- 1 See George Steiner, Extra-Territorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution (New York: (...)
1The rebellious and experimental groups we refer to now as the historical avant-gardes were an international phenomenon with the common denominator of being multi-artistic. As the field of literary studies still tends to be dominated by the anachronistic concept of national literatures, few critical approaches are genuinely comparative, let alone universal. In the specific case of modern Mexico, we can profit by dwelling on the concept of extraterritorial culture, explored in 1971 by George Steiner.1 Modern Mexico shares this extraterritorial identity because many of its cultural protagonists were in voluntary or imposed exile.
- 2 Although they are not synonymous terms, modernism and the avant-garde share large areas of overlap. (...)
2Another problem we still encounter in the study of what in English we call modernism or what in the Romance languages we refer to as the avant-garde movements is disciplinary imperialism or specificity elevated to autonomy.2 Those who study literature seldom venture beyond the frontiers of their discipline and the same holds true for specialists in art, music, cinema, photography, design, and architecture. Each field tends to work in isolation from the others and dialogue is usually replaced by monologue. Of course, the historical avant-gardes were international, not just in outlook and influence, but also in their own composition. For example, of the three principal artists of Cubism in Paris, only one was French. On the multi-artistic character, it is worth remembering that although Marinetti and Breton, the leaders of Futurism and Surrealism, were writers, it would be inaccurate to see the groups they founded as purely or mainly literary movements.
- 3 A good example of this less prejudiced and more universal approach is the book by Serge Fauchereau, (...)
3Another common defect in approaches to the avant-gardes of Latin America is the traditional Eurocentric tendency to see local manifestations as passive copies or mimetic imitations from the periphery of the original movements born in the cultural centres of Europe. In recent years, attempts have been made to correct this distortion and a more balanced view has been achieved.3 The history of many of the international avant-gardes can well be seen as the dramatic series of repeated and frustrated attempts to reunite the literary-artistic avant-garde with the revolutionary-political avant-garde. A century later, we can admit that even though the utopia of newness was not capable of transforming life and society, its ghost still haunts us like a powerful myth.
4Mexico had a unique position in the second decade of the twentieth century because it was the first Western country to experience a social and political revolution that was destined to transform many aspects of life. From 1910 Mexico was the only country (and remained so until the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917) that offered the real, practical possibility of uniting the ongoing political revolution with a corresponding cultural revolution. The country became a laboratory and this experiment, with all the risks, contradictions, and inevitable improvisations, fascinated not only those at home but also those abroad, who flocked to witness and participate in what soon became known as the Mexican Renaissance: writers, artists, thinkers and adventurers from North America, Europe, South America and even the Far East. From 1920, when José Vasconcelos was named rector of the National University, and especially from October 1921, when he became the Secretary of Public Education in the government of Álvaro Obregón, Mexico began to export its political and cultural revolutions.
5This essay will look at different moments and scenarios that define the early artistic and literary avant-gardes of Mexico between 1915 and 1924. As we shall see, the initial moments all involve Mexican artists and writers who are based abroad. The Mexican avant-garde is born simultaneously in New York and Paris, then reborn in Caracas and Barcelona, before setting down roots in the native land in 1921. In each of these moments the protagonists distinguish themselves as independent rebels within the radical movements of rebellion that we call the avant-gardes.
6Our first stop is New York City in 1915. Due to political differences with the dictator Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican writer Rafael de Zayas Enríquez felt obliged to take his family into exile in New York in 1907. His son Marius de Zayas (Veracruz 1880 –Stamford, Connecticut 1961) was a precocious caricaturist who inserted himself into the cultural elite in Veracruz and then in Mexico City before participating actively in the reviews and publications of New York. While in the USA he collaborated in The World, and, between 1909 and 1911, in América, a magazine directed by his father, and he also joined forces with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and his circle, publishing in Camera Work. Between 1915 and 1916 Marius was one of the directors of the review 291 (title inspired by the address of Stieglitz’s gallery on Fifth Avenue) and exhibited his work in The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, before establishing his own spaces in The Modern Gallery (1915-1918) and the De Zayas Gallery (1919-1921). At this time, he became a central figure of New York Dada, stimulated by the presence of two exiled artists: Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. In 1916 he published his ground-breaking study African Negro Art. Its Influence on Modern Art and never ceased to promote and introduce the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Diego Rivera and Paul Strand, among others. Towards the end of his life, he finally wrote How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, an extensive book-length manuscript in the form of a letter addressed to Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In short, Marius de Zayas was an artist from Veracruz who lived most his life outside Mexico, first in the USA and then in Europe, before returning to the USA. As his friend José Juan Tablada recalled in his memoirs, Zayas was the first Mexican caricaturist to achieve international fame.
- 4 Octavio Paz, “Apollinaire, Atl, Diego Rivera, Marius de Zayas y Ángel Zárraga”, in Obras completas, (...)
- 5 Marius de Zayas, Cómo, cuándo y por qué el arte moderno llegó a Nueva York (Mexico City: Universida (...)
7Perhaps this extraterritorial stigma explains why his work and activities were completely forgotten for many years in his native land. Octavio Paz was right to complain in 1982 that “no museum in Mexico has ever organized an exhibition on Zayas and not one line has been dedicated to him by a Mexican critic”.4 Fortunately, the panorama has changed recently and in the last 17 years Antonio Saborit has edited, annotated and translated several books by Zayas, as well as curating the first national exhibition in 2009.5
- 6 Willard Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago (...)
8The second issue of 291 (dated April 1915) published a work entitled “Mental Reactions”, a collaborative visual poem signed by both Agnes Ernst Meyer and Marius de Zayas. As Willard Bohn has noted, this is the first example of a new art form in the Americas.6 It was only predated in Europe by Apollinaire’s first caligramme, “Lettre-Océan”, in June 1914, and by the Italian Futurist Carlo Carrà’s Dipinto parolibero (Festa patriottica), in August 1914. The verbal text of the poem is by the North American poet Agnes Ernst Meyer while the visual, spatial and typographical layout are by Zayas. The work is thus a collaboration between a woman and a man, a poet and an artist. This is important as one of the themes of the work is the persistent stereotypes of gender roles. The verbal text is an interior monologue or stream of consciousness meditation by Meyer, who speaks to herself in an act of introspection, recording her “mental reactions” to the surroundings and to her encounter with a man she feels attracted to. Although she flirts with him, she ultimately declines the possibility of an adventure. The female speaker is ruthless in the way she analyzes her own reactions and realizes that, despite her desire to live intensely, she finally conforms to established stereotypes. Agnes Ernst was a journalist, philanthropist, patron of the arts, civil rights activist, critic of racial segregation and prominent promoter of educational reform. She married the financier Eugene Meyer and formed part of the cultural elite or plutocracy of New York City.
- 7 Bohn, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, p. 188.
9Zayas’s contribution is fundamental: he not only illustrates, but also reconfigures and interprets the text, endowing it with complexity and a different type of modernity. He proceeds by fragmenting the syntactic and spatial continuity of a linear text and then reassembles it to create new possibilities of analysis. In “Mental Reactions” we perceive how the geometrical forms point to Cubist techniques while the typographical resources probably derive from Futurism and Dada. These sources are combined, however, to produce an astonishing and uniquely personal result: a visual poem that is quite different from Apollinaire’s famous inventions. One of the most surprising features of this creation is that “in order to compensate for the poem’s verbal stasis, the visual elements are highly dynamic”.7 Geometrical forms and typographical devices express the dramatic nature of the inner contradictions of a woman who confesses, in the middle of her monologue: “Yes, we women, cowards, cheats all of us who, when our / kingdom is offered, stop to calculate the price”. Zayas does not merely illustrate the text: he offers us a puzzle, a conceptual jigsaw the pieces of which we are invited to reassemble in an act of creative participation. The spatial layout is even more experimental than the verbal content.
- 8 Ramón Favela, Diego Rivera. Los años cubistas (Mexico City: Phoenix Art Museum / Instituto Nacional (...)
- 9 Idem., p. 92 (my translation).
10Our second stop is Paris in the same year: 1915. The work we now know as Paisaje zapatista or Zapatista Landscape (1915) is Diego Rivera’s most important contribution to Cubism, a movement to which he belonged for about five years, from 1913 to 1917. It is also the work that caused the rift with his mentor and friend Pablo Picasso due to the accusation (launched by Rivera) of plagiarism.8 The oil painting has a complicated history. Finished in the Mexican’s studio in Montparnasse, Paris, its original title was El guerrillero or The Guerrilla, although the painter referred to it as his “Mexican trophy”.9 Stimulated by the visit of the exiled Mexican writer Martín Luis Guzmán, whom he portrayed in the same period seated in an equipal (or traditional Mexican chair) that Rivera had in his studio, and informed by friends, the press and by letters of the dramatic developments of the civil war in his country —a conflict that was entering its most violent phase, after five years of armed struggle—, Rivera decides to do something that was heretical within the norms of orthodox Cubism. In a Cubist composition he includes exotic elements that make direct reference to Mexico: a wide-brimmed hat, a rifle, a sarape, the cartridge belt, and bottle gourd fruits, all against a background of exuberant foliage amid the mountains and volcanoes of the high central plateau of his country. Rivera thus combines in one work the three principal genres of Cubist painting: still-life, portrait and landscape.
11It was no coincidence that at the same time another exiled friend, Alfonso Reyes, was writing in Madrid his Visión de Anáhuac (1519) or Vision of Anáhuac, in which he proposes a national catharsis of the revolutionary violence. Finally, in the same year, 1915, Mariano Azuela published in instalments, in El Paso, Texas, the first version of what would become, a decade later, the archetypal novel of the Mexican Revolution: Los de abajo (The Underdogs). These texts demonstrate that, although in 1915 the painters and artists were more finely tuned to the movements of rebellion, the writers were beginning to search for new models of narrative expression.
12The specific reference to the agrarian movement led by Emiliano Zapata was added much later by Rivera, when he changed the title, perhaps to reinforce his inexistent or dubious revolutionary credentials (Rivera had been living in France thanks to a stipend offered by the Porfirian governor Teodoro Dehesa). In The Guerrilla or Zapatista Landscape Mexican politics and social violence irrupt for the first time in a painter who until then had been obsessed by the formal research of Cubism, remaining indifferent to social and political concerns.
- 10 Idem, p. 126.
- 11 Idem, p. 92.
13The second heresy he introduces in this oil canvas of 1915 is the use of brilliant colour, an excess of exotic sensuality that was in direct contradiction with the rigorous austerity and the ascetic rationalism that had dominated Cubism. That same ascetic vision was held by Pierre Reverdy, destined to replace Apollinaire as the writer, poet and theorist of the group after the latter’s early death in 1918.10 Rivera had a violent confrontation with the dogmatic Reverdy in 1917, an incident that would accelerate his exit from the movement. What we do know is that when Picasso saw this work by his Mexican disciple, he liked it so much that he appropriated several elements in a contemporary piece. From that moment there was a rift between the two painters. We also know that when the writer Max Jacob saw the work for the first time, he thought that it was by his friend Picasso and not by Rivera.11
14In 1915, then, Rivera is an avant-garde Cubist in Paris, practicing the universal language of formal experimentation, assimilating the European schools of painting yet beginning to introduce native elements with a certain realism, perhaps vaguely aware that his destiny was not to be another epigone of Picasso, Braque and Gris, but to rediscover his own identity as a Mexican painter, something he would do soon after his return to Mexico in the summer of 1921, when he accepted commissions for mural paintings in public buildings. In Paris Rivera was a rebel within (and against) the Cubist rebellion.
15Let us move forward now to 1920 in Caracas, Venezuela. The Mexican poet José Juan Tablada was living there (and in Colombia) on a diplomatic mission authorized by president Carranza. Formed in the decadent and symbolist schools, Tablada was the first Mexican disciple of Baudelaire, pursuing the latter’s artificial paradises in his work and in his life. In terms of political ideology, it is fair to say that Tablada was addicted to authoritarian power (he sang the praises of the dictator Porfirio Díaz on the eve of the Revolution and later collaborated with Victoriano Huerta, the military leader who overthrew Madero, the instigator of the 1910 Revolution, and then had him and the vice-president murdered). Yet in artistic matters Tablada was an avant-garde revolutionary, always aware of the latest tendencies and open to universal culture. In 1919 he had published in Caracas Un día… Poemas sintéticos, an extraordinary book that represented the first appropriation and naturalization of the Japanese haiku in the Spanish language. But now, in 1920, his persistent orientalism took him in a different direction: that of the calligramme and the visual poem. Li-Po y otros poemas is a watershed collection, a landmark that inaugurates for Mexican poetry the adventure of the cosmopolitan avant-garde.
- 12 In “La caricatura: absoluta y relativa” (1914), in Marius de Zayas, Escritos sobre arte, op. cit., (...)
- 13 José Juan Tablada, “Artistas mexicanos en Nueva York. Marius de Zayas, Pal-Omar, Juan Olaguíbel” (1 (...)
16When we open the book, the first thing we see, even before the epigraph by Mallarmé, is a “psicografía” of Tablada by Marius de Zayas. This forms part of the characteristic style of the artist in New York in the second decade of the twentieth century, first practiced in brief sketches or portraits, which he baptized as examples of abstract caricature. Zayas referred to his portraits as “a graphic and plastic synthesis of the analysis of individuals”.12 The simplification inherent in caricature is combined with fragmentation, abstruse algebraic equations, a degree of abstraction and the presence of geometrical figures, all designed to capture the essence of a personality. When he was in Paris, collaborating with Apollinaire in Les Soirées de Paris in the summer of 1914, Zayas published four of his best abstract caricatures, dedicated to his friends Apollinaire, Picabia and Stieglitz and to the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. In an article published in 1919 Tablada celebrated the work of his friend and added this commentary: “El último resultado de la evolución artística de De Zayas es la psicografía, o sea la imagen de una persona, no fotográfica u objetiva, sino filtrada a través de la subjetividad del artista que la descompone como un prisma el rayo solar, tornándolo en espectro”.13
17The first part of the 1920 collection features poems in print, many more in calligraphy and a Chinese (or Sino-Japanese) ideogram. The sequence recreates episodes in the life of Li Po, the Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty. The handcrafted nature of this section (the poet as artisan) can be read as a rejection of commodity culture and as a gesture of nostalgia for what Walter Benjamin later diagnosed as the loss of aura caused by the age of mechanical or technological reproduction. Just as each of the haiku poems in his 1919 volume were accompanied by the author’s hand-painted illustrations in water colour, here, in “Li-Po”, the long poem that constitutes the first part of the 1920 book, calligraphy expresses unique personalization and gives a ritual quality to the text (figure 1). In this first part, with one exception, the visual form of the poems duplicates the verbal content, as in many of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, which tend to be figurative. Let us look at the exception: an ideogram, which translates as “longevity” (figure 2).
18The ideogram contains within it, in the white spaces that trace the character against the dark background, verses written in Spanish, thus combining two writing systems. The image is prior to the text, but the text in Spanish is not a translation or illustration of the ideogram: it is a parallel language that explores the analogies between writing and painting. Transformation and metamorphosis are expressed in verses linked by rhyme. The flame of the lamp is mysterious but also visually illuminating, as if Tablada intended to tell us that his own tentative approach to the Chinese written character was through the accessible door of the plastic arts.
- 14 Willard Bohn, “The Visual Trajectory of José Juan Tablada”, Hispanic Review, vol. 69 (2001), p. 197
19The sixteen poems included in the second part of the book are presented as “Otros poemas ideográficos”, texts of different levels of complexity that use a range of techniques. “Impresión de La Habana” (figure 3) is a composition written in Havana, probably in 1918, during a visit the poet made with his new wife, Nina Cabrera (of Cuban descent). Like Apollinaire’s “Lettre-Océan”, this visual poem is modelled on the convention of the postcard: a rectangular shape with a boxed title. It represents the typical view of Havana from the water. On the left, above the rocks, we see the lighthouse of the Morro del Castillo projecting its rays into the sky and, on the right, a palm tree moving in the breeze, seagulls flying in the blue sky and the visual illumination of the lights of the city, seen as fireflies that are associated with the sensuality of female glances. On the lowest level we can observe the line of the sea. In contrast to the verses inserted into the Chinese ideogram already mentioned, which are read from left to right and from top to bottom, like a normal written text in a Western language, here the spatial layout and the visual code permit other patterns of reading or perceiving. The reader becomes a spectator as the eye is drawn to capitals or larger font or unusual typography, such as the words in gothic type towards the bottom (“Se incrustan en tus farallones / los huesos de los españoles”, two nine-syllable verses linked by rhyme). This gives historical depth to the composition, an impression reinforced by the references in the upper zone, in the lighthouse, to Christopher Columbus and the figure of the conquistador. The mention of the song of “las nuevas sirenas” (sirenas are both mythological mermaids and the modern sirens of factories and boats) is probably a direct allusion to Apollinaire’s inaugural calligramme and thus a recognition of the primacy of the author of Calligrammes. As Bohn has noted, a closer look at the tower of the lighthouse reveals certain letters in capitals and boldface, probably to represent windows on both sides.14 This calligramme, a visual or ideographical poem, expresses once more a point of union of the literary and artistic avant-gardes in 1920. Although indebted to previous models (especially Apollinaire), Tablada’s poem is not derivative but personal and distinctive.
- 15 For a study of the preeminence of this manifesto and its influence on Actual No. 1, see Héctor Olea (...)
20In May 1921 David Alfaro Siqueiros published in Barcelona the first and only issue of the journal Vida Americana. The illustrations included indicate influences and preferences: three caricatures by Zayas, seven paintings by Rivera, one of his own portraits (revealing the influence of Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà and Italian metaphysical painting), two paintings each by two Uruguayans living in Barcelona (Joaquín Torres García and Rafael Barradas) and two reproductions of canvases by Cézanne, the father of Cubism. There are also fragments of texts by Braque and Severini on Cubism and a visual poem and an essay by the Catalan avant-garde poet Joan Salvat-Papasseit. The most important text by Siqueiros is “3 llamamientos de orientación actual a los pintores y escultores de la nueva generación americana”, written in the first-person plural and arguing in favour of cosmopolitan avant-gardism and innovative Americanism under the “constructive spirit” of Cézanne (named as “el restaurador de lo esencial”). This is the founding theoretical document of the Mexican artistic avant-garde, a manifesto in which Siqueiros would always maintain that he had incorporated the ideas of Rivera.15 What is interesting here is that in May 1921 Siqueiros still believes in “plástica pura” and his references are not to Marxism and the October Revolution but to Cubism, Futurism and Dada, while he recognizes that the ancient pre-Hispanic painters and sculptors (“Mayas, Aztecas, Incas”) can be a point of departure for a new art. He rejects notions of cultural nationalism and there is no mention here of social, political, collective or public art. On the eve of his return to Mexico, then, Siqueiros the artist (who is a friend of the anarchist Salvat-Papasseit) is free of the sectarian and dogmatic doctrines he would later defend. He identifies with the movements of innovation and rebellion, while at the same time fusing them with the idea of the continuity of an ancient American tradition.
21Let us now go to Mexico City. In December 1921 the poet Manuel Maples Arce pasted a broadsheet to the walls in the streets of the centre of the capital. Actual No. 1 was printed on both sides and consisted of an inflammatory introduction, followed by 14 numbered points and a final “Directorio de vanguardia”, which includes (among the 200 or so names) all the figures mentioned in this essay (Zayas, Rivera, Reyes, Tablada, Salvat-Papasseit, Torres García, Barradas, Apollinaire, Picabia, Duchamp, Breton, Marinetti, Siqueiros and Charlot) as well as the major protagonists of Spanish ultraísmo, Cubism, Futurism, Dada and other movements. As this document has been described and analyzed by many critics, I shall not dwell on it here, except to mention that the scandalous slogans, insults, neologisms, advertisements and calls for the liquidation of all previous literature as decadent garbage coexist with exalted celebrations of modernity, machines, and the dynamism of urban life. Like the ultraístas of Spain, he calls for a synthesis of all existing isms in what he calls Actualismo or Estridentismo. Actual No. 1 was, of course, a personal document, but others soon joined him to create a movement: the writers Arqueles Vela, Germán List Arzubide, Salvador Gallardo, and Luis Quintanilla, as well as the different artists who would illustrate the books and magazines of the movement: Fermín Revueltas, Jean Charlot, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Guillermo Ruiz, Dr. Atl, Roberto Montenegro, Germán Cueto, Leopoldo Méndez, and Fernando Leal, among others.
- 16 The portrait was first reproduced in Ortega, “Nuestro apóstol creacionista Maples Arce”, El Univers (...)
22One of the most important and memorable collaborations between a writer and an artist was undoubtedly that between Manuel Maples Arce and Jean Charlot. The young French artist, a devout Catholic, arrived in Mexico City in January 1921 at the age of 22, and stayed until May, then returned in December for a much longer stay that lasted several years. He immediately participated in the birth of the muralist movement, painting his first mural on one of the staircases in San Ildefonso. Massacre at the Templo Mayor, completed between 1922 and 1923, recreates with extraordinary energy and dynamism one of the most violent episodes of the Conquest, the killing spree carried out by Pedro de Alvarado in Tenochtitlan in 1520. Executed at the same time as Rivera’s first mural, La creación, the younger artist upstaged his senior and set the standards by incorporating history and epic into painting that aspired to be public, social, didactic and political. In 1922, a few months after Maples Arce had created Estridentismo, Charlot did an innovative Psychological portrait of Maples Arce (figure 4) to accompany an interview the poet gave to Febronio Ortega in El Universal Ilustrado.16 Abstract, experimental and dynamic, this fascinating woodcut print is Charlot’s first collaboration with the poet and his nascent movement. He would also illustrate the front cover of Germán List Arzubide’s book Esquina in 1923 and, at roughly the same time, he codirected with Maples Arce a project called “Ediciones del movimiento estridentista”.
- 17 Manuel Maples Arce, Urbe: super-poema bolchevique en 5 cantos (Mexico City: Andrés Botas e Hijo, 19 (...)
- 18 Years later, Maples would remember his affinities with Charlot and specifically mentions their conv (...)
- 19 Manuel Maples Arce, Metropolis, trans. John Dos Passos (New York: T. S. Book Company, 1929).
23However, the most ambitious collaboration occurred in 1924 when Maples Arce asked Charlot to illustrate his long poem Urbe: super-poema bolchevique en 5 cantos, dedicated to the workers of Mexico, something unheard of before.17 Why did he ask Charlot instead of Fermín Revueltas, Rivera, Siqueiros or any of the other Communist painters who would sign, in June 1924, the Manifiesto del sindicato de obreros técnicos, pintores y escultores? Probably because the poet and art critic felt that his work would not be understood by an orthodox Communist and perhaps because he had just seen Massacre at the Templo Mayor and understood the significance of its epic dimension, which he sought to emulate in his poem.18 This was not the only illustrated edition of Urbe. Five years later, John Dos Passos published in New York his English translation under the title Metropolis with a colour cover by the Mexican artist Fernando Leal.19
- 20 For a study of the enthusiasm of Mexican writers for technological inventions in the 1920s and earl (...)
- 21 Jean Charlot y Emilio Amero, El grabador Posada. Monografía (1923); Jean Charlot, “Un precursor del (...)
24Nonetheless, the choice of a young, unknown French artist was surprising. Just before the collaboration Maples had presented Rivera’s first mural in a public ceremony on March 9, 1923 (with José Vasconcelos and Antonio Caso), praising the work’s “estilo francamente estridentista”. From the moment he arrived in Mexico, Charlot had shown little interest in the adoration of urban modernity and technological progress (the Futurist themes that obsessed Maples). On the contrary, he was attracted by the non-Western, indigenous part of Mexico while his Christian temperament dictated that he always viewed art as a spiritual activity. The woodcuts he submitted to Irradiador (the magazine co-directed by Maples Arce and Fermín Revueltas in 1923) were all centred on indigenous peasants, usually carrying heavy burdens (figures 5, 6 and 7). Fascinated by poverty, oppression and primitive traditions, Charlot was fully aware of the most recent developments of modern art, with a detailed understanding of Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism, but the communist and collective ideology expressed in the subtitle of Maples’s work would not have appealed to his sensibility. However, in solidarity with innovative youth, he accepted the invitation. His first decision was crucial. He would use one of the oldest artistic techniques available: the woodcut with its primitive aura, a medium that seemed to enter into conflict with the Futurist trappings of technological modernity celebrated in the poem (which mentions cables, motors, iron, steel, factories, trams, trains, airplanes, elevators, ocean liners, docks, cranes, telephone lines and machines).20 The ancient technique, practiced by some of the German Expressionists, was rediscovered by Charlot, who shared it with young Mexican painters. He also initiated, in 1923 and 1925, the rediscovery of the engraver José Guadalupe Posada as a precursor of modern Mexican art.21 A traditional form (associated in Mexico with popular, mass production) suddenly also became an avant-garde medium for experimental art.
- 22 Juan Manuel Bonet, “Papeles vanguardistas mexicanos: algunas pistas”, in México ilustrado: libros, (...)
- 23 Perhaps deceived by this, the first historian and analyst of Estridentismo, Luis Mario Schneider, w (...)
- 24 The first skyscraper in Mexico City, Edificio La Nacional, was planned in 1928 and completed in 193 (...)
- 25 Maples liked this portrait so much that he used it many years later as the cover of the volume of h (...)
25All the illustrations for the 1924 volume are in black and white, except for the one on the cover (figure 8), which features red and black in an allusion to the banners and flags used by organized labour in their meetings and parades. Below the author’s surnames, balanced between two symmetrically placed circles, we see modern tower blocks soar on the urban horizon while geometrical forms interact with the typeface. The decision (undoubtedly requested by the poet) to write the initial letter of the title with the letter “V” recalls the strategy of the main publication of the Spanish ultraístas (Vltra), as Bonet has pointed out.22 The provocative subtitle leads us to expect a political poem,23 yet Charlot’s cover design gives weight to the urban theme while minimizing the political or revolutionary message. We also see on the cover the place and year of publication. This immediately invites us to identify the modern city with Mexico City, yet the content of the poem and of Charlot’s illustrations, deny this exclusive possibility. The city sung by the poet is also an international port. In 1924 neither Mexico City nor Veracruz had the kind of architecture or technological development mentioned.24 The city of Urbe is an ideal construction of the imagination: a utopia of international modernity. After the cover we contemplate the frontispiece (figure 9), which is a synthetic portrait of the author with bold lines that express the confidence and strength of a charismatic and prophetic leader.25 As in his experimental Psychological portrait, Charlot offers us here the emblem of a personality cult.
26The other interior illustrations, however, pull in different directions. Charlot produced five more woodcuts, one for each canto. Rather than illustrations, they are interpretations that sometimes coincide with the poem and at other times correct it or offer a different reading. What the artist decides to illustrate is just as important as what he decides to omit. He is selective. His interventions do not simply duplicate elements of content. To a certain extent, he projects his own ideology onto the poem, thus creating a complex, iconotextual object that is both linguistic and visual. The peculiar nature of this unique collaboration explains the status of this work as one of the great modern examples of an illustrated book in Mexico.
27For the first canto, the artist creates a striking image which features two symmetrical skyscrapers and, up in the sky between them, a hot-air balloon (figure 10). The viewpoint is elevated, perhaps from another skyscraper. In the streets below we can vaguely make out stick figures and dots, schematized crowds holding a banner. Maples mentions no skyscrapers in the first canto or anywhere else in his poem, so this is Charlot’s decision to include an iconic symbol of urban modernity. He takes as his model for this skyscraper the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, a triangular structure erected in 1902 and soon considered an architectural icon that seemed to resemble a ship when seen from the front. Although Maples describes his city as new, modern and international, made of iron and steel, with elevators, trams and trains, he also describes it as a port with ocean liners, docks, piers and cranes. Accordingly, Charlot’s identification of the city with New York is totally plausible. In the first stanza Maples presents his poem as “brutal / y multánime”, combining in this neologism the conflicting ideas of multiplicity and unanimity. Both “multánime” and “noviestructural” (used later) are neologisms that Maples takes directly from Guillermo de Torre, who had used both inventions in his Manifiesto vertical, dated “Madrid, noviembre, 1920” and published as a supplement to the last issue (number 0) of the ultraístas’s magazine Grecia in the same month.
- 26 In the 1965 interview with Stefan Baciu, Charlot declared: “jamás me consideré pintor futurista” (J (...)
- 27 Jean Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920-1925 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University P (...)
- 28 Manuel Maples Arce, Soberana juventud, op. cit., p. 148.
28When he published Urbe, Maples had never been outside Mexico, but his imagination fed on international references and on the images and reproductions glimpsed in the books and magazines he received. Even more than the poem, Charlot’s image for canto I sees humans as dwarfed by the monumental dimensions of urban modernity. We should remember that Charlot never saw himself as a Futurist painter.26 Equally it is worth recalling that in his pioneering and documented study of the Mexican artistic movement, which he published in English four decades later, Charlot referred to Maples as “the futuristic poet”.27 The artist also omits any representation of the social and political revolution, despite the poet’s specific allusion in this canto to the Bolshevik Revolution: “Los pulmones de Rusia / soplan hacia nosotros / el viento de la revolución social”. Likewise, Charlot does not represent any factory or workers, despite repeated mentions in the poem, and there is no visual reference yet to the subtext of a sentimental or romantic relationship with a woman, first invoked as a sudden memory: “oh el fogonazo / verde de sus ojos”. Overlooked too is an intriguing image which can be interpreted as an adolescent memory of the “red batallions”, fighting units made up of workers, created in 1915 by the Casa del Obrero Mundial to offer support to the Ejército Constitucionalista of Carranza: “Bajo las persianas ingenuas de la hora / pasan los batallones rojos”. Finally, the poet insinuates at the end of his opening canto his fear or sombre premonition that only his verses will remain to illuminate the modern city and the social revolution: “Mañana, quizás, / sólo la lumbre viva de mis versos / alumbrará los horizontes humillados”. The artist expands this pessimistic intuition. Far from being a propagandistic eulogy of the Mexican or the Russian Revolution, Urbe is a complex and contradictory text that expresses hope and fear, celebration and lamentation, faith and doubt, modernolatry and primitivism. Many years later in his memoirs the poet described it accurately as “un canto en que latía la esperanza y la desesperación”.28
- 29 Elissa J. Rashkin identifies the geometric figure with a hammer in The Stridentist Movement in Mexi (...)
29The second sequence of the poem locates the action in a specifically Mexican context. There is a reference to the vociferous crowds that greet the followers of Obregón in the streets (“los hurras triunfales / del obregonismo”). The description of the port city continues, as does the theme of idealized love (“Oh muchacha romántica / flamarazo de oro”). The presence of the crowds of organized labour provokes fear in the girl, but her lover (presumably the poet) reassures her and links the masses to the romantic tradition: “No temas, es la ola romántica de las multitudes”. Then the poet introduces an enigmatic and powerful image that suggests that the noisy celebrations in full sunlight will soon be followed by dark silence and by a return to an atavistic or primitive past: “la noche Tarahumara irá creciendo”. Charlot’s woodcut (figure 11) abandons the horizontal perspective and presents an angular ascendant movement. The shape at the top has been seen as a hammer (thus alluding to part of the emblem of the Soviet Union), but a closer inspection reveals that it represents an airplane rising above the city, a typical theme of Futurism.29 In fact, this image is probably based on two verses: “Un pájaro de acero / ha emprorado su norte hacia una estrella”. At the centre of this “bird of steel” we can see a simplified figure that has been interpreted as a poet playing his lyre, but again it would be more coherent to see him also as an aviator, the poet-pilot who operates the control wheel in the cockpit. The exhilaration of speed in the act of flying allows us to see the concrete blocks of the city buildings below in a different perspective. In the bottom left-hand corner, we see another strange figure, not mentioned in the poem. When compared to the poet-pilot above, it can surely be interpreted as a representation of Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, taken by the Romans as a symbol of immortality. Pegasus is grounded on the horizontal perspective and facing the opposite direction. In this way Charlot expresses the ambiguous note that dominates the final image of this second sequence, where the euphoric celebration of mechanical modernity engenders not immortality but death: “Los motores cantan / sobre el panorama muerto”. Rather than an apology of Futurism, Charlot seems to offer an ironic vision of the relationship between technology and mythology. The utopian thrill of infinite dynamism coexists with an intuition of impending and inevitable disaster.
30For the third canto, Charlot again adds something that is not in the poem: a tall aqueduct that is seen towering above the urban landscape (figure 12). A train speeds along the aqueduct leaving a trail of smoke. The train, another typical symbol of modernity, progress, speed and energy, became an important weapon of war in the Mexican Revolution. In the lower left-hand corner, a female figure is clearly visible holding a handkerchief in a gesture of saying goodbye. The minute stick figure seems insignificant, dominated by the urban infrastructure and the moving train. We associate her with the romantic girl who represents the past, now a dark anachronism, while modernity signifies both the loss of innocence and the end of traditional notions of art and beauty: “perdida en los obscuros pasillos de la música / alguna novia blanca / se deshoja”. Charlot prefers to centre on this sentimental theme and not on the workers firing pistols after hearing speeches, workers described in the poem as “rojos / y amarillos” (the colours indicating, respectively, the communist and non-communist factions of the labour movement).
- 30 Escalante describes the temporal structure of the poem thus: “El primer canto es el de la mañana. E (...)
31The fourth canto of the poem continues with the progression of scenes that occur at different moments of a single day.30 Now we are in the darkness of night. All sounds are replaced by silence. The shouts of the workers, the “mechanical rhythms” of the machines in the city, the sound of gunfire and artillery shelling all disappear. The initial verses are ominous: “Entre los matorrales del silencio / la obscuridad lame la sangre del crepúsculo”. The previous image of the utopian force of the wind of the October Revolution, celebrated as “esta nueva belleza / sudorosa del siglo”, now takes on a sombre aspect as a source of suffering: “Sobre la arboladura del otoño, / sopla un viento nocturno: / es el viento de Rusia, / de las grandes tragedias”. The poet continues the sentimental theme of his memories and mixes it with the perception of political in-fighting and divisions among the workers. His insomnia is punctuated by voices, trains and soldiers heading towards devastation and hell. However, Charlot decides to represent a maritime scene dominated by two ships heading in different directions under the stars with the night sky illuminated by search lights that form a gigantic cross (figure 13). The outline of the land with its mountains is visible in the background. The ships are contained within a bowl-like structure that recreates the visual impression of the hull of a ship floating below sea level. Here the artist simplifies the complexity of the poem and prefers to recreate a typical war scene, although he keeps the nocturnal setting.
32The fifth and final canto is the most pessimistic. From the beginning it announces in a powerful image the triumph of atavistic barbarism over the modern urban utopia: “Las hordas salvajes de la noche / se echaron sobre la ciudad amedrentada”. This negative stereotype of the Revolution (both the Russian and the Mexican) as a dark invasion of savage tribes could also be the first example of the reworking of an image included two years earlier in Eliot’s The Waste Land, where we read in the fifth and final part:
- 31 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922), in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1 (Collected and Uncollected (...)
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in the cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only […]31
33Violence, revolution and war inevitably provoke sensations of insecurity and fear of a regression to primitivism. Previous premonitions now seem to come true: urban splendour succumbs to apocalyptic desolation; virginity and innocence have been attacked by lust and lechery; the triumph of the revolution has been followed by internecine warfare, unleashing blood and hatred. We can also hear in that initial image of “savage hordes” the echo of Freud’s polemical myth of the primal or “primitive horde” (taken from Darwin), developed in Totem and Taboo, a construction that was later transferred, after the October Revolution, to the “Eastern hordes” that threatened chaos and destruction (the contemporary reference of Eliot’s image).
34Yet the poem’s references to the Bolshevik Revolution now give way to a local name: “Ocotlán / allá lejos”. The reference is to the Battle of Ocotlán in Jalisco, in February 1924, during the rebellion of Adolfo de la Huerta. This is presumably the moment Maples is writing his poem. At the end of 1923, when it became obvious that the official presidential candidate was Plutarco Elías Calles, Adolfo de la Huerta refused to recognize the government of Obregón and began a rebellion that was finally suffocated in June 1924 (Urbe was published on July 24, 1924, according to the colophon). So, the poem was written at a time of uncertainty and doubt, when many thought the new order inaugurated by the armed struggle could be lost forever. In the final canto, it is not only the Russian Revolution but also the Mexican Revolution that is a source of insecurity and anguish. The same oscillation between enthusiastic optimism and fearful pessimism that dominates the poem on the collective or political level also functions on the personal level of the romantic subplot. The “muchacha romántica” or “novia blanca” is now besieged by the forces of darkness: “La lujuria apedreó toda la noche / los balcones a obscuras de una virginidad”. The final stanza is indicative of the poet’s ambivalent view of the city, the revolution and even the literary tradition:
Las calles
sonoras y desiertas,
son ríos de sombra
que van a dar al mar,
y el cielo, deshilachado,
es la nueva
bandera,
que flamea,
sobre la ciudad.
- 32 Evodio Escalante (op. cit., p. 61) recognizes the presence of Manrique in these verses.
35Supreme paradox: an avant-garde poem ends by invoking the famous “Coplas” written in the xv century by Jorge Manrique on the death of his father.32 Here there is no apology of modernity, no celebration of the revolution, no break with tradition, but rather the recognition of a new reality that reconciles opposites. The hope of a new flag is balanced by the tattered quality of the sky. The absolute has been relativized while novelty has had to form a pact with tradition. These verses prove the hyperbolic nature of the poem’s subtitle. The new dawn presides over an urban reality of devastation and ruin.
- 33 Here I differ from Klich, who sees Charlot’s illustrations as conveying “an optimistic spirit” that (...)
- 34 Tatiana Flores, op. cit., p. 185.
36How does the artist represent this complex and skeptical culmination of an ambitious poem? He returns to the central theme of the modern city, the port and technology. The final woodcut features a gigantic ocean liner with smoke pouring out of its funnels as it speeds away from the urban landscape (figure 14). Viewed from below, the perspective increases the size of the liner, which looms large and threatening. We can also see two schematic human figures: a man and woman falling or diving into the sea in an act of desperation and helplessness. Besieged by the primitive hordes in the civil war, afraid of the destruction of the crumbling city, the couple (presumably the poet and his lover) decide to abandon the ship and flee, offering themselves (in a strange inversion of Manrique’s verses) to the vast ocean. The visual narrative is, of course, a simplification of the verses and an affirmation of Charlot’s own worldview, more skeptical than the poet of technological modernity and the progress brought by social revolution.33 Tatiana Flores is correct to note that the prints “present a bleak view of modern life”.34 The poet’s ambiguous doubts have been transformed into a vision of alienation and catastrophe.
37The enthusiastic opinions of the first reviewers of Urbe ignore the deep ambivalence of the poet’s view of the modern city, the revolution, and Romantic love. When we add to this the critical stance expressed in Charlot’s interventions, we are obliged to pose the question: when does the admiration of the monumentality of modernity and progress (with the revolution as its preferred instrument) begin to turn into fear provoked by the threatening signs of helplessness and nihilism? When does utopia produce its own disenchantment? Are the artists and writers analyzed here examples of revolt, rebellion or revolution?
- 35 What follows is inspired by Octavio Paz, “Revuelta, revolución, rebelión” (1967), in Obras completa (...)
38Following the etymological and semantic path traced by Octavio Paz in an essay written in 1967 on the three related concepts of revolt, rebellion and revolution, we can sketch a preliminary map of the early phase of the Mexican avant-garde.35 In most Western languages the two oldest terms (as applied to social change) are revolt and rebellion, whose meanings remain closely related. Revolt is a spontaneous and popular uprising against authority. It threatens to introduce disorder and chaos. Rebellion is an act of disobedience or resistance by an individual or by a marginalized minority that opposes established authority. On the other hand, revolution, as we now understand the term (especially since the French Revolution of 1789), is a violent and systematic change of institutions according to a rational, intellectual and philosophical plan that seeks to introduce a new order. When we apply these definitions to the cultural sphere, the modern avant-garde movements can be seen as the multiplication of individual or group rebellions that together constitute (retrospectively) an aesthetic revolution. However, authentic creators are seldom docile and obedient servants. They will usually never be content to simply follow a revolutionary prescription or adhere to a new orthodoxy. They will invariably cling to the more anarchist attitudes associated with freedom, rebellion and revolt. As extremely authoritarian and hierarchical groups in themselves, the avant-garde movements produced their own dissidents and heretics. Fortunately, the artists and writers mentioned here (Zayas, Rivera, Reyes, Azuela, Tablada, Siqueiros, Maples Arce and Charlot) practiced rebellion and revolt both within and against the aesthetic revolution they participated in.