II.3.6 DIGITAL ARCHIVE 1051636
Peruvian painter and muralist José Sabogal (1888–1956) wrote this manuscript in September 1937 upon visiting an exhibition of Mexican art organized by Moisés Saenz, Mexico’s ambassador to Peru. From 1922 to 1925, Sabogal lived in Mexico where he met Los Tres Grandes (Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros). In this text, Sabogal admires the nascent energy of Mexican artists included in the exhibition and indicates that the use of their country’s folklore reflecting both the pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial past can be instrumental in the crafting of a renewed national aesthetics. By 1937, Sabogal had become the chief proponent of Peruvian painting based on an indigenous aesthetics, a position that had been officially sanctioned five years earlier with his appointment as director of Lima’s prestigious Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. This text was published in Sabogal’s posthumous Obras literarias completas [(Lima: Ignacio Prado Pastor Editor, 1989), 423–24].
MEXICO’S REMARKABLE ART MOVEMENT was a byproduct of the long, bloody revolution; it coalesced at the peak of the widespread aesthetic renewal known as the “Paris Movement” [École de Paris]. Several noted Mexican artists were involved in the Movement, and later went on to take part in their country’s artistic awakening.
Both movements shared common goals and proposed identical forms of renewal in the field of visual arts. Mexican artists now found themselves inspired by the eternal rhythm of art once expressed in the warm, vivid, admirable style of their rich, traditional art in the amazing Indian works of ancient times and in the unbroken link with their colonial background. They bring fresh insight to the work of reconstruction; with cleansed souls and hearts filled with childlike enthusiasm, they stand facing a vast horizon.
The postwar, worldwide aesthetic revolution followed a similar path. That great tragedy revealed the rampant disorientation in the field of visual art at that time and stimulated a deep appreciation for the eternal, living work of art-truth. This new phase in the history of humanity also introduced a new, purer way of seeing things, and acknowledged the unsung masters from earlier times whose works of art nurtured and sustained priceless links to the past. These masters were revered in guides to the renewal; among them, Paul Gauguin was the most significant artist as far as we are concerned, because the nature of his work positions him as a major precursor of our current painting in the Americas.
This happy confluence of events led to a new artistic blooming in Mexico, which in turn produced a higher level of visual art with an American content that had hitherto been absent. Thus began a period during which artists, fired with Renaissance-inspired enthusiasm, were influenced by the noblest pictorial methods of the past and managed to revive the “painting of mankind,” as Michelangelo described al fresco painting.
This favorable environment contributed to a crystallization of ideas in the field of mural painting that expressed the mood of the times and defined an era in Latin America’s history of visual art.
The exhibition of Mexican painters in Lima was organized by Moisés Sáenz, who is a learned, accredited representative of that nation; he is a key figure of the renewal movement in the field of education, therefore closely identified with aesthetic resurgence in his country.
We are grateful to Ambassador Sáenz for his generosity in offering this exhibition of works from his valuable private collection.