D O C U M E N T / I N T R O D U C T I O N
INTRODUCTION TO CARLOS MÉRIDA’S
“THE TRUE MEANING OF THE WORK
OF SATURNINO HERRÁN”
harPer montgomery
When the Guatemalan artist Carlos Mérida (1891–1984) arrived in
Mexico City during December of 1919, he possessed knowledge of
the European avantgarde and contemporary Mayan artesanía that
enabled him to bring a cosmopolitan vantage point to one of the most
pressing questions in postrevolutionary Mexico: how should young
artists draw on autochthonous culture to renew a nationalist art?
Mérida issued a strongly worded answer to this question six months
later in “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán: 这
False Critics,” the Document translated in this issue of ARTMargins.*
In his highly polemical text, Mérida accused Mexican critics of misin
terpreting the paintings of Saturnino Herrán (1887–1918). Herrán,
who died prematurely, had been celebrated at the time of his death
在 1918 by poetcritics, such as the beloved Ramón López Velarde,
as a painter of Mexican themes. The artist’s practice of depicting
peasants, Tehuanas—women of the Isthmus region of Oaxaca in
Southeastern Mexico—and scenes of preColumbian gods and con
temporary folk rituals were not what made his work worthy of critical
praise, Mérida contended. Herrán should not be admired, as critics
claimed, as “the most Mexican of painters and the greatest painter of
*
Carlos Mérida, “La verdadera signifi cación de la obra de Saturnino Herrán: Los falsos
críticos,” El Universal Ilustrado, 七月 29, 1920, 14 和 26. Quotes from this manifesto are
derived from the translation in the Document.
© 2018 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
土井:10.1162/ARTM_a_00203
115
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Mexico.”1 Instead, Mérida explained, it was Herrán’s skill as a drafts
person that merited critical admiration. At face value, Mérida was
deriding Herrán’s paintings with the false praise that they were well
drawn, that they were “drawings with color”—an insult to any
painter.2 But the Guatemalan interloper was also, 实际上, 环境
his sights on a much larger and more consequential target than the
draftsmanlike quality of Herrán’s paintings. Mérida was arguing
that the artist’s reputation as the country’s greatest Mexican artist
was merely a symptom of a far more serious problem: Mexican crit
ics’ lack of objective judgment—that is, their failure to establish
consistent, transparent criteria for determining what nationalist
painting should be.
In “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino Herrán,”
Mérida proposes new criteria that would correct the critic’s role and set
Mexican artists on a path to developing a stronger nationalist painting.
第一的, 他认为, critics and artists must abandon their affection for lit
erary themes. The thencurrent practice of representing Mexican iden
tity through realist paintings in which an artist would feature an
existing set of motifs was dangerous, he explains, because it would
encourage local audiences to embrace longstanding picturesque types.
As Mérida laments, “It is believed that artists make nationalist works
when they paint either a charro, a rebozo, or a china poblana or a more or
less starched Tehuana, or even a servile copy of the Aztec Calendar or
Sacrificial Stone.”3 Most readers in Mexico City would have understood
that he was referring to a set of imagery that had lost its authority
because it had been so long produced and displayed in two distinct and
yet equally visible realms of image consumption: at the annual exhibi
tions at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, where realist paintings of
1
Carlos Mérida cites this phrase on p. 14 of his text, which he has borrowed from a head
line by one of the many texts written in honor of Herrán following his early death. 这
article Mérida was referring to is the following: Federico E. Mariscal, “Saturnino Herrán:
El más mexicano de los pintores y el más pintor de los mexicanos,” El Pueblo, 十二月
29, 1918. The Spanish title literally translates as “the most Mexican of painters and the
most painter of Mexicans.”
2 Mérida, 26.
3
同上. Images of charros (cowboys from the central states), rebozos (shawls of indigenous
origin), chinas poblanas (women wearing a traditional mode of dress common in central
Mexico until the midnineteenthcentury), and Tehuanas (women from the Istmo region
of Oaxaca) were all produced onstage and in tourist postcards during the period. 他的
reference to “the Aztec Calendar” and the “Sacrificial Stone” refers to Aztec sculptures
recently exhumed.
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such Mexican motifs lined the gallery walls, and in postcards and
photographs that produced romantic images of traditional Mexico for
foreign tourists.
Disdain for such “literary” themes of picturesque nationalist types
was a complaint voiced by many critics and artists of Mérida’s genera
tion in Mexico, 秘鲁, and even Argentina, WHO, by the early 1920s,
were clamoring for artists to take formal approaches to incorporating
autochthonous culture into their artworks. Most famously, the Peru
vian critic, writer, and leftist organizer José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–
1930) incorporated this stance into his influential text “Literature on
审判,” wherein he argued that realist modes of representing indigenous
people must be abandoned because they repeated colonial impulses to
record and collect images of exotic peoples created by costumbrismo, 这
eighteenthcentury Spanish practice of capturing the charm of foreign
peoples by lavishing attention on the details of their dress.4 Although
his politics differed from the socialist Peruvian’s, the Argentinean
critic Alberto Prebisch (1899–1970) similarly lamented the ongoing
presence of stereotypically “Argentine” views of the pampas at the
annual Salons in Buenos Aires. In his reviews for the avantgarde mag
azine Martín Fierro in Buenos Aires during the mid1920s, Prebisch
urged artists to turn instead to the rhythms and shapes of the city in
search of sources for an Argentine painting whose nationalism would
be expressed through its forms rather than through iconographic
motifs.5 All these cases indicate a growing cohort of what we could call
modernist critics who were simultaneously directing their complaints
about the “literary” toward both an older generation of poetcritics and
a young generation of artists, whom they sought to convince that art
does not need to contain such obvious motifs of “the Mexican” or
“the Argentinean” to be of national interest.
Mérida’s polemic begins by flatly rejecting realist painting and
sculpture, as well as the critics who praise it. If critics were to assess art
according to its forms and not its thematic content, he explains, 他们的
judgment would be less clouded by personal prejudice—that is, 经过
their own memory or emotional associations. Mérida argues that rather
4
5
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Literature on Trial,” in Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian
Reality, 反式. Marjory Urquidi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 182–287.
Alberto Prebisch, “El XIV Salón Nacional de Bellas Artes,” Martín Fierro 2, nos. 10–11
(September–October 1924): 72; “Salón Nacional de Bellas Artes de 1926,” Martín Fierro 3,
不. 24 (十月 5, 1926): 272–73. Both citations are from the facsimile edition.
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than attending to artworks’ “symbols and ideologies,” critics should
attend to “the essential character of a picture, its true plastic value, 它是
material quality, the harmony of its tones, its drawing, its tendency,
etc.” “It is painting or sculpture that is at stake, not literature,” Mérida
decisively declares.6 In making such charges, he also suggests that the
consequences of approaching indigenous themes as merely “literary”
sources have been especially grave in Mexico, because the paintings
produced through such an approach encourage Mexicans to develop
a picturesque, touristic sense of their own culture.
When Mérida struggles with the difficult question of how modern
artists should deal with indigenous cultures, he is less decisive. 这是
清除, 尽管, that a key goal of improving how artists represent indige
nous cultures in Mexico or Guatemala is finding a means for artists
like himself to identify less superficial aspects of the local people and
their arts than the charming and easily consumable imagery exhibited
in a painting by Herrán. Mérida declares that, “To make nationalist art,
we must fuse the essential part of our autochthonous art with our cur
rent countenance and our current feeling, but not in an external, 那是
to say theatrical, form but instead in its essential, spiritual form.” His
emphasis on spirit and on an internal aspect of indigenous art suggests
that he, like many of his peers, believed that the formal beauty of arte-
sanía was evidence of the spiritual and emotional substance of its
创客: 那是, not only that an Indian craftsperson could possess
an interior life that bore commonalities with that of modern man, 但
that a traditional artisan could serve as an intermediary figure through
which the modern avantgarde artist could identify deeper veins of
emotion and spirit within himself. Even though this was a primitivist
trope, it acquired new, politicized meanings in Mexico and Peru during
the 1920s, where critics like Mérida, Mariátegui, and others experi
enced uneasy and inconsistent relationships with the Indian and mes
tizo people they painted, the indigenous crafts and costumes they
depicted, and even how their own ethnic indigeneity was implicated in
their capacity to identify with these subjects. (Mérida’s family was eth
nically part Maya, a fact that was noted in the press during the 1920s.7)
尽管如此, it should be borne in mind that the power relationship
6 Mérida, 14.
7
Anita Brenner, “An Artist from the Maya Country,” International Studio (四月 1926):
85–87; Máximo Bretal, “Mérida, pintor de Guatemala,” El Universal Ilustrado, 十一月
12, 1925, 32–33.
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always favored the cosmopolitan artist. 的确, in this text, Mérida is
cautious to relegate “indigenous art” to playing the role of “nothing
more than guidance.”
By bringing to light a different take on debates about questions
of art and nationalism, Mérida’s article brings into view unacknowl
edged facts about postrevolutionary Mexican art that suggest that
questions of identity were being considered with far more complexity
than has been acknowledged. It proves that postrevolutionary Mexican
art was not invented from scratch by returning heroes from Europe
or from the war at home, such as Diego Rivera (1886–1957), José
Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–
1974). It raises questions central to Mexican art at the time—whether
this art should express its cultural identity through formal or thematic
方法, and to what degree it should depend on European trends—
which were being examined by cosmopolitan artists and critics within
a setting that was transnational. It also reveals that the question of
what Mexican art should look like was being debated by a network of
critics and artists who traveled extensively across Europe and Latin
美国. Further more, it indicates that these debates were taking
place in the cosmopolitan milieu of a Mexico City populated by immi
grants and connected to other Latin American centers through the
press and the post.
Even Mérida’s biography offers much to complicate narratives of
travel, nationalism, and the development of art and criticism in 1920s
Mexico and Latin America. Mérida’s text bears many signs of having
been conceived by a writer who—having lived in Paris and traveled
to New York in the decade leading up to 1920, and later resided in
Guatemala and Mexico—beheld the scene in Mexico City with a vision
informed by his mobility. Mérida had become fluent in European
avantgarde methods while living in Paris between 1909 和 1914,
在哪里, among other experiences, he may have encountered European
artists representing “exotic” cultures, such as the paintings of Moroc
can women that Henri Matisse exhibited at the Galerie Bernheim
Jeune in 1913.8 He may have also witnessed various approaches to the
revival and embrace of local folk cultures, such as those on view at the
Salon d’Automne of 1913, where a selection of Russian folk art was
exhibited. (Although no historical record exists of his attending either
8 Matisse displayed thirteen of his Moroccan women at that Parisian gallery in spring 1913.
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of these exhibitions, they evince the visibility of such themes and
issues in Paris generally during Mérida’s stay.)
Mérida arrived in Mexico City armed with contacts with promi
nent Mexican artists and critics whom he had met in Europe and New
约克. He had encountered many Mexicans while living in Paris—
including Roberto Montenegro (1885–1968), Rivera, and Adolfo Best
Maugard (1892–1964)—and had befriended José Juan Tablada (1871–
1945) while passing through New York in 1917. (Both Tablada and
Montenegro were early proponents of Mexican folk art.) These contacts
helped him find work writing for magazines and newspapers, 哪个
was a prime source of income for Mérida during the early 1920s, 什么时候
he worked as an art critic for two prominent Mexico City–based maga
zines: El Universal Ilustrado and Revista de Revistas. The former title,
a largeformat illustrated magazine comparable to Caras y Caretas in
阿根廷, throughout the early to mid1920s was a lively source of
information on new art and culture that addressed a growing middle
class eager to feel connected to the rest of Latin America and the world.
That a text as antagonistic as Mérida’s “The True Meaning of the Work
of Saturnino Herrán” appeared in El Universal Ilustrado also says a
great deal about the support for young oppositional voices that existed
in Mexico during the early 1920s. El Universal Ilustrado employed
Mérida and many other young avantgarde artists to write for and edit
the magazine. From June to December of 1920, he wrote once or twice
a month for the magazine and for its affiliated newspaper, El Universal,
about exhibitions in Mexico City and themes related to modern art and
Mexican culture.9
Although Mérida published no other polemical texts during this
时期, in his art reviews for El Universal Ilustrado he trained a critical
9
体积 2 of Xavier Moyssén’s La crítica de arte en México: 1896–1921 (2 vols.) (墨西哥
城市: UNAM–IIE, 1999) contains much of the criticism Mérida produced between 1920
和 1921, although not all of it. Various texts are available in the Document database
of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas, 在http://icaadocs.mfah.org
/icaadocs/, 七月访问 10, 2016. For the most comprehensive record of his writings
about art and dance from 1920 到 1981, see “Hemerografía,” in Homenaje nacional a
Carlos Mérida (1891–1984) (Monterrey: Museo de Monterrey–INBA, 1992), 271–73. 这
monograph also contains the most current and comprehensive accounts of all aspects of
Mérida’s work and writings. Collections of Mérida’s later writings on muralism and
dance are collected in, 分别, Escritos de Carlos Mérida sobre arte: El muralismo, 编辑.
Xavier Guzmán, Alicia Sánchez Mejorada de Gil, Leticia Torres Carmona, and Amando
Torres Michúa (Mexico City: INBA–CENIDIAP, 1987); and Escritos de Carlos Mérida sobre
arte: La danza, 编辑. Cristina Mendoza (Mexico City: INBA–CENIDIAP, 1990).
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eye on a milieu that was clearly as aware of cosmopolitan trends as it
was of its own need to embrace local artists and cultures. He covered
exhibitions of the drawings of the Mexican artist Carlos Orozco
Romero (1896–1984) and the Salvadoran caricaturist Toño Salazar
(1897–1986), as well as the annual exhibition of students’ work at the
Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, the most prominent venue for dis
plays of new art.10 Mérida’s articles on modern art in the magazine—
including essays on Robert Delaunay’s “simultaneísmo” and on
Futurism, topics familiar to an admittedly limited circle, but referenc
ing works that could be seen in blackandwhite reproductions in the
magazine—display a perspective on the European avantgarde that is
simultaneously receptive and thoughtfully critical.11 In his writing on
“simultaneísmo,” Mérida deems Delaunay’s theories of color useful,
但, in the article on Futurism he expresses extreme skepticism regard
ing the movement’s relevance for Latin American artists.12
Beyond a short statement for a pamphlet, Mérida did not write
about his own art during this period.13 “The True Meaning of the Work
of Saturnino Herrán” should, 然而, be interpreted as an early effort
to critically frame his own artistic practice. When Mérida moved to
Mexico City, he brought with him a trove of paintings he had made
while traveling through the mountains of Guatemala to paint indige
nous women after he had left Paris, works he no doubt hoped would
help him secure visibility as an artist in Mexico and prove him an expe
rienced painter of indigenous themes. Just two months after he had
published his polemic, Mérida achieved his goal, by being invited to
exhibit his work at the galleries of the Escuela Nacional, where he had
10 Mérida, “Siluetas de Dibujantes Mexicanos [Carlos Orozco],” El Universal Ilustrado, 可能
11
26, 1920; Mérida, “Siluetas de Caricaturistas de América: Toño Salazar,” El Universal
Ilustrado, 九月 3, 1920; Mérida, “Las decoraciones florales de las canoas de
Xochimilco,” El Universal Ilustrado, 二月 2, 1922.
Futurism possesses a long history of reception in Mexico and Latin America, dating from
the great poet Rubén Darío’s translation of Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto, which appeared
with commentary in La Nación (Buenos Aires) on April 5, 1909. See International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies: Futurism in Latin America, 编辑. Mariana Aguierre, Rosa
Sarabia, Renée M. Silverman, and Ricardo Vasconcelos (Cumberland, RI: Walter de
Gruyter, 公司, 2017).
12 Mérida, “La Escuela pictórica del día: El simultaneísmo de Delaunay,” El Universal
Ilustrado, 六月 17, 1920; Mérida, “Cuestiones de arte moderno: Algosobre el futurism,”
El Universal Ilustrado, 六月 1920.
13 Mérida wrote a brief statement for the pamphlet accompanying Exposición Carlos Mérida
(Mexico City: Salon de Exposiciones de La Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, 八月
25–September 10, 1920).
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been hired by the school’s director to help devise programs for present
ing modern art in the school’s galleries.14 In August 1920, the school’s
newly renovated modern galleries hosted a selection of some forty
paintings and watercolors that Mérida had made in Guatemala in 1919
and on the outskirts of Mexico City during the spring and summer
的 1920.
It was no coincidence that Mérida’s antagonistic essay appeared
just two months before his exhibition opened. Although Mérida’s
paintings of indigenous women were by no means complete abstrac
系统蒸发散, they approached the motif of indigenous culture and people in
a manner theretofore unseen in Mexico City. Presenting aggressively
平坦的, synthetic renderings of Mayan women, these paintings could not
have been more different from Herrán’s. Instead of emphasizing the
beauty of his female models, as Herrán did, Mérida almost ignored the
women completely. By rendering their heads and bodies as highly syn
thesized geometric forms, he instead accentuated the formal beauty of
the women’s indigenous textiles by depicting them in extreme detail.
此外, the compositions and palettes of the paintings them
selves appeared to be inspired by the patterns and colors of the textiles
worn by the models.
Because Mérida’s unusual paintings were widely reproduced in the
Mexican press during the summer and fall of 1920, including features
in both El Universal and El Universal Ilustrado, they would have been
visible even to Mexicans who did not attend his exhibition at the
Escuela Nacional. It therefore must have been a deliberate strategy
for Mérida to illustrate “The True Meaning of the Work of Saturnino
Herrán” with prominently placed reproductions of two of Herrán’s
paintings: A 1914 drawing of a mestiza draped in a silk rebozo from cen
tral Mexico, and a 1915 painting of the artist’s wife wearing the dress of
Tehuanas. Herrán’s paintings unquestionably present beautiful women
for an erotic gaze.15 Both models are shown wearing traditional cos
tumes that enhance the desirability of their bodies and faces. 就像
14 The Escuela’s new director, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, had asked Mérida to assist him in
devising a new program for the school’s galleries that would expose students to the latest
trends in modern art. Regarding these exhibitions, see boxes 2 和 4 at the Escuela
Nacional de Bellas Artes Archive, Facultad de Arquitectura/UNAM, Mexico City.
15 My interpretation is based on Adriana Zavala’s excellent reading of the sexuality of
Herrán’s paintings in Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: 女性, 性别, 和
Representation in Mexican Art (大学园: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2010), 146–52.
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Carlos Mérida. La pincesita de Ixtanquiquí, 1919. Oil on canvas, 201/2 ∞ 2313/16 在. (52 ∞ 60.5 厘米).
Private collection. Image courtesy of the author.
the rebozo is not meant to be admired as an object that can be exam
ined for its inherent beauty, but rather as an adornment accentuating
the beauty of its wearer, the dramatic head piece of the Tehuana’s cos
tume accentuates the movement or potential movement of the body
of its wearer. In sharp contrast, Mérida renders his women as inert
figures completely devoid of any sign of living flesh, painting them
instead as twodimensional mannequins whose task is to display the
formal beauty of the textiles they wear.
Montenegro, Tablada, and the director of El Universal
Ilustrado, Carlos Noriega Hope (1896–1934), all praised the works
in Mérida’s inaugural exhibition for their display of the artist’s love
for “American” culture.16 Although Mérida was admired for focusing
on cultures that had been great ancient civilizations—namely the
16 Francisco Zamora [Jerónimo Coignard], José Juan Tablada, Roberto Montenegro, Manuel
Horta, and Carlos Noriega Hope [Silvestre Bonnard], “Jucios de artistas e intelectuales
mexicanos sobre la obra de Carlos Mérida,” El Universal, 八月 28, 1920, 23.
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Saturnino Herrán. La criolla del mantón (1915) and Tehuana (1914). Reproduced in the July 29, 1920, issue of El Universal
Ilustrado. Image and photograph courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.
Maya and, in Mexico, the city of Teotihuacán—his paintings actually
focused on the contemporary practice of wearing traditional textiles
in the highlands of Chimaltenengo, 危地马拉, and even in the envi
rons of Mexico City. Montenegro in particular valued this aspect of
Mérida’s early paintings, but its significance was considerable and
would have been noted by contemporary readers precisely because
the equation of Mexican nationalism with contemporary indigenous
craft was a bold stance. By focusing on the artistic beauty of arte-
sanía, specifically on textiles and pottery, Mérida’s paintings departed
from the standard practice of glorifying Mexico’s ancient culture. 在
doing so, Mérida aligned himself with a group of thinkers in post
revolutionary Mexico, such as Montenegro, Gamio, and Dr. Atl, WHO
were dedicating themselves to the study and promotion of contempo
rary artesanía.
The key task for these thinkers was to encourage middleclass
Mexicans to begin to perceive the objects that indigenous craftspeople
made as artistic objects worthy of admiration. Montenegro, the one
artist Mérida praises in this Document, and someone who probably
helped him a great deal, was instrumental in organizing the first exhi
bition of Mexican crafts in 1921, to celebrate the centennial of the con
summation of Mexican independence. Manuel Gamio, the director of
anthropology for the Mexican state during and after the Revolution,
was dedicated to studying artesanía as part of his belief in cultural
mestizaje—a theory of the blending of indigenous and European cul
tures that was meant to absorb indigenous Mexicans into a concept of
the nation.17 Gamio’s agency hired Mérida—along with many other
young artists—to study indigenous crafts, 什么时候, at the behest of
the Anthropology Department, Mérida wrote an article on the tradi
tional art of creating the floral arches that adorn canoes used to navi
gate the channels of Xochimilco, he praised the unnamed artists for
their sense of color and composition.18 This work of serious study
stood in direct contrast to the activities of Best Maugard, whom
Mérida criticizes by name in his text and who both organized a
Mexicanthemed dance with Anna Pavlova, in New York in 1916, 和
staged a festival of traditional dance and music for the consummation
of Mexican independence, in Mexico City in 1921—activities that
17 Manuel Gamio, Forjando patria (Mexico City: Porrúa Hermanos, 1916).
18 Mérida, “Las decoraciones florales de las canoas de Xochimilco.”
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Mérida clearly saw as distorting indigenous cultures for the exotic
charm they held for urban audiences.19
Conceiving of hieratic compositions in which traditional women’s
bodies appeared to conform to the geometric tendencies of their textile
patterns also enabled Mérida to present his own works as an alternative
to the dreaded influence of Spanish painting. Mérida bemoaned the
visibility of Spanish influence in Herrán’s paintings and those of other
artists, whose work he claimed had been falsely embraced as national
ist by an older generation of poetcritics in Mexico. But his call to reject
the longstanding influence of Spanish painting should not be inter
preted as a stand against European influence writ large. 实际上, shortly
after Mérida’s solo exhibition opened at the Escuela Nacional, 至少
one Mexican writer criticized his work for exhibiting a dependency on
French Primitivism.20 In a similar vein, when Siqueiros issued his well
known manifesto “Three Appeals for the Current Guidance of the New
Generation of American Painters and Sculptors” less than a year later,
he too condemned the continued influence of Spanish realist painting
in Latin America while suggesting that French avantgardism might,
反过来, offer artists useful approaches to addressing formal ques
tions in their work.21
Was Mérida’s polemic meaningful in shaping the local, or was it
merely a provocative stunt staged by a young, ambitious newcomer?
不出所料, we can answer “yes” to both questions. 就其一而言
手, Siqueiros, in his much more influential “Three Appeals” mani
festo from that period, seems to channel Mérida when he denounces
trite, picturesque versions of nationalist painting and calls for artists to
locate nationalism in artistic form. On the other, viewed within a lon
ger chronology and wider context within Mexico, Mérida’s complaints
against Herrán were not necessarily out of step with his young contem
孔雀. Leading theorists and proponents of avantgardism in Mexico
City during the early and mid1920s, including Manuel Maples Arce
(1898–1981) and the French transplant Jean Charlot (1898–1979), 是
19 Rick López, Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution
(达勒姆: 杜克大学出版社, 2010), 98.
20 A[ntonio] C[astro] L[eal], “Nueva y muy americana labor de Carlos Mérida,” El Universal
21
Ilustrado, 四月 8, 1920, 13.
Siqueiros issued “Tres llamamientos de orentación actual a los pintores y escultores de la
nueva generación Americana” in May 1921 in his review Vida Americana: Revista norte
centro y sud americana de vanguardia (巴塞罗那), which appears directly indebted to
Mérida’s “La verdadera significación de la obra de Saturnino Herrán: Los falsos críticos.”
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also soon calling for formal responses to the social transformations
that had been caused by the Revolution and, 正在进行中, praising
the mysterious beauty of objects produced by Mexican artisans. Mérida
should not be undervalued, 然而, as an early voice in these debates
and as an outsider. The caustic tone of this modernist critic—who in
rejecting Herrán asked an entire generation to confidently turn its back
on what Herrán and the critics who admired him represented—surely
inspired the spirited young men and women who filled Mexico City in
the early 1920s to question other assumptions that historians today
should also be revisiting.
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