II.3.3 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 832600

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IMAGES OF GUATEMALA

André Salmon, 1927

Excerpts from the Preface for an Album that will be Out Soon

NOW IS THE TIME for truly influential local forces to start encouraging young people in the Americas toward the refreshing possibility of creating a brand-new art. One that is capable of appealing to Europe, while still questioning its possible decadence. After so many false starts, we now see works steeped in the origins of Native art.

. . . The very best young painters in Latin America can, with marvelous ease, come closer to this naked art. An art with which they seem earnestly engaged and which our [Paul] Gauguin—the first European to really dream—was able to embrace in exchange for a most particular intellectual perspective.

This is the art that Carlos Mérida, with his refreshing authority, will henceforth show in Guatemala—and I imagine farther afield as well. It is therefore a great pleasure to hear that he wishes to show his art in Paris, where we may judge it for ourselves.

Let us be clear. We should neither label this kind of art with the platitudes we usually use to name decorative art, nor be overly intimidated by its range.

If Carlos Mérida brings us a wealth of color never seen before, the surprise could be as dazzling as the Russian ballets we have witnessed. At a certain level, civilized Europe is a true offspring of old Asia. Moreover, having been taught by smarter collectors than ours, Moscow artists were not unaware of Henri Matisse and Odilon Redon. The abyss separating America and Europe is considerably deeper.

There is no one better suited to the task of bridging the abyss than Carlos Mérida. Among his other talents, he is appropriately gifted and was born to introduce us to the joys of an exuberant art of union with no repetition. One that springs from a devotion to aesthetic perfection and takes its principles from essential elements of ancestral Native art; thus, manifesting its own opulence— which, seems to approximate a Barbarian devotion to opulence. But on the contrary, it reduces all the magnificence of accent and tone to a measured level where a harmonious combination occurs. There, I would say, gold is nothing more than an ancillary quality to the whole, in stark opposition to the works that moved those who arrived in the caravels. Thus conditioned, it demonstrates an improper value that challenges supreme agreements.

Carlos Mérida has come to visit us, imbued with confidence and joy. After several weeks, or several months, can there be any doubt as to the warmth of his youthful works, or as to their ability to deliver a brilliant trove of exoticism?

Carlos Mérida discovered the “Paris Movement” [École de Paris] and was astonished; he felt profoundly moved by all that staunchly refutes the spirit of decorative art.

Nevertheless, he must regain his confidence. High decoration—of the architectural kind—overcomes the inadequacies of the decorative spirit. We have seen that, in America, where it is practiced; young masters spent a decade enduring the same kind of aesthetic suffering as our own [painters]. It finally seems to be understood that, thanks to its willpower in returning to essential principles, the School of Paris has freed one country after another. Each one has therefore found an art of its own, in spite of the belief in a cosmopolitan unification that was in vogue many years ago.

Let me tell you something, Carlos Mérida. Haven’t you become the master of essential principles, the key ones that involve certainty, without which you couldn’t be a national master? Furthermore, aren’t these obstinate creations— which yield limitless fruits because of the limited scope of the field—sufficiently sensitive to any cultivated nature that they will not be touched, and which also nourish the most immediate passions of your race?

Well, you will progress beyond the works that you submitted today, among which we recall a variety of titles.

You have dazzled us with the harmony of a New Egypt. The drawings of radiant clothes, some shawls, even the ponchos with so many hieroglyphs to be deciphered in order to discover the secret of sleeping gods hidden among mountain tops and lakes, framed by the craning neck of a mysterious yet familiar llama.

Passionate young man, you will deserve the good name of Libertador if you are able to free a world, the Empire of the Sun, from the pedagogical slavery in which it is still kept by ethnographers.

That might be sufficient. However, the traits and their resolution, their possibilities regarding a prolific break—an already profound science governing the distribution of hues—assure us that soon, perhaps tomorrow, you will have fulfilled your goals. And these are focused on a national art that can be understood by all young visual artists.