Just
For Art, Mexican Broke The Mold
A Retrospective Is Gerzso's First Since His Death
By STEPHEN KINZER
The New York Times, Monday, August 18, 2003.
SANTA BARBARA , Calif. - To most out siders,
Mexican art is easy to recognize. Many consider it powerful
but limited in range, di rect and boldly realistic,
shaped by haunting images like Diego Rivera's exploited Indians
and Frida Kahlo's tormented women.
A show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art aims to subvert that stereotype.
It presents the work of Gunther Gerzso, who is widely considered the finest
ab stract painter Mexico has pro duced and a figure of growing repute
in the art world. It is the first Gerzso retrospective since he died in 2000
at 84.
"This show really catapults his fame, and it comes after a decade when he's been
getting much more attention," said Ilona Katzew, a curator at the Los An geles
County Museum of Art who specializes in Latin American painting. "I hold him
in very high regard. He developed something uniquely his own, a crisp, clean
artistic style that's very intense and charged with emotion."
While other Mexican paint ers were using art as a platform for social
and political protest, Gerzso preferred to paint scenes from what he called
his "land scape of the spirit."
"A painting is like a screen on which a world of emotional anxieties are projected," he
said. "I don't produce happy art; it's more philosophical. I'm more of a sad
man."
Gerzso was born in Mexico City to a Hungarian father and a German mother. He
was educated partly in Switzerland , where he lived with an uncle who was an
art historian and collector. While in Switzerland he discov ered the abstract
art of Kandinsky and the spiritual prose of Hermann Hesse, a neighbor of his
uncle.
These experiences gave Gerzso a view of the world that was unusually broad
for a Mexican of his generation. He was fascinated by Mexico 's traditional
cultures and pre-Columbian art, but he also embraced modern ideas like psychoanalysis.
Throughout his life he was, in his own words, that of "a European with Mexican
eyes."
Although Gerzso incorporated many dis tinctly Indian images in his paintings,
some Mexican critics found his art too foreign. After his first big show, in
1950, some of them complained that his work lacked Mexicanidad, a sense of
being Mexican.
Gerzso was one of the hand ful of Latin American artists who were transfixed
by abstraction, surrealism and other artistic movements that convulsed Eu rope
in the 20th century. Their work mixed the subtlety and psy chological
depth of European art with Latin America 's vibrant passions and tragic sense
of life.
Among others in this group of pioneering
artists were the Uruguayan Joaquin Torres-Gar cia, who
studied in Barcelona and developed a style of sculpture in
fluenced by Braque and Juan Gris; the Chilean Roberto Matta,
who worked in Le Corbusier's ar chitecture studio in
Paris and em braced a wild, swirling form of surrealism;
the Brazilian Lasar Segall, who studied in Berlin and Dresden
and in 1932 was a co founder of the Sao Paulo-based
Soci ety for Modern Art, which helped revolutionize
Latin American paint ing; and the Cuban Wifredo Lam,
who used traditional Latin and Afri can patterns in
strikingly modern ways and was admired by titans from Picasso
to Jackson Pollock.
As these artists were transform ing Latin American culture by open ing
it to modern European influ ences, Gerzso was becoming famous not as a
painter but as a set designer. He had been fascinated by architec ture
since childhood, and by 1935, when he was just 20, he was design ing sets
for plays by Shakespeare and Moliere. Later that year he was hired by the Cleveland
Play House, then one of the leading regional thea ters in the United States
. After five years of designing sets and costumes there, he returned to a Mexico
that was entering its golden age of cine ma.
Almost every leading film director who worked in Mexico in the 1940's and 50's,
from John Ford to Luis Bunuel, called on Gerzso's design talents. He painted
when he could but did not feel driven to display his introspective work while
Mexican art was dominated by passionately political muralists.
In 1962 Gerzso finally decided to abandon his successful stage-design career
and devote himself to art. He wavered only once, coming out of retirement to
become production de signer for John Huston's 1984 film "Under the Volcano." His
paintings, however, continued to show a dis tinctly cinematic sense of
com pressed narrative, a result of the years he spent telling stories
onstage with shapes and colors.
Gerzso also illustrated books by the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican author Octavio
Paz, who considered him "one of the great Latin Ameri can painters."
"In all Gerzso's pictures there is a secret," Paz wrote. "His painting indicates
its existence behind the canvas. The depicted rendings, muti lations and
sexual hollows have a function: they allude to what lies on the other side."
Many of the 122 paintings and works on paper in the Santa Barbara show are
Mexican images portrayed with a European sensibility. "Noc turnal Landscape" is
entirely in shades of blue, with a lightly colored square standing for the
moon and elongated rectangles below repre senting natural and man-made
fea tures. "Personage-Landscape" is dominated by layers of green shapes
and has one of Gerzso's trademark painted rips in the middle.
"So much is about myths and sources and origins," James Oles, a professor of
art history at Wellesley College , said when asked to describe Gerzso's work. "Then
think of the 40's Pollocks or Rothkos with similar themes, but so different formally."
In the catalog that accompanies the show, the curator, Diana C. Du Pont, asserts
that Gerzso's art is defined by "a belief in expressing a reality beyond surface
reality; the value of intuition and free associa tion; the importance
of unconscious thought and emotional feeling; and the necessity for mystery
and poetry in art."
"While this creative outpouring to day stands as a defining example of modern
abstraction," Ms. Du Pont writes, "his art did not receive the recognition it
deserved, neither at the time of its making nor during the artist's lifetime."
This show, called "Risking the Ab stract: Mexican Modernism and the Art
of Gunther Gerzso," seeks the audience that knows little or nothing of Gerzso.
By presenting it, the Santa Barbara museum is not only paying homage to Gerzso
but also reflecting a trend among some curators and museum directors away from
themed shows and back toward the older model of focusing on a single artist.
"In Latin American art, the era is over of the group show in which you show this
and this and this and say you've done your job,'.' said Phillip M. Johnston,
director of the Santa Barbara museum. "The one-man show is to us the better vehicle
now. We need to look at the figures who shaped this art in the 20th century.
Gerzso is right up there with the best of them."
After closing here on Oct. 19, the exhibition will go to the Museo de Arte
Moderno in Mexico City and the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
When Gerzso died he was still largely unknown outside his home land. Many
Americans were first exposed to him through the traveling Jacques and Natasha
Gelman collection of Mexican art, which has been on view at museums across
the coun try for three years. (It is now at the Nevada Museum of Art in
Reno .) Audiences from Dallas to New York have thronged to the Gelman show
because it features major paintings by Frida Kahlo, but it also offers a tantalizing
sample of Gerzso's works. Many viewers wanted to see more, and the show in
Santa Barbara is their first chance to do so.
"So many people came out of the Gelman show and asked, `Who is this Gerzso ?
' " said Carlos Tortolero, di rector of the Mexican Fine Arts Cen ter
Museum in Chicago . "More and more people are starting to recog nize him
as a great artist, but he hasn't broken into the mainstream yet. Twenty years
from now the Met will do this show, and the headline will be `Museum Discovers
Great 20th-Century Artist.' "
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