El nuevo grabado en madera mexicano: Méndez*

from From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture

Social Graphic Art in Mexico*

Paul Westheim

If Posada is the faithful interpreter of the sorrows and joys of the Mexican people, of their soul and spirit, Leopoldo Méndez is undoubtedly his spiritual and artistic heir. And what Orozco represents as a muralist painter, Méndez represents in his field, that of graphic arts. Méndez says, in his preface to the little album of Posada edited by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (which has for the bibliophile the special attraction that the prints were pulled from the original plate), that the master worked like a watchmaker: his works “mark the hours and moments of the life of the people of Mexico. . . . Posada convinced his people, as is it possible to convince all people of the earth, with his art [which had] high technical quality and identified with their aspirations.” It seems to me that in these sentences he [Méndez] expresses the goal that he himself pursues: an art that is at the same time Mexican and universal, [art that is] identified with the aspirations of the people and [is] of the highest technical and artistic quality. Siqueiros once wrote: “Méndez is potentially the most representative and valuable printmaker [ grabador] of the modern movement of the plastic arts in our country.”

Méndez was born in Mexico City in 1902. When the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz collapsed, he was eight years old. It is up to his generation to preserve and defend the conquests of the Revolution. Posada, a brave fighter against the Porfiriato, had devoted most of his work to the small events of the day. But in the meantime, many things occurred. Humanity went through the First World War and then the Second. The Mexicans carried out their Revolution; they knew the tremendous sacrifices, the many hopes, and the many disappointments. It is natural that Méndez—son of the times that with horror we call “our time”—, a political temperament whose fundamental attitude is nonconformity and rebellion against all types of injustice, expresses this attitude of his also in his work, with all the force of his creative power. Écrasez l’infâme [Crush the infamous], Voltaire’s catchphrase, is also his. What Goya, in his preface to Los Caprichos [The caprices], formulates as the aim and meaning of his work as a printmaker [ grabador]—“to stigmatize the prejudices consecrated by time, hypocrisy, and prudishness”—is also the aim and meaning of Méndez’s art. It is taking sides, with all resolution, with the enthusiasm of a warrior. Schiller, in the early nineteenth century, in the era of neoclassicism, was still able to demand that the poet rise “above the battlements of the party.” Romantic illusion of the day before yesterday, as romantic as the sound of the postilion (which does not exist anymore)! Whoever regrets—and many regret it—that a great artist is on the barricade, in the trench, should not blame him but rather the time that dug those trenches. His work, like Voltaire’s, is a work of illumination. Only in the dark is it necessary to illuminate.

Méndez is an artist for whom form is experience; for whom the experience of the form is the assumption and legitimation of all his creation. He himself has once said: “I link my work with the social struggle. But since my main weapon in this fight is this work of mine, I take it very seriously and do everything to ennoble it [the fight].” This is what distinguishes him from so many artists of our time, painters, printmakers [ grabadores], writers, [who are] blameless in the sincerity of their ideology but are unable to transmute it into creative spiritual energy. In 1920, Méndez was for a brief time a student at the Academia de San Carlos, evidently without learning much. He himself, by himself, had to forge his graphic style and even his graphic technique. It seems that in his beginnings he seriously strove to adjust his woodcuts and linoleum [ grabados en madera y en linóleo]—his preferred material—to the style of Posada; there are works of his from that time that undoubtedly recall his great precursor. He soon realized that this attempt to apply Posada’s style directly was a mistake; that he would have to look in other directions, another artistic orientation, another mode of representation.

Leopoldo Méndez

La revolución, hecho viviente [The Revolution, a living fact], 1940

Posada could still give himself the pleasure of narrating, of describing the events placidly, calmly— although certainly with a lively and convincing diction—, of resorting to suggestive detail to characterize the environment and atmosphere. His prints [estampas] tend to [have] an intimate effect. The audience he was addressing, those people who spent two or three cents for a corrido, after having listened open-mouthed to the man who had sung the chilling story, those many who could not read gazed with great attention at the pictures, which gave them an impression of what they heard and were, for them, the type of report [that was] the most interesting. Mendez can no longer count on this attitude. It is true that he also wants to narrate, to describe events, but they are events such that there is no longer room for placidity, or calm, or intimate effect. “[A] Political song, [is an] ugly song,” Goethe says in Faust. In his [Méndez’s] prints [are] the injustices, the horrors that have happened and those that are threatening us, and that tomorrow may be a reality for each one of us. And for him it is not just about narrating. He feels it his duty to shake up consciences, to fight against the indifference and apathy of the people, to make them active and militant. It is essential not only that the theme contribute to this end but also, and in the first place, [that] the formal expression [contributes], which in order to achieve a profound and immediate effect on the masses must be concise, precise, and aggressive. Compared to the artistic experiments carried out in Europe, to the prints [ grabado] of Munch, to the painting of Picasso, his technique is rather traditional. Despite being of a revolutionary temperament, or precisely because he is one, because he feels himself the bearer of a message for the crowds, because he aspires to the broadest and most universal effect, he believes himself obliged to resort to a conventional perspective, to a form accessible to all, to comprehensible [and] basic spatiality. It is natural that, in the case of large runs—for example, of flyers [hojas volantes]—in which it is not possible to count on printers educated to respect the peculiarities of artistic writing, the printer is obliged to renounce the subtle effects that a print [created] by hand can produce in favor of the plate and to stick exclusively to what the plate itself can offer. It is very likely that Méndez drew on this practical experience to develop his graphic style. [Through] a style that avoids large surfaces, [which are] dangerous because they easily produce the effect of a sandwich board; that works with strong contrasts of black and white areas and [then] softens this contrast in the black areas by introducing small stripes—fine or bold lines—and small white areas. Looking at his compositions we understand how great an artist is Leopoldo Méndez, who, possessed by the ambition of a master craftsman, feels—as he has once said himself—the fruition of carving and engraving, the joy of graphic creation.

* Paul Westheim, “El nuevo grabado en madera mexicano,” in El grabado en madera,trans. Mariana Frenk, 4th ed., 236–87, Breviarios del Fondo de Cultura Económica no. 95 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1954), 270–76.