Museum Review: 10 To The First Power - Celebrating Miami Art Museum's 10th Year Acquisitions - Page 2

His history mirrors many other artists through the ages who were destined and groomed for some useful and responsible profession. His mother died in 1911 when he was 12-years-old and was moved with an aunt to Mexico City. She put him in accounting school (someone once suggested I become an accountant rather than photographer and, luckily, I demurred), so that he could do the financial reporting for the family fruit-selling business. He wisely followed the muse to the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, where he sat in on classes until they took him in officially in 1917.

The early paintings are dark and heavily influenced by European movements, Cubism, Fauvism, Neo-impressionism, and other rising -isms of the new century. He threw in Mexico's indigenous facets and the violence of the Revolution of 1910. Then he stirred in his hopes and dreams and the power of the –isms, and out of the cauldron came Mexican forces who labeled him traitor to the Revolution, which helped propel him into the New York of the 20s, and later the late 30s and 40s.

Sadly, some of MAM's galleries, particularly for these earlier works, were poorly lighted. The lighting appeared to be an on-going problem that, we can assume will be addressed in the building for which ground will be broken next year. Not all the pieces were impressive, but the jewels among the choices were just that: jewels of his own modernism infused with the spirit of Abstract Expressionism of post-war New York.

There are Mexican women of Tehuantepec drawn Cubist style that still smell of chiles and emanate hot tropical style unknown to Picasso. There are supernatural figures with glowing eyes, phantoms of the post-war apocalyptic fears of nuclear annihilation that threaten to escape from the confines of the canvas frame, and symbolic birds with tropical colors and universal hopes and fears.

He was still painting in the 1970s and 80s, although death had become one of the motifs in his work. We are not surprised since that angel, that seductive temptress that comes for us all, hovered with his muse and he made his peace with her. He shows it in his work. He shows, too, the love for his wife of many decades in the portrait of her that embodies so much in so little. Luckily, these later pieces, the supernatural and the birds of the Cold War, are the ones I found in the better-lit galleries. MAM impresses in a state usually in love with the new and pop, chain stores and art on velvet.

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

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