II.3.4 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 832415
THERE IS NOTHING MORE SUMPTUOUS, more opulent than our tropical zones. Every day, for everyone to see, the sun opens its womb in a unique hara-kiri of color. Even those who live with that orgy of hues never get completely used to it and are always thrilled by its marvelous virginal novelty. Colors enter through the eyes and through the hand that cuts the stubborn fruit and the hearts of vegetables; colors rise up through the foot that walks the land, through the body that is bathed in the inescapable glare of the sun’s rays.
The colored fabrics produced by Mexico’s mother race—the Maya—cannot equal the harmonious, magnificent, luxurious varieties produced by Mayan artisans living in Guatemala. Their ceramics, on the other hand, were spectacular. It is hard to find anything to rival the noticeably Eastern imagination and skill our ancestors developed to transmute the earth into their earthenware bowls and etch the feeling of the tropics into the rocks.
We are blood brothers of the same race, all who share our ideas, who are free thinkers, and we are in solidarity when we attack or when we love. At this time it is impossible to talk about Guatemalan art. In addition to having only just begun, it lives under Mexico’s favorable shadow. The influences are ethnic in origin rather than being transmitted from neighboring brothers. That same race, the Maya, who lived on the same lands in Guatemala are perhaps the most interesting civilization in the Americas. To me, in a certain way, the idea of a patriotic homeland is an expression of idiotic fanaticism. Any cause with a blood connection is defended powerfully and instinctively. No half measures are allowed in the tropics, where passion infuses everything, and that is what makes them glorious.
The rough, fleshy feel of the prickly pear, the juicy tongue of the maguey cactus, the delicacy of vanilla, tobacco, corn, the gold of our fruit, and the polyglot color of our birds are what we speak of when we tell other countries about ourselves. Just as we feel the daily assault on our senses from the merciless sun. . . . A people influenced by the sun, the great classic of the tropics. Color justifies our race. . . .
As Europe enters old age, Mexico’s voice is just breaking; Mexico, vanguard of the Americas, the forward prow of the race. Mayan Mexico, primitive nature: jungles, blind forces, alcohol. Everyone in tune so that the Renaissance can dance on the hips of Boticelli’s Spring.
Latin America has become a refuge for impotence, sheltering mediocre intelligence. It is a pity! Only three or four names deserve our respect. Everyone else takes advantage of the fact that people are easily influenced by Latin Americanisms such as, let us kill the gringos! Or by a form of communism rooted in laziness. See the transcendental manifestations of what stirs interest in the Americas: a few books, paintings, and music. That is all I remember as I write. . . .
As I listened to my own heartbeat, I proclaimed myself a Mayan prince in the middle of Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower. The Sun was my godfather, I witnessed the event in the name of the gods. The steel Geyser Tower mirrored my modern orientation, pointing straight up at the sky. I will have my shield inscribed on two wooden crates, one from the Maya of my birthplace (near Antigua, Guatemala), and the other from Mexico—the very same country with two names in the books—and will use both to cover the breast of the perennially unlikely woman.
How many other things came to mind as I contemplated Carlos Mérida’s paintings!
I must state, once and for all, that Carlos Mérida is one of the most brilliant, enthusiastic “harbingers” of the Americas painting. His current work shows its roots, reveals his patient learning, and expresses his entire life. He introduced a certain pictorial tonality and was one of the major influences who made us deeply aware of our underlying racial history at a time when almost all the scarce painting in the Americas was tinged by a parasitic dependence on Europe. . . .
There is no doubt that, in art, the best fruit comes from the Tree of Genealogy. Thus we see how painting in the Americas takes control of itself, develops a true awareness of itself, its power. And that approach, which we should adopt once and for all, is a great triumph for our Primitives.
In terms of teaching American painting—that was stillborn by the glittery, picturesque, leafy quality that seduced painters who had no technique at all, no feeling for Native themes, and who were disastrously influenced by the French or the Italians (painters who stooped to paint superficial symbols)—Carlos Mérida took on the difficult task of guiding these painters, of introducing them to significant values. He whittled his way toward a visual art of the Americas. At that time, few approved of the direction Mérida proposed, and he was largely ignored.
I don’t think any other painter on the continent has championed the idea of revaluing America with the same spirit of perfect brotherhood or has known how to promote it in such a modern way, with total freedom. There are two or three other painters in the Americas whose work is more finished than Carlos Mérida’s paintings; but we must not forget that he was the main instigator of those works. Here is a rousing endorsement from Diego Rivera himself, “For several years now, Carlos Mérida’s work has shown an Americanness of extremely interesting influence; he was the first to introduce a sense of the picturesque nature of the Americas in real paintings”. . . .
Mérida spent his youth in the miraculous natural environment of the highlands, in the western states of Guatemala, on the shores of Lake Atitlán, and in Mexico, and has absorbed, almost by osmosis, the incomparable colors of those regions. . . .
Some young painters think they will amaze Europe with their version of an art of the Americas, which merely captures the picturesque quality and portrays traditional scenes, but solves no problems and offers no interpretation; it has no feeling for indigenous themes and no concept of an aboriginal expression of the visual arts. Works of this nature have no place in the painting of the Americas or in any other kind of painting. The true stream of American feeling runs deep, and very few can capture it because very few possess the necessary erudition and sensitivity to plumb its depths. Our young painters would benefit a great deal from a visit to Mexico, where they will find an interesting pictorial movement and some relatively modern, technical organizations. [Alternately], a trip to Europe poses enormous risks for them, [as they are faced with] many currents extremely distant to our own, which can influence sensitivities that have barely lost their virginity. It is like a lynching of the soul, a merciless fight that I once suffered and still feel. When someone from the tropics is twenty years old in the all-embracing life of Paris, it seems something truly pathetic and moving. . . .
Undoubtedly, Carlos Mérida is Guatemala’s major artist. No one among us does it better and nobody is more Guatemalan than he is. The only international life our little countries enjoy is provided by our prodigal sons. Mérida has managed to multiply and whittle down his criollo sensitivity. His is dense, indigenous work, guided by an admirable temperament; his figures are imbued with a natural rhythm of life that is like our breathing. . . .
Mérida arrived in Mexico a few years after he returned from his first trip to Europe, where he learned about the need for total freedom through his involvement in the great pictorial incubation inspired by [Guillaume] Apollinaire: the Fauvists and the Cubists. Anita Brenner, in her essay “The Mexican Renaissance,” describes his work at that time: “Carlos Mérida, who returned to Mexico before Diego Rivera did, was the first to adopt the lessons of modern French painting. And he was the first to return to the plane values found in traditional indigenous painting. . . .
There was no painting milieu in Mexico when Mérida arrived in 1920—a year before Rivera returned from Europe. In very sporadic cases, there might be works with no connection to each other, totally disoriented, that was all. . . .
Mérida told me that, “color is what came most easily to me in my painting.” He already possessed that native sensitivity to color; and a unique chromatic vision that was governed by an exotic obedience to the form it sought to express: Mayan sensitivity. . . . Mérida’s color does not just reflect the violent, tropical color of other Latin American painters—a very “chromo” color, even in the admirable Brazilian Tarsila [do Amaral]. His color shows the smoothness of tones and half tones, it reveals the most difficult shades—ochers, blacks, grays—that move me most of all. We are in the tropics. Color is just right; like an epithet, color matched like a declared objective, definitely devoid of synonyms. Color may be the outstanding quality in Mérida’s work; in spite of the marvelous construction of his works, all so well formed and so full of architecture, that stir up I don’t know what kind of strange, troubling feeling.
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In spite of the exotic flavor of Mérida’s work, its quality has surprised the critics in New York and Europe, who rate him—more or less conveniently— with no reference to Gauguin’s painting. On the whole, there are few disagreements on this work, whose main guidelines I have tried to outline above, with the help of quotes from specialists in the field. [I draw attention to the one] by Anita Brenner: “Carlos Mérida, devoid of all form or theory, produces work that is pure painting. Imitating no one and using his own life within the framework of his own time and materials, Mérida transfers the values of ancient monuments, in whose shadow he was born. Like the creators of those monuments, he needs no interpreter or dictionary. To understand his work one must either know nothing about art or know a great deal about art. More importantly, Mérida does not use color or lines to compose his subject; he uses nothing but the geometry of color. Which is the equivalent of painting at the purest level”. . . . “Through a transparent spectroscopic calculation, Mérida uses two dimensions to express a third one on the plane. Mérida has turned color into a religion. His life culminates in painting and his painting culminates in color. Line and composition are thus controlled and subordinated”. . . .
I can surmise a stage when the painting of the Americas will be stripped of all decorative intention, to seek even greater refinement in color, the field in which several of our painters excel. In Europe, of course, Mérida’s solid color, his flat color seems decorative, because trends there are different and overtly opposed to his work. European painting is under the formidable influence of [Pablo] Picasso, the [Leonardo da] Vinci of the New Renaissance. The painting of the continent has never been more out of climate than now, when transplanted in Europe. We have plenty of sensuality. We must intellectualize the painting of the Americas, taking into account that our nature is out of place in Europe, which is indeed its best [pictorial] raison d’être. . . .