A Uniquely Mexican Modernist
By CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT
Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, August 26th, 2003.
SANTA BARBARA
- Initially, a canvas by the self-taught Mexican Modernist
painter Gunther Gerzso might appear to be wholly abstract.
Luminous shapes of carefully mottled color - hard-edged,
rectilinear and layered - offer no immediate references to
anything recognizable.
Slowly,
though, that perception shifts. The flat plane of the painting
melds with intimations of the surface of Earth and the skin
of the human body. In Gerzso's 1960 "Apparition," for
example, colorful blocks of crimson, orange and off-white
interlock like the stones of an ancient temple or the sheer
cliffs of an abyss. Thin, precise slices of black suggest
deathly ritualistic cuts or a dimpled navel.
Skin, a painting
and the land are all two-dimensional surfaces concealing
inscrutable depths, where mysteries of life and death reside.
Fragments of luminosity surrounded by engulfing darkness
are the norm in this work, while architecture, a sheltering
abstraction that mediates between the body and the environment,
is frequently evoked. Gerzso's easel paintings are abstract,
but they also court a sense of metaphysical unease.
A sprawling exhibit at the Santa Barbara
Museum of Art offers a welcome and revealing survey of the
artist, who is not widely known outside his native country.
He was born to European emigre parents in Mexico City in
1915, and he died there at 84 three years ago.
Curator Diana
du Pont has assembled 122 paintings and works on paper for
the first substantive analysis of Gerszo's work in 30 years.
(After closing in Santa Barbara on Oct. 19, it will travel
to Mexico and Chicago .) The show contains surprises.
In 1963, no less a personage than
Octavio Paz called Gerzso not merely the best abstract
artist in Mexico but "one
of the great Latin American painters," period. The dramatic
pronouncement requires some explaining.
For one thing, Gerzso
was something of an outsider in the Mexican art world, where
abstraction was looked upon with suspicion. Instead, recognizable
imagery, whether Realist or Surrealist, represented modem
orthodoxy. Even as late as 1990, the mammoth traveling blockbuster
show " Mexico
: Splendors of Thirty Centuries" included not one abstract
painting in its survey of the nation's modern era.
An outsider
Mexican nationalism and its populist orientation
didn't have much room for abstract art - a prejudice that
was further complicated by Gerzso, while actively socialist,
not having an Indian or Spanish surname. Being self-taught
as a painter left him outside the ranks of artists trained
in academies supported by the government. And he initially
established his reputation in the 1940s as a set designer
in the Mexican movie industry. (He began to paint full time
only around 1960, shortly before Paz's statement.) His seriousness
and depth of commitment were subject to question.
The Santa
Barbara show begins with set designs and modest works on
paper, in which Gerzso is teachmg himself to draw. A riveting
postmortem charcoal portrait of the assassinated antiStalinist
hero Leon Trotsky beatifies him as a Christlike figure, with
a subtle corona radiating from his head and a Communist star
hovering over his chest.
Gerzso was also
involved with the community of European artists in exile
in Mexico City during World War II. Other figure studies
of peasants and of apocalyptic scenes of terror partake of
common European Expressionist and Surrealist currents of
the day. Aesthetically, he's all over the place.
His work starts to come together as a coherent
expression around 1944, in small, derivative but beautifully
articulated Surrealist paintings. Masked figures, spiky landscapes
and other nightmarish elements are rendered in jewel tones
emerging from the darkness.
New connections
These and other obvious references to the
work of Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Wolfgang Paalen and,
especially, Andre Masson were gone by the end of the decade.
In their place, colorful architectonic clusters of flat rectangles
glow mysteriously against ominous black and blueblack fields.
Suggestions of the structural intricacies of Aztec temples,
the sensual interlaces of Maya decorative motifs and other
ancient forms of indigenous art are seamlessly merged with
modern abstraction.
This work seems to take its gruff, dry
surface appearance - and a good deal of its interest in Mexican
Indian ritual and traditions - from the frescoes of Jose
Clemente Orozco, an artist Gerzso greatly admired. What's
most interesting, though, is that Gerzso is merging two mythologies
- the mysterious legacy of ancient culture and an equally
enigmatic Modernism.
In
this, he's like countless American artists in the late 1940s
and 1950s. The moral catastrophe of the early 20th century,
with its unspeakably brutal wars, the grinding inhumanity
of the Depression and the bleak endgame posed by the Cold
War threat of nuclear annihilation, led the avant-garde to
respond in a specific way.
Think of Gerzso's
paintings as describing a modern labyrinth, in which lurks
a ferocious unseen Minotaur. The artist searched for ways
to rebuild a modern world by starting over in a pre-modern
one.
Steeped in Surrealism
The show demonstrates with some finality
at least two things: First, Gerzso was slow to develop -
he didn't reach his mature phase until well after World War
II but he was no dilettante. And second, while abstraction
was his language, throughout his life as a mature artist
Surrealism provided his pictorial syntax.
Therein lies the
problem with this art. Surrealism was the most widely disseminated
aesthetic movement of the 1920s and 1930s. By the 1960s,
Gerzso's skill as a colorist is often dazzling (the distinctive
look he achieved evokes a Parisian tradition of belle facture
- beautiful handling - that's both suave and sensual), but
the Surrealist foundation of his painting also can't help
but seem old-fashioned, a repetitive relic of an earlier
age.
Art in postwar Mexico
- as in postwar Los Angeles - remains poorly examined and
widely misunderstood. The handsomely installed Santa Barbara
show, accompanied by an impressive and informative catalog,
charts Gerzso's career with care. It offers the kind of in-depth
scrutiny of a significant if currently unfashionable figure
that more museums ought to undertake.
A painting early in the show sets
the tone for both the exhibit and the artist's nascent career.
The bust-length 1945 self-portrait shows him seated behind
a table or a ledge on which he rests his arm, bent at the
elbow. His forearm stands upright, parallel to the left edge
of the canvas, like a flagpole that ends in an open hand.
A melancholic
yet determined expression passes across the artist's shaded
face. Gerzso is showing his colors here. He puts his faith
in what his hand might produce. It's a moving and single-minded
testament, rendered at a moment when the world had just collapsed.
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