19th-20th Century Mexican

The always surprising Roberto Montenegro was a painter, drawing artist and engraver who also created stage designs for theatre, ballet, opera and cinema, as well as writing poems, short stories and an autobiography (Planos en el tiempo, 1962) while moreover working as a civil servant at the National Institute of Fine Arts and the Secretariat of Public Education.

Montenegro, who shared the same place of birth with the painters Dr. Atl (1875-1964) and José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), among others, began his art training at Ateneo Jalisciense, in Guadalajara. His cousin, the poet Amado Nervo, recommended him to Revista Moderna, a journal where he worked as an illustrator before moving to Mexico City. In 1903 he enrolled at the San Carlos Academy, where he robbed shoulders with Diego Rivera (1886-1957), Saturnino Herrán (1887-1918), Ángel Zárraga (1886-1946), Francisco Goitia (1882-1960) and Jorge Enciso (1879-1969). Three years later, a grant allowed him to travel with Rivera to Europe. In Madrid he enrolled at the San Fernando Royal Academy of Art and coincided again with Nervo, who held a post at the Mexican Chancellery.

From Madrid he moved to Paris, where he attended the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière. At the time Montparnasse was awash with avant-garde artists: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) were then caught up in the first cubist experiments; Les Demoiselles d’Avignon caused outrage in 1907; the Fauvists, spearheaded by Henri Matisse (1869-1954), presented their first exhibition and defended the use of colours “like sticks of dynamite,” as André Derain (1880-1954) decreed. Although Montenegro was dazzled by all this effervescence, he persisted in the art nouveau phase of his beginnings in which he painted voluptuous portraits of women with sinuous lines and plant and floral motifs indebted to the decadentism of Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898).

After a short albeit intense period of two years he returned to Mexico in 1910. There, in the context of the celebrations of the centenary of independence, he was invited to organise the first exhibition of folk art. In fact, Montenegro played an instrumental role in revaluating folk art and went on to become a true expert; over the following years he published the books Máscaras mexicanas (1926), Pintura mexicana (1880-1860) in 1933, Museo de Artes Populares (1948), Retablos de México (1950) and promoted many exhibitions in Mexico and the USA on the subject, including Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, in collaboration with Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957), in 1940, commissioned by MoMA, New York.

Although he did not engage directly in the Revolution (nor indeed did Rivera), he accepted an official invitation to join the nationalistic project: in 1920 the artist created the first mural works at Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo, rendered in a classical style. That project was soon followed by others, carried out at the Secretariat of Public Education, the National School of Teachers and the Benito Juárez School.

Back in Paris he worked as a literary illustrator and took part at the annual Salons d'Automne before the outbreak of the Second World War forced him to seek refuge in Mallorca, in the company of Rivera and his wife, Angelina Beloff (1879-1969). From there he travelled to Barcelona and eventually to Madrid. During the war Montenegro painted genre portraits, fishing scenes, still lifes and seascapes in a language reminiscent of Spanish academic realism and in particular of Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923). He painted a mural work with the subject matter of fishing for the Parliament of the Balearic Islands. He also continued creating stage and costume designs for the theatre.

The disparity in style of Montenegro’s output made him a controversial figure for many. Critics viewed the amalgamation of different styles and periods as anachronistic, hybrid and excessively theatrical. He was also branded as frivolous and conservative, worldly and mystic, as experimental although without being avant-gardist. It is true that during the same period he dabbled in the Impressionism of Renoir (1841-1919), Picasso’s and the caricature-like approaches of German expressionists. It is equally true that he was always torn between his love for and his desire to innovate; between academic perfection and the freedom of experimentation; between modesty and ornamental excess. The accusation levelled against him that he wished to prove the breadth of his visual recourses may well be true. Recognised as an accomplished portraitist, Montenegro is nowadays highly sought-after by businessmen, politicians, the wealthy and cultural celebrities.