Report from Mexico
ALBA, VICTOR
REPORT FROM MEXICO Red Artists Launch ?®Peace Offensive' By Victor Alba Mexico City For decades, the painter Rufino Tamayo lived here in an absolute void. Celebrated in Europe and the United...
...It happened following Beria's execution, the criticisms of "socialist realism" in the Soviet Union, and the return from Moscow of Secretary General Dionisio Encina of the Mexican CP...
...Now things have suddenly changed...
...But I think the party's primary objective is to win people over by striking an attitude of repentance...
...Have the Communists at last come to realize that their attacks on artists like Tamayo, Revueltas's recantation in 1950, and Siqueiros's lectures have alienated an increasing number of Mexican and other Latin American artists and intellectuals...
...He had been accused of "adhering to naturalist realism," "not understanding that socialist realism lends artistic productions an optimistic sense of life," and failing in his novels to depict "Communists as better and happier than other men...
...We are always ready to help those who try to understand us...
...The pro-Communist labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the Communist art critic Antonio Rodriguez had convinced him that, in his works, he had departed from the esthetic principles laid down by Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Communist poet who acted as spokesman for "socialist realism" in Latin American letters...
...The "monopolists" completely dominated the market for Government-ordered murals (all-important in Mexico) and the exhibition halls...
...Around him were grouped young artists like Vlady, Nefero, Gironella and Geles Cabrera, holding different views of art but united by a common desire for freedom from Communist control...
...On his return, he started to write, becoming a movie scenarist as well as one of Mexico's best-known novelists...
...Celebrated in Europe and the United States, he was never able to hold an exhibition in his own country...
...Tamayo has not fallen into the trap, nor have his friends...
...Since that time, he has published nothing...
...while an official art gallery, hitherto a "monopoly" stronghold, has invited him to hold an exhibition...
...Moreover, Tamayo has been invited to paint a fresco on the Palace of Fine Arts, the veritable feudal castle of the "monopolists...
...In Mexico as elsewhere, those who fancy themselves the shrewdest are often the most naive...
...A member of the Communist party since his youth, Revueltas had worked in the factories and in the fields, and had been deported to a penal colony at the beginning of World War II...
...The clarion call for a new Popular Front of artists and intellectuals was sounded by the writer Jose Revueltas...
...However, a number of well-known writers are already announcing that the Communists are not as terrible as everyone had thought, that they are returning to the paths of freedom, and that intellectuals should cooperate with them "to help them acquire a taste for independence...
...Now this same Revueltas, still as much a Communist as ever, has written a long article for the newspaper Novedades in which he sings the praises of abstract art and freedom of expression...
...You see," they are saying...
...For four years, the "monopolists" held complete sway...
...For Mexico City is, in an artistic and literary sense, the Paris of Latin America...
...and Diego Rivera, Chavez Morado and their disciples, though they hated him as the voice of orthodoxy and for his public reprimands, always echoed his words...
...On June 20, 1950, Revueltas wrote a letter to the newspapers announcing that he was withdrawing his most recent play from the boards and removing his books from the bookstores...
...These events, which set in motion a purge of Beria's friends among Mexican and Spanish Republican refugee Communists, also marked the end of the artist "monopoly's" public activities...
...This may be part of the story...
...He was forever delivering lectures on "socialist realism" or on political questions...
...If a young artist wanted to get anywhere, he had to attend Siqueiros's lectures, sign Communist manifestos or join the party...
...We were wrong about Tamayo and abstract art, and we admit it and are making amends...
...After explaining all these "reasons" for his action, Revueltas concluded: "I wish to express publicly my intention to honestly revise my work...
...Whenever he won a prize abroad, the painters' "monopoly," led by Siqueiros, the Communist artist who took part in the first attempt on Trotsky, would begin denouncing him as "a traitor to Mexican art...
...Siqueiros always spent more of his time talking than painting...
...Tamayo took the lead in opposing them, proclaiming the universality of art and denouncing his foes as exponents not of Mexican but of Soviet art...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 14
