the teachings of Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso can be recognized. Rivera and Picasso met in 1914; Rivera recalled it in his autobiography: "Being personally welcomed by the master of Cubism was, of course, for me an enormous source of personal satisfaction." The canvas is constructed through a composition of geometric forms in shades of green, grey, and blue. The figure is a sailor wearing a striped shirt and a blue hat topped with a red pompom, on which the word «patrie» stands out. He is seated in front of a table and holds a glass in his hand; two fish are arranged on a plate.

Section II.4 - Rivera in Italy

The European experience of Mexican artists represented not only a space of avant-garde rupture and experimentation, but also a moment of engagement with the classical tradition. In Rivera's case, before making his definitive return to Mexico, he undertook a study trip to Italy at the end of 1920, during which he analyzed the works of Giotto, Masaccio, and Michelangelo. His notes document studies on light, monumental scale, and compositional solutions that would become fundamental to his conception of the mural as painting integrated into architectural space. During this journey he also produced numerous drawings of sculptures and archaeological collections, reinterpreting the classical world through a modern and personal gaze. Among these, a sketch of the bust of Epicurus held at the Musei Capitolini stands out, in which the solemn model is reworked through free and expressive lines.

Diego Rivera — Portrait of Epicurus (drawing from the bust in the Musei Capitolini) (1920)

In his studies of the Antique during his stay in Italy, Rivera chose in some cases to linger on places and works less frequented by critical tradition, as if he wished to contribute to the definition of a new canon according to autonomous criteria. Numerous are the drawings taken from archaeological collections, in which he sometimes seems to go beyond a simple copying exercise, arriving at a kind of caricature of works otherwise perceived as solemn. Such is the case of the irreverent drawing that accentuates the nose of the Bust of Epicurus, in the Sala dei Filosofi of the Musei Capitolini, Palazzo Nuovo. In some measure, it was a matter of breaking existing canons in order to reconstruct them through complex reformulations. The bust on display here dates to around 160–192 AD and is a copy of a Greek original from the second quarter of the third century BC.

Section III.1 — The Mexican Cultural Renaissance

With Diego Rivera among its central figures, the so-called Escuela Mexicana de Pintura defined one of the most significant moments of modern art in Latin America. The phenomenon, which authors such as Anita Brenner and Jean Charlot defined as the "Mexican Renaissance," involved a profound reappraisal of the country's historical and cultural roots: the Mesoamerican past, popular traditions, and the representation of indigenous peoples, peasants, and workers assumed a central role in a new national imaginary. In 1921, José Vasconcelos called numerous artists — among them Rivera, still in Europe — to work on the walls of schools and public buildings, conceiving images as an educational tool in a country marked by high rates of illiteracy. In parallel, the Escuelas de Pintura al Aire Libre, the Misiones Culturales, and exhibitions of popular art broadened access to artistic creation, contributing to a cultural project oriented toward the construction of national identity. While Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros led the great monumental projects, figures such as Rufino Tamayo, María Izquierdo, Agustín Lazo, and Frida Kahlo developed more introspective and experimental approaches.

Section III.2 — Reverberations of the Revolution

The outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the violence of the following decade profoundly marked subsequent artistic production. Some artists, such as Gerardo Murillo, Orozco, and Siqueiros, experienced the conflict directly; others, like Rivera, followed its developments from Europe. In both cases, the widespread conviction was that social renewal had to be accompanied by an equally profound renewal of expressive forms. Orozco's work offers the most critical perspective on the post-revolutionary phase: urban slums, working-class precariousness, the contradictions of a society engaged in redefining itself after the conflict. In his memoirs he declared that he had frequented the most marginal neighborhoods of Mexico City as part of his own visual research. The works of Rivera, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, and Fanny Rabel broaden this perspective, highlighting the social fractures that continued to mark the country even after the end of the conflict.

Section III.3 — National Identity

In 1921, with the creation of the Secretaría de Educación Pública led by Vasconcelos, a broad state cultural project took shape. Popular art was valorized as an essential component of a national identity founded on indigenous heritage and local traditions: not marginal folklore, but an authentic source of aesthetic and cultural meaning. Artists such as Saturnino Herrán, Frida Kahlo, Roberto Montenegro, Rufino Tamayo, María Izquierdo, and Jean Charlot developed languages capable of integrating craft production, rural settings, and popular religiosity. The representation of indigenous figures, trades, costumes, and dances marked a shift in perspective that ran through mural painting as well as graphic art and easel works. Rivera and other artists integrated this local reality with the experiences of the international avant-gardes, constructing a modern conception of mexicanidad in which ethnic diversity and everyday life acquired a central role.

Saturnino Herrán — Girl with Gourd (1917)

In Girl with Gourd, Saturnino Herrán depicts a smiling young woman, with black braids and adorned with necklaces, who gazes benevolently toward the viewer while holding a lush gourd in her hands. Through the inclusion of vernacular elements — traditional clothing, local architecture, the cacti typical of the Mexican landscape — Herrán develops a reflection on national identity. The figure of the mestiza woman, associated both with the fertility of the land and with the abundance of its fruits, anticipates an idea that would become central after the Revolution: that of a nation in which the Hispanic-American heritage and the sensibility of indigenous cultures converge. Every detail is constructed through brushstrokes that follow the volumes with precision, lending the composition a marked three-dimensional plasticity.

Rufino Tamayo — Still Life with Calla Lily (1924)

Rufino Tamayo entered the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1917. It took approximately ten years for him to develop a first fully recognizable and autonomous pictorial language. This painting was made during his apprenticeship phase. The most evident element is the refined balance between forms, proportions, and colors, constructed through the relationship between the wallpaper, the flowers, and the vase. The composition immediately recalls Henri Matisse's "Harmony in Red," while the interplay of planes can be related to certain portraits by Paul Gauguin. It would be reductive to attribute to this painting an early "Mexicanist" orientation: Tamayo is still in search of his own language. A few years later he would move to New York, where he would come into contact with the international avant-gardes. His stylistic evolution is evident in the still lifes of the late decade, characterized by a denser pictorial matter, references to Cubism, and a growing interest in the metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico.

Jean Charlot — Woman with Amphora (1922)

Jean Charlot moved from Paris to Mexico in 1921, beginning his career as a muralist as Diego Rivera's assistant for the creation of La Creación at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. The modelling of the figures and the compositional structure of "Woman with Amphora" are closely linked to his mural "Masacre al Templo Mayor" (1922–1923). The work, executed in 1922 in the Coyoacán studio that Charlot shared with Fernando Leal, reveals the artist's ability to reconcile elements that are only apparently contrasting: a traditional genre scene is rendered in a modern and tendentially abstract language. In his notes he wrote: "Planarism suppresses all physical representation of volume: the image presents a series of flattened surfaces, whose relationships of form and colour suggest volume." The monumental figure of the woman advances toward the viewer; the geometric solidity of the foreground contrasts with the flatter rendering of the secondary figures ascending toward the mountain.

Section III.4 — Muralism

In the context of Vasconcelos's cultural program, artists were called upon to decorate the walls of public buildings by reviving the pre-Hispanic and colonial mural tradition with a clear educational purpose. The first commissions — El árbol de la vida by Roberto Montenegro and La Creación (1922) by Rivera — inaugurated a new phase in which muralism established itself as a movement. Rivera, drawing on his experience of the Italian fresco cycles studied in 1920, integrated Renaissance and Byzantine influences with figures and colors from popular Mexico. Between 1923 and 1928 he led the decoration of the Secretaría de Educación Pública, constructing a visual epic of the post-revolutionary state. Alongside him were Orozco and Siqueiros — Los Tres Grandes — each with his own vision: Rivera celebrated local traditions; Orozco offered a critical reading of history; Siqueiros denounced social injustices through technical innovation.

Section III.5 — Other Horizons of Mexican Modernity

Electrification, industrialization, and metropolitan growth profoundly transformed everyday experience, giving rise to a social landscape marked by dynamism and contradictions. While some artists focused on denouncing inequalities, others turned their attention to more introspective, fantastical, or experimental pursuits. Artists such as Rufino Tamayo, Miguel Covarrubias, Agustín Lazo, Gabriel Fernández Ledesma, and Nahui Olin developed figurative and chromatic languages capable of conveying both the vitality of the city and its tensions. In this panorama, Rivera occupied a peculiar position: a driving force of national art and, at the same time, a reference perceived in an antagonistic light by those seeking alternative paths. A tension that reveals how the process of constructing mexicanidad was anything but unified.

Miguel Covarrubias — An Afternoon in Xochimilco (ca. 1937)

As a space of convergence of diverse and heterogeneous figures in a country moving toward modernity, the urban context offered the artistic community the opportunity to represent a plural and diversified reality. This is the case of the work Una tarde en Xochimilco (1937) by Miguel Covarrubias, in which one can observe a Sunday outing on a trajinera (traditional boat) along the canals of Xochimilco, a legacy of the ancient pre-Hispanic city. Following the model of the so-called "impossible interviews," which the artist had illustrated starting in 1931 for Vanity Fair magazine in New York, Covarrubias introduces an ironic note by contrasting the flower sellers and the oarsmen with the urban figures who observe with a certain detachment a lacustrine landscape that had by then become, in part, outdated. This juxtaposition of elements and figures, in addition to highlighting the painter's mastery in the art of caricature, conveys the image of a city in transition toward modernity.

Juan O'Gorman — Colonial and Feudal Latifondo of Mexico (1975)

This work by Juan O'Gorman allows us to clearly grasp the complexity of Mexican artistic modernity. Evoking at once a physical landscape and a specific historical phase, the work stages architectures, geographies, regional vegetation, and human figures without pursuing a merely descriptive intent, but taking shape as a narrative device capable of articulating a reflection on territory and historical memory. Through this operation the artist develops a critical gaze on national history, on Mexican culture and civilization, bringing out its contradictions and attempting to interpret them from the perspective of a possible alternative world.

Section IV.1 – Beyond Social Realism

After the 1920s, the official support of the State for muralism and social realism defined the canons of Mexican art. However, in the first half of the twentieth century a plurality of tendencies coexisted, opening alternative paths and exploring introspective, symbolic, and experimental languages, reinterpreting the popular, the festive, and the everyday from individual perspectives. In the 1930s and 1940s the arrival of European artists in exile enriched the panorama with new Surrealist and metaphysical poetics, which entered into dialogue with local research already oriented toward the fantastic and the oneiric. Rivera himself took part in these debates: he supported Breton's visit in 1938 and participated in the Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo of 1940 in Mexico City, revealing an interest in the irrational and the grotesque that coexisted with his social commitment.

Section IV.2 — Fantastic Art

Fantastic art, also known as fantasy painting, is one of the most original expressions of Mexican painting, present in the national imagination since antiquity. It explores the oneiric and the grotesque through unreal scenes and unsettling atmospheres inherited from both ancient Mexico and popular tradition. Although Breton associated it with Surrealism during his 1938 visit, historiography has emphasized how Mexican fantasy possesses its own autonomy, rooted in indigenous mythologies. Art historian Ida Rodríguez Prampolini highlighted its existence as a true national school, capable of articulating hybrid imaginaries that go beyond Bretonian influence. The works of María Izquierdo, Antonio Ruiz, and Juan Soriano bring together the intimate and the fantastic, the popular and the symbolic, giving form to a visual universe in which the everyday is transformed into a space of estrangement and revelation.

Juan Soriano — My Bed Has Four Little Corners (1941)

Throughout his career, Juan Soriano's work remained deeply tied to his land of origin, without however adhering to pre-Columbian reminiscences or celebrations of the typical Mexican landscape. His relationship with Mexican tradition takes shape rather as a reinterpretation of the folk art of his native Jalisco, filtered through the sensibility of Chucho Reyes, his first point of reference in the field of the visual arts. The title refers to a domestic prayer of secular origin: from the Middle Ages onward, a prayer recited at the end of the day spread across many areas of Europe to protect children from malevolent presences during the night. Many Italian and Latin American versions open with: "My bed has four corners, four guardian angels, two at my feet and two at my head." Only in the 1940s did Soriano paint an entire series of images dedicated to newborns surrounded by angels, introducing variations on the traditional model. The winged figures in this work have a corporeal and tangible presence, the result of the artist's peculiar interest in classical aesthetics.

José García Ocejo — Cinema Cochoun (1976)

In the tradition of Mexican painting, it is rare to encounter artists who paint for pure pleasure. José García Ocejo is a significant exception. The pleasure of his painting lies in constructing, through continuous formal metamorphoses, a peculiar universe: in it, fantastic obsessions and a taste for a world now lost are condensed, which the artist evokes with passionate engagement but devoid of pain or romantic despair. His figures belong to other universes: that of Greek mythology populated by fauns, satyrs, centaurs and nymphs; the seductive one of Gustave Moreau; that of fin-de-siècle snobbism, of the refined decadence of the Belle Époque. García Ocejo places these characters in a kind of theatrical representation in which the world of his inventions is reflected. Sensuality permeates the pictorial forms, but their voluptuousness is rendered with such measure that it never slips into vulgarity. As art historian Ida Rodríguez Prampolini writes: "his is the open and sincere smile of a romantic who remains an absolutely singular case".

Section IV.3 — Echoes of Surrealism

The first Surrealist to come into contact with Mexico was Antonin Artaud, who in 1936 lived among the native Tarahumara people and dedicated several writings to the work of María Izquierdo. Two years later André Breton, a guest of Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Coyoacán, recognized in Mexico the existence of an "implicit" Surrealism present in pre-Hispanic, popular, and contemporary art. During his stay he co-authored with Trotsky the Manifesto ¡Por un arte revolucionario independiente! In those years the movement also spread through the arrival of European artists in exile — among them Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Benjamin Péret. The Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo of 1940 at the Galería de Arte Mexicano brought together Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Roberto Montenegro alongside Wolfgang Paalen, César Moro, and Alice Rahon, consolidating Mexico's role not only as a place of refuge, but as a territory of intense cultural experimentation embedded in the debates of twentieth-century modernity.

Diego Rivera — The Night of the Radishes (1946)

Thanks to his political commitment and his connection with André Breton, Diego Rivera produced several works of Surrealist inspiration. In this singular watercolor he drew inspiration from a Mexican folk tradition directly linked to the annual celebration of December 23rd in the city of Oaxaca, during which participants compete in creating sculptural compositions from radishes with anthropomorphic shapes. Rivera may have been attracted to this Oaxacan festival for its folkloric character; however, as an artist well aware of the theoretical tenets of Surrealism, it is not excluded that he also recognized in it the automatic dimension and the logic of the "objet trouvé" inherent in the shapes of the radishes. Pinkish radishes float against a black background; gesticulating faces and equestrian references lend the scene a dimension that is at once grotesque and quixotic, traversed by an ironic register tinged with humor.

Section IV.4 — Metaphysical Painting

The metaphysical movement, born in Italy in 1917 with Giorgio de Chirico, was distinguished by the construction of enigmatic and silent spaces, by the presence of figures and objects stripped of their context that take on a symbolic and unsettling value. Its reception in Mexico spread initially through the Stridentist manifesto Actual Nº1 (1921) and the pages of the journal Contemporáneos (1928). Figures such as Rufino Tamayo, María Izquierdo, Carlos Orozco Romero, Manuel González Serrano and Roberto Montenegro showed, at different moments in their output, a clear affinity with de Chirico's poetics. These artists integrated popular elements and theatrical-inflected stagings into their own research, transforming the metaphysical dimension into a tool for exploring the tensions between the local and the universal, between individual experience and the demands of modernity. Metaphysical painting in Mexico did not take shape as passive imitation, but as an engagement that, while in dialogue with European poetics, constructed an imaginary world distant from Mexican social realism.

Carlos Orozco Romero — Dream (1940)

This dreamlike urban landscape is one of Orozco Romero's best-known works. It was created shortly after André Breton's celebrated declaration that Mexico was the surrealist country par excellence. Although he was among the artists represented by the Galería de Arte Mexicano, Orozco Romero did not participate in the 1940 Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo. It is plausible that "Dream" was created during his stay in New York, supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, and that its atmosphere also derives from a condition of nostalgia for his homeland. The dreamlike dimension is constructed through a deliberately altered scale and a strongly distorted perspective. Tiny human figures attempt to lift a smiling balloon, inspired by the painted ceramic piggy banks typical of Tonalá. The urban landscape evokes De Chirico's Piazze d'Italia; the white and ochre stucco walls refer back to the memory of provincial Mexico.

Manuel González Serrano — Death (ca. 1940)

From the 1940s onwards, following the Exposición Internacional del Surrealismo in Mexico, the connections between Mexican art and metaphysical painting began to emerge with greater clarity. In this context, the work of Manuel González Serrano stands out, developing a figuration of an unreal character capable of undermining the logic of representation. A central element of De Chirico's aesthetic dominates the painting: the arcades stretching toward the architectural monument resembling a minaret, identified with a viceregal aqueduct — the aqueduct of Los Remedios in Naucalpan. A large cloud gathers in the sky. Before it floats a mysterious kite, maneuvered by a woman in a pinkish dress running along the aqueduct. She is unaware that, beneath the architectural structure, almost as if awaiting her fall, an enigmatic female figure appears, completely wrapped in a white shroud: Death.

Roberto Montenegro — Homage to de Chirico (1944)

Around 1926, Roberto Montenegro came into contact with the writers of the group known as "Los Contemporáneos," who through their publications introduced into Mexico the avant-garde forms that had developed in Europe and the United States during the interwar period. This coincided with a phase in which Montenegro allowed his fantastical dimension to emerge with greater freedom, producing works that reveal evident affinities with the visual grammar of Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy. The painting reveals a deep assimilation of the structural elements of de Chirico's work, reworked by interweaving them with figures typical of modern Mexican painting. In the foreground, a horse fixes its gaze on the viewer with a vaguely anthropomorphic expression; before it lies an automaton, perhaps the fallen rider. The rest of the background is dominated by a metaphysical architecture that frames a cloudy sky and, in the distance, a calm blue sea crossed by small boats.

Conclusion

You have reached the end of the exhibition. What you have seen in these rooms is the result of an uninterrupted dialogue between local and international, between tradition and rupture, between identity and avant-garde. A dialogue that never found a definitive answer — and that for this reason continues to be fruitful. Thank you for visiting the exhibition.