Guatemala-born, Mexico-based artist Carlos Mérida (1891–1984) wrote this article in 1926 on the cusp of his full transition to nonfigurative painting. This is one of the first texts in which Mérida develops ideas on the ancestral (mainly Mayan) traditions that would inform his geometric work of the late 1930s and 1940s. Straddling the past and the current situation in Mexican art exemplified by muralism, Mérida delves into what he considers “noble aesthetic concepts.” The artist writes that Mexican painting is the epitome of American art because it persists in channeling the country’s Indo-Hispanic character. Furthermore, it also encompasses a vital, racially-driven principle that supersedes external influences manifested in Mexican art since colonial times. The essay was published in the bilingual journal Mexican Life: Mexico’s Monthly Review [(Mexico City), vol. 2, no. 1 (1926), 16–17].
MEXICAN PAINTING (why not call it American, if the vast, marvelous breath of our ancestors blows anew through all the Indo-Hispanic land?) is now undoubtedly directed within the traditional standards susceptible to transformation and therefore to evolution. From all the diversity of production of some years up to this time, the same ascending course toward new paths—but toward new paths intimately joined by the strong bond coming to us through the centuries—can be observed. That profound “vital principle that animates the intuition” is that which created the bas-reliefs of Palenque and sculpted the stelae of Quiriguá; and it is the same principle that has left its impressions in the retablos of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad [in Mexico City], as well as in the frescoes of the Ministry of Public Education. Racial potentiality always manifests itself in spite of all evolutions and in spite of influences. The unanimous judgment of that conglomeration called people will ever be with the aesthetic vibration that has created the mural paintings in the Escuela [Nacional] Preparatoria, rather than with “those wrecked flowers flooding the salons of our wealthy grandees.” What is that secret that has not been lost? What is that secret which thrives in spite of all the transformations and all the vicissitudes?
The present flourishing of art in America—I wish to be broad, for Mexico is a very beloved part of our America—is without doubt due to a return to the conclusion of our tradition, a moment paralyzed by special but transient circumstances. With the result that sociological movements are at work changing the organization of public, the liberating, inquietude of these is translated into noble aesthetic concepts—noble because disinterested—that are made tangible long before these same peoples may have found that which the artists engraved for eternity.
Mexico and the rest of America are passing through a period of indocility which has been interpreted in the attainment of a visionary art which goes the way of the future, while the people are agitating to launch new struggles against new tyrannies as lamentable as the preceding ones, the artists coming from these people already see the era of noble attitudes full of equity.
An art which is the child of the people, and which is accomplished with great pains and intermixtures of noble tradition, has to be a strong art which is understood and loved by all the people—no matter the race—who have a heart and a brain, sentiment and sensibility, and this art is above everything. Did we not conclude the observations? Is someone ethnically different from us concerned with our artistic speculations?
And the artists who determine this art for posterity are the heralds of new vital attitudes, the advanced bodies of the future—“celestial lightning rods”—as one of our great poets termed them. They are the guarantors of the natural civilization, the visionaries of that which is ever hatched in the crucible of life. We read that even our old virtues flourish; those which illuminated the anonymous artists of Chichén Itzá, and which are now illuminating that phalanx of enlightened ones opening the breach toward the future.