A collection of sixty-seven photographs of the urban and semiurban areas of Mexico city taken in 1941

Helen Levitt: Mexico City

Arts & Photography

Oles, James

Levitt, Helen

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

W.W.Norton&Company

“A lucid―at times, even poetic―summary of five hundred years of Mexican art. The illustrated works of art are well-chosen and beautifully integrated into Oles’s text. Indeed, it feels as if his words emanate from the art itself.” –Donna Pierce, Denver Art Museum This new interpretive history of Mexican art from the Spanish Conquest to the early decades of the twenty-first century is the most comprehensive introduction to the subject in fifty years. James Oles ranges widely across media and genres, offering new readings of painting, sculpture, architecture, prints, and photographs. He interprets major works by such famous artists as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, but also discusses less familiar figures in history and landscape painting, muralism, and conceptual art. The story of Mexican art is set in its rich historical context by the book’s treatment of political and social change. The author draws on recent scholarship to examine crucial issues of race, class, and gender, including the work of indigenous artists during the colonial period, and of women artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout, Oles shows how Mexican artists participated in local and international developments. He considers both native and foreign-born artists, from Baroque architects to kinetic sculptors, and highlights the important role played by Mexicans in the global art scene of the last five centuries. 276 illustration, 249 in color

Art and Architecture in Mexico (World of Art)

History & Criticism

Thames&Hudson

Richly illustrated with works of both high culture and commercial kitsch - many of them never before reproduced - South of the Border revisits an era when Mexico captured the North American imagination. Between the final years of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-17 and the immediate aftermath of World War II, dozens of U.S. painters and photographers flocked to Mexico, among them Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Marsden Hartley, Helen Levitt, Josef Albers, and Robert Motherwell. South of the Border reconsiders the work of these and other American artists, along with representative works of their Mexican contemporaries and examples of the vast quantities of commercial art - illustrated books and magazines, travel posters and postcards - and Mexican folk and tourist art that contributed to Americans' image of their neighbor to the south. Artists visiting or living in Mexico, Oles writes, were enthralled with the country's climate, pre-Columbian heritage, and folk culture. Especially during the Great Depression, not only artists but the general American public as well saw in Mexico an appealing alternative to the pressures of industrial society. Some artists, including Winold Reiss, Thomas Handforth, and Doris Rosenthal, won acclaim for their depictions of a seemingly timeless rural life in Mexican villages. Others, among them Pablo O'Higgins, Elizabeth Catlett, and Robert Mallary, fired their work with politics, bringing the movement for social reform directly to the people through large murals and popular graphics. In a bilingual text - English and Spanish - that accompanies more than 180 illustrations, Oles describes these and many other U.S. artists drawn to Mexico, placing their work in its original political and cultural context. An accompanying essay by Karen Cordero Reiman reexamines the history of Mexican art from 1910 through 1950, providing a fresh interpretation of a period long obscured by nationalist discourse and the domination of muralism. Published in cooperation with the Yale University Art Gallery, South of the Border includes capsule biographies and selected bibliographies for many of the artists discussed in the text.

SOUTH OF THE BORDER

Yale University Art Gallery

Ferragut, Marta

Smithsonian

Between the final years of the Mexican Revolution and the immediate aftermath of WWII, dozens of U.S. painters and photographers flocked to Mexico. Oles reveals the work of these artists, along with representative works of their Mexican contemporaries. Text in Spanish and English. 185 illus., 75 in color.

SOUTH OF THE BORDER PB

•The ultimate guide to the life and work of the last Mexican surrealist, creator of the infamous 'Hand Chair'•Never-before-seen hypnotic and dazzling images•World renowned cultural authorities, like Leonora Carrington and Fernando del Paso, grace the pages of this unique bookPedro Friedeberg, one of the most outstanding contemporary Mexican artists, is virtually impossible to pinpoint. Whether because of the almost baroque density of his images, his multiple mediums of expression (painting, sculpting, serigraphy, furniture making), his vast range of favored genres (landscapes, still life, pure abstraction, architectural drawing) or his production styles (art nouveau, surrealism, and pop art), he is a challenge for any one book to represent. This new publication endeavors to do him justice though, relishing in the complexities of his oeuvre. A key part of understanding the man behind the art comes from his own personal encyclopedia, which travels through the Cabala, the work of architect Francesco Borromini, heraldry, religious motifs, and insect art - to name but a few.Friedeberg has displayed his art at over 100 solo exhibitions and close to 120 collective expos, in the top museums and galleries of Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, United States, Japan, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Spain and former Yugoslavia. Known for his surrealist work, his most recognizable piece is the Hand-Chair: a sculpture/chair designed for people to sit on the palm, using the fingers as back and arm rests. Friedeberg began studying as an architect, but did not complete his studies as he began to draw designs that disturbed the conventional forms of the 1950s - from the mildly ludicrous to the completely implausible, such as houses with artichoke roofs. However, his work caught the attention of artist Mathias Goeritz who encouraged him to change to a profession where his imagination and unique worldview could by fully realized. Friedeberg became part of a group of surrealist artists in Mexico, which included Leonora Carrington and Alice Rahon: irreverent men and women who rejected the dominant hegemony of sociopolitical art. If Friedeberg's most infamous statement is true, and art is dead because nothing new is being produced, then his startling work must be a resurrection.Text in English and Spanish.

Pedro Friedeberg (English and Spanish Edition)

Collins, Jeffrey

TRILCE EDICIONES, S.A DE C.V

Preceded by the heroic modernism of the 1920s and abruptly curtailed by World War II, the heterogeneous art movements of the 1930s have been comparatively neglected as concurrent cultural phenomena. The 30s were much more than a period of transition or crisis, witnessing as they did the massive expansion of Surrealism, and fervent debate between new movements in abstract and realist painting. Political turbulence was of course rife at this time, with the rise of totalitarian governments and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, provoking a fluid migration of artists across borders and unlikely exchanges of ideas. Published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, Encounters with the 30s explores the micro-histories of the decade. Surrealism is covered in detail, along with abstract art (such as the Concrete Art, Circle, American Abstract Artist and Abstraction–Creation movements) and Mexican Realism, and key exhibitions of the period (such as the Nazis’ “Degenerate Art” shows and the World Fairs); photography, political poster art and the Spanish Civil War comprise other sections. The monograph is amply illustrated with works by Arp, Brassaï, Calder, Delaunay, Ernst, Gabo, Hepworth, Miró, Picasso, Weston and many lesser known artists of the era.

Encounters with the 30s

Wood, Paul

Schnapp, Jeffrey T.

Mileaf, Janine

La Fábrica/Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Tamayo reinterpretado

Zavala, Adriana

Indych-López, Anna

Coffey, Mark K.

Cordero Reiman, Karen

Debroise, Oliver

Pereda, Juan Carlos

Suckaer, Ingrid

TURNER PUBLICACIONES S.L.

During the summer of 2007, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City hosted the most complete exhibition ever of the work of Frida Kahlo. Marking the centenary of Kahlo’s birth, the Palacio showed 354 works, including 64 oil paintings, both beloved and virtually unknown, 45 drawings, 11 watercolors, 5 etchings, plus scores of letters, photographs and other personal ephemera. It was a labor of love, as well as a loving gesture, for Mexico’s greatest artistic ambassador. It was also timely; Kahlo is in the air again, as young contemporary artists revisit and recast psychoanalytic, Neosurrealistic figuration.In 1953, when Frida Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in Mexico--the only one held in her native country during her lifetime--one critic wrote: “It is impossible to separate the life and work of this extraordinary person. Her paintings are her biography.” Kahlo herself puts it better: “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” This essential catalogue, based on the Palacio de Bellas Artes exhibition, presents brief essays by a wide range of Kahlo scholars, poets, anthropologists, architects, psychologists and experts in many other disciplines, both from Mexico and abroad--as well as a more extended appreciation of Kahlo by the novelist Carlos Fuentes, along with Kahlo’s own paintings, drawings, prints and ephemera.

Frida Kahlo: National Homage 1907-2007

Grimberg, Salomon

Tibol, Raquel

FUENTES,CARLOS

Editorial RM

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