The affect of the Mexican Revolution Essay Example for Free

The affect of the Mexican Revolution Essay Francisco Bollain y Goitia Garcia (1882-1960) is a prominent Mexican artists of the XX century, who has been almost forgotten for decades and is now rediscovered. His works are rather complicated for perception and they can hardly be called pleasant, for Goitia concentrated on the most homely aspects of the world around him, demonstrating the fatality of revolution and violent changes in the most shocking way. This paper is to investigate two of his famous paintings – Zacatecas Landscape with Hanged Men I and Zacatecas Landscape with Hanged Men II. The paper is to demonstrate the style and manner of painting, as well as compare those pictures with works of other Mexican painters of the time such as Jose Clemente Orozco and Victor Augustin Cassasola. Some biographical data about Goitia is necessary to understand his works, so the paper shall open with a short biographic reference about the artist. Francisco Goitia was born in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Being a talented artist since his early years he studied in the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City and than in Barcelona with the Spanish artist Francisco Gali. Upon return to his home country in 1912 he has found it being wasted by the revolution. Having occupied the position of official painter for General Angel of Pancho Villas army he had an ability to observe war and it’s consequences with his own eyes. The experience influenced Goitia’s works greatly and his paintings are now examples of uncovered brutality and dread. There were even claims that Goitia ordered to exhume executed soldiers and hang them on cactuses as models for his pictures so it is hard to say how much in his paintings comes from real facts and how much from artificial staging of his morbid fantasies. Goitia has never worked with monumental forms so characteristic for Mexican art of the time. His canvases remained inside realism, impressionism and to a great extent symbolism, so he never became so popular as Diego Rivera or Jose Orozco. His last years passed in self-imposed poverty, but still he was quite a famous painter inside Mexico since early 20-s. In recent years his works became of interest for scholars outside Mexico as well. Both landscapes of Zacatecas (I and II) were painted most probably in 1914, although the exact date is unknown. They are both variations about the same topic: a bleak depressive landscape with half-dissolved corpses of hanged men on the trees. Both pictures were drawn from nature. Goitia knew this terrain well since he himself was born in Zacatecas, so he takes almost an intimate and affected position towards the scene. The landscape is typical for northern Mexico – it includes grey and yellow desert land with hills on the horizon and yuccas growing everywhere. The men hanged on the trees seem to their parts – so â€Å"naturally† they are tied to the branches. Most of the researchers point biblical analogies in the first painting for the landscape is so bleak that it reminds Golgotha. The analogy becomes even stronger for Goitia called his series of paintings about revolution â€Å"martyrdoms†. Goitia has been in the army of Pancho Villa in 1914 when he has captured the capital city of Zacatecas. Being both fascinated and frightened by that what he has seen he started feeling that his mission was to record the epic events of the revolution for history. As he himself put it â€Å"I went everywhere with the army, observing. I did not carry any weapons because I knew that the mission of killing was not mine† . Among the things Goitia has witnessed was death of general Lazaro Gomez, who has been repulsing enemy attacks auntill he ran out of ammunition and shot to his back after being taken prisoner. The body of the general has been beheaded and hanged on a tree with his head replaced with the head of a steer. It is believed that exactly death of Gomez inspired Goitia to paint his Zacatecas Landscape with Hanged Men I, although he used bodies of simple soldiers as â€Å"models†. So the first variant of the painting can really be considered a record of actual events, although Goitia did not concentrate on the death of a particular man, but aimed to show the series of deaths in Zacatecas. The most obvious difference between two variants of paintings is the manner in which they are drawn and involvement of the spectator. Zacatecas I still looks like a â€Å"real† classical painting with obvious elements attributable to artistic form including shape, symmetry, movement and rhythm. The background plays an active role in the picture and the bodies of the hanged look simply like the bodies of the hanged. They are horrible and shocking, but at least â€Å"natural†. Perhaps Goitia was not satisfied with the artistic effect of the first painting, so in the second variant he made it more impressive and less realistic . This was necessary to strike the audience in the necessary way. In the second painting two dead bodies are absolute centre of the compositions, and their empty eyeholes are pointed directly ad the spectator, as if they were looking at him. The position of the bodies creates an impression of surrealistic â€Å"gates† to the dreadful reality of death and grief. Death and it’s triumph are key points of the picture. The first variant is painted with oil on canvas and the second one looks more like a touchy pencil drawing, which has later been colored. To make his second painting even more symbolic Goitia replaced usual terrain of Zacatecas with surrealistic vision of deadly symbolism. In Zacatecas Landscape with Hanged Men II the trees seem to come out from gothic descriptions of Poe as they are gnarled and lifeless being painted with pale cold colors. Skulls of animals on the ground once more stress that death is a true master of the stage. The only living creatures on the second painting are owls – traditional symbols of night and forerunners of death. They create a ghostly atmosphere of the scene. Bodies are waved to different sides paralleling the braches they hang on, so they seem to be blown by different winds. White sun in the grey skies creates an image of omen. The general impression from the first picture is that Goitia painted that what he has seen and the second picture is undoubtedly a manifesto of his views, in which he tried to impress the observers by shocking view of horrifying images. As it has been already mentioned, the paintings belong to Goitia’s revolutionary period when he worked as a painter of Mexican federal army. The revolution in Mexico lasted from 1910 till 1917. Some scholars believe that Cristero rebellion of 1926-1929 was also a part of the revolution, so revolutionary events lasted in Mexico for almost two decades. Goitia’s paintings are images of that what virtually every Mexican of the time has once experienced, and this is perhaps the main reason why Goitia is so popular in Mexico and less famous outside its borders. It is hard to say for sure whether Goitia was an active supporter of the revolution or just followed the army as a chronicler. His later memoirs seem to support the second point of view – Goitia remained an artist but not a revolutionary throughout his travels after the army. The manner of paintings and their impression also correspond to the version. He has never painted any picture in which he would admire revolution, but both paintings seem rather to blame its barbarity. The manner of Goitia’s painting reminds the most famous apocalyptic pictures such as Triumph of Death by Peter Breugel, descriptions of war by Goya or Picasso’s Guernica. Most of the revolutionary painters glorify its triumphs and view it as a way to the new world. Goitia has chosen to demonstrate the horrifying â€Å"side effects† of progressive social upheavals. This was enough for him to be considered one of the sharpest critics of revolution in art. He explained that: â€Å"You see that it is natural that circumstances have made my temperament more inclined to the profound. There is a great deal of sadness in this country and I have tried to sum a certain phase of it† . Such Goitia’s insights are rather unusual for Mexico of the time, where revolution became almost a national idea, reflected in numerous artworks. This includes frescos by Diego Rivera or monumental modernist paintings of Jose Clemente Orozco. Mexican artists of the time shared different views of the revolution but there was one common thing for all of them – for them revolution was a magnificent event, a high tide of spirit and will, but in no way a vision of death and destruction. For example Diego Rivera was an incandescent Trotskyist, absolutizing the idea of global revolution and idealizing Trotsky as its dramatic leader. Orozco is a more complicated case for he was interested more in changes that revolution would cause in human minds and in the society. Still his art stands closer to the supporters of revolution as he used expressive modernist techniques being a revolutionary artist by his mere nature. And another common point of Rivera and Orozco is that they both are working with â€Å"objective reality† using artistic means to make the spectator impressed by this reality . In contrast, Goitia’s paintings are full of his own attitudes and they allow the spectator to make his. Revolutionary artists provided only one view, Goitia allowed the audience to chose. Although it is hard to find a â€Å"colleague† for Goitia between painters, such â€Å"colleague† still existed among photographers. Augustin Casasola in fact worked for the newspapers, but he would remain a usual reporter in case his pictures were not full of artistic sense, making them close to Goitia’s graphic works. As the revolution spread along Mexico Casasola established his own agency to provide home and foreign press with photographs of the event. Working as an independent photographer he was able to use his talent in full. he concentrated on all aspects of the revolution showing both victories and, like Goitia, the unattractive sides. He has also gathered a large collection of images of revolutionary individuals – from officers to peasants in their surroundings. Like Goitia his manner has been characterized by psychological dramatics and involvement of the spectator to the picture . Warlike and revolutionary art is always popular because there are always lots of people who are ready to admire the triumph of spirit and epic deeds. Less popular is art that shows the another side of war and revolution – death and destruction. To show this side the painter needs to be much more talented and avoid being just a thrilling entertainment. For this reason only a few painters became great after painting atrocities of war. Goitia is perhaps not so famous as Goya, but his works are deeply original.For this reason he is now being rediscovered and investigated by art historians worldwide. Works Cited: 1. Dore Ashton. (1999) Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century. In The 20th Century Art Book. ed. by Editors of Phaidon Press 2. Jacqueline Barnitz (2001) Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America University of Texas Press 3. Latin American Painting available at: http://www. chicagomanualofstyle. org/tools_citationguide. html (last accessed: November 19, 2007) 4. Viva Casasola! http://emiliobrizzi. blogspot. com/2007/03/viva-casasola. html (last accessed: November 19, 2007)