Mérida, Carlos | Colección

19th-20th Century Guatemalan

As his fellow countryman and art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón claims, Carlos Mérida, born in a Mayan-Kʼiche family, “gave his life’s destiny—painting—to Mexico’s art heritage.” Mérida remained aloof from the nationalistic movements of his time, and once stated that he detested the grandiloquence and theatricality of Muralism. Notwithstanding, the instrumental role which this long-lived artist (who died at the age of 92) played in the turbulent process of modernisation of Mexico’s visual arts was always acknowledged. A pioneer of abstraction, together with Gunther Gerzso (1915-2000), the

Breakaway Generation

adopted him in its ranks as the main formative precedent of its visual innovations.

In 1911, after embracing painting and despite his limited experience, Carlos Mérida departed for Europe to seek his fortune. In Paris he rubbed shoulders with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Kees van Dongen (1877-1968). He also became friends with Luis Cardoza y Aragón and was introduced to Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Roberto Montenegro (1885-1968) and Ángel Zárraga (1886-1946), who had spent some time furthering their training abroad and would later encourage him to return to Mexico.

Before doing so, Mérida went back to Guatemala where he set in motion a pro-indigenous movement, combining art and ethnology. “After returning from Paris […] I had the feeling that in America I had found a new world peopled by visions that entirely overshadowed all the learnings I had gleaned in Europe,” he admitted in his Autorretrato. Mérida began to explore the wealth of his native culture and grounded his formal and colour exercises in Guatemala’s archaeology, handcrafts and folklore. In that regard he was also a pioneer in the renaissance of painting in America.

The opposition of his future in-laws to his marriage with Dalila Gálvez led him to accept an invitation from Diego Rivera to work with him and Jean Charlot (1898-1979), Amado de la Cueva (1891-1926) and Xavier Guerrero (1896-1974) in the encaustic paintings they were creating at Simón Bolívar Amphitheatre at the National Preparatory School. Mérida decorated the Children’s Library at Secretaría de Educación Pública and contributed to the creation of Mexico’s Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors Union. However, he was soon disenchanted with the ideological dogmatism and iconographic limitations of early Muralism. That being said, he did learn one lesson from the post-revolutionary moment: that of the fertile bond between architecture and painting that Mérida would apply in the notion of integration in which the collaboration among artists, engineers and architects would guarantee the emotional dynamics and scale of public works. In the 1950s he joined the architects Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral in a shared process of research that led to the creation of a number of innovative mosaic murals, together with others on a lesser scale (Secretaría de Recursos Hidráulicos, Restaurant Sanborn’s in La Fragua, Centro Urbano, Crédito Bursátil, Banco de Fomento Cooperativo). His crowning achievement is perhaps the large mural he did for the Multifamiliar Presidente Juárez apartment complex.

After another brief interlude in Paris, during which he became acquainted with Paul Klee (1879-1940), Joan Mirò (1893-1983) and Jean Arp (1886-1966) and which, in the words of D. Bayón gave him a “surrealist shower,” his definitive return to Mexico in 1929 encouraged him to pare down his resources to flat perspective, the use of circles and ovals, and a composition with vertical axes and asymmetric sides. Little by little, other contingent associations, like musical movement, were gradually added to the codices and altarpieces from the pre-Hispanic and colonial past. Around the late 1940s, the decoration with arabesques and wavy lines, and the organic forms of his beginnings, gave way to neatly geometric abstractions in which drawing was replaced by design, though never relinquishing the trace of the human silhouette. The artist also experimented with a variety of techniques: amate paper and paper produced with agave fibre, polished parchment, watercolours mixed with marble dust, enamel on copper, lacquered mahogany, dry and matte fossil-fuel plastics, and others.

It is worth underscoring that Mérida’s practice was not circumscribed to mural or easel painting and graphic works. His active contribution to cultural promotion started in 1929 with his appointment, together with Carlos Orozco Romero (1896-1984), as director of the Galería Nacional, currently Palacio de Bellas Artes. Shortly after that he directed the Escuela de Danza; conceived countless stage and costumes design for ballets; published many art critic essays; and taught at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).