serv­ing the mem­ory of the Mex­i­can rev­o­lu­tion, and by ex­ten­sion, cri­tiquing the in­ter­na­tional bour­geoisie. All found their rad­i­cal po­lit­i­cal voice in the ex­pe­ri­ence of the Mex­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, while a few went on to cre­ate an in­ter­face with ideas im­ported from world com­mu­nism.

I brought this im­pres­sion of Mex­i­can Art with me when I first came to Mex­ico from Canada in 1993. But my first visit to the Car­rillo Gil mu­seum col­lec­tion was strangely jar­ring. While view­ing its fine col­lec­tion of paint­ings by the three cen­tral pro­tag­o­nists of mu­ral­ism, I was struck by the fact that these were easel paint­ings cre­ated for a bour­geois clien­tele. They had clearly been painted at a man­age­able

size, then elab­o­rately framed, to be hung in a pri­vate, do­mes­tic set­ting. Yet here they were pre­sented in the stark, high-func­tion­al­ist set­ting of a pub­lic mu­seum. It’s a dis­junc­tion art view­ers are used to in any mu­seum, but it seemed par­tic­u­larly in­tense here due to the po­lit­i­cal nar­ra­tive sur­round­ing the ca­reers of these artists.

This was my in­tro­duc­tion to a more com­plex cul­tural re­al­ity than I was used to back in Canada. I learned that in Mex­ico a com­mu­nist ac­tivist can paint por­traits for the elite, and a bour­geois (such as Car­rillo Gil) can be­come bo­hemian, pur­su­ing his own paint­ing ca­reer. That such fiercely po­lit­i­cal artists dab­bled in the pri­vate sphere is par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing for

con­tem­po­rary artists with po­lit­i­cal con­vic­tions of their own.

As I prob­a­bly don’t need to point out, ex­plic­itly po­lit­i­cal art­work doesn’t eas­ily find a place in the art mar­ket, un­less it has gone through a lengthy in­te­gra­tion and com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion process. How does one main­tain a po­lit­i­cal voice but con­tinue fi­nanc­ing an art prac­tice, faced with the mount­ing costs of pro­duc­tion? These artists found the an­swer in prac­tices which strad­dled the world of pub­lic com­mis­sions and the pri­vate econ­omy of the art mar­ket.

I have cho­sen the four artists fea­tured in this cur­rent in­ter­ven­tion in the col­lec­tion of the Car­rillo

Gil Mu­seum be­cause each demon­strates a sub­tly dif­fer­ent di­vi­sion of prac­tice with re­gard to the pri­vate and pub­lic spheres.

Diego Rivera

An in­tense sense of pub­lic en­gage­ment is found in Diego Rivera’s work for the Mex­i­can Com­mu­nist Party in the 1920s. Though best known for his paint­ing and graphic work done in the name of com­mu­nism, it is his po­lit­i­cal writ­ing and or­ga­ni­za­tional work that re­ally show his fierce ded­i­ca­tion to the party. This is com­mu­ni­cated here with an ex­hibit of some of the po­lit­i­cal ephemera gen­er­ated by Rivera, gen­er­ously se­lected and loaned by Ri­cardo Pérez Es­camilla for this ex­hi­bi­tion.

This ex­hibit of po­lit­i­cal doc­u­ments is shown ad­ja­cent to a dis­play of Rivera’s “Cu­bist” paint­ings from 1915 and 1916. These paint­ings—done just af­ter his re­turn to Mex­ico from Eu­rope—show the in­flu­ence of the Parisian scene of the time, and date from be­fore his in­tense po­lit­i­cal ac­tiv­ity in Mex­ico. Later they were ac­quired by the en­tre­peneur Car­rillo Gil and hung on the walls of his pri­vate villa.

David Al­faro Siqueiros

My dis­play of Siqueiros’ paint­ing In­tertrópico (1946) pre­sents the work as it might have been viewed

on a pri­vate tour of Car­rillo Gil’s house. This work was ac­quired by the col­lec­tor in 1947 and is part of a group of land­scape and still-life easel paint­ings Siqueiros pro­duced at the time. This was an un­usual body of work for not be­ing sketches or stud­ies for mu­rals. I have had Siqueiros’ mural Re­trato de la bur­guesía (Por­trait of the Bour­geoisie) re­pro­duced in greyscale on the wall di­rectly be­hind. The mural, recre­ated here by En­rique Huerta, is found in the head­quar­ters of the Mex­i­can Elec­tri­cal Work­ers Union. The in­sti­tu­tional set­ting of the orig­i­nal mural is an at­mos­phere I have de­cided to recre­ate here, and it is con­trasted with the com­fort­able sur­round­ings of the other Siqueiros work on dis­play.

Gun­ther Gerzso

Though well-known to art con­nois­seurs as a painter of geo­met­ric com­po­si­tions and ab­stracted land­scapes, Gun­ther Gerzso was known to a much larger pub­lic as the art di­rec­tor for nearly a hun­dred films. His film ca­reer started in 1943 and con­tin­ued for al­most twenty years, bring­ing him to­gether with di­rec­tors such as Ale­jan­dro Galindo, Luis Buñuel and Miguel Del­gado. I have se­lected four films whose dates of pro­duc­tion are evenly spaced over the span of Gerzso’s film ca­reer. In Galindo’s Es­quina Ba­jan!, Gerzso has se­lected lo­ca­tions at the edges of the city. These scenes, shot in the new “frac­cionamien­tos”—land­scapes of empty lots and pris­tine streets await­ing houses—give the viewer a strong sense of the mod­ern­iza­tion

and ex­pan­sion of Mex­ico City in the late 1940’s. The fi­nal film in this se­ries, El Anal­fa­beto, di­rected by Miguel Del­gado and star­ring Can­ti­n­flas, was pro­duced in the same pe­riod as the Gerzso paint­ings on show in the ad­ja­cent in­stal­la­tion.

These paint­ings were cre­ated be­tween 1959 and 1961 af­ter a trip to Greece, as ev­i­denced by their ti­tles, which ref­er­ence Greek ge­o­graphic sites and mytho­log­i­cal char­ac­ters. It might be hard to find a con­nec­tion be­tween the films and the paint­ings, but I have “art di­rected” the in­stal­la­tion to evoke an in­te­rior ready for a film shoot, while also al­lud­ing to the type of habi­tat Gerzso’s paint­ings would have nat­u­rally resided in. This is, I be­lieve, how a view­ing of

the work of Gerzso would have taken place in the pri­vate rooms of the art col­lec­tor Car­rillo Gil.

Al­var Car­rillo Gil

The last artist I have de­cided to in­clude in this ex­hi­bi­tion is the en­tre­peneur, art col­lec­tor and painter Al­varo Car­rillo Gil. In pri­vate, the col­lec­tor was an avid painter, whose own works make up (…) per­cent of this col­lec­tion. In his own times, the painter Car­rillo Gil was dis­missed as a dilet­tante and in­ter­loper, but I think his work mer­its some study, not so much due to the in­ten­tions of the artist, but more for what it ex­presses of the cre­ative mind­set of his times. I think the key to look­ing at Car­rillo

Gil’s paint­ings is to con­sider the prints and re­pro­duc­tions he ac­quired of for­eign artists. His was a kind of pro­cess­ing prac­tice, in which we see the forms and ideas of Eu­ro­pean mas­ters like Klee and Pi­casso (of whom he col­lected hun­dreds of re­pro­duc­tions) di­gested and re-pre­sented in his can­vases. The work reads like a com­po­nent of a larger pro­cess­ing ma­chine for re­ceived ideas of Mod­ernism. Most Mex­i­can cul­ture is, of course gen­er­ated in­dige­nously, but there is also a strain of mid-20th Cen­tury art—and ar­chi­tec­ture—in which Eu­ro­pean ideas were im­ported, melted down and re­formed into a uniquely Mex­i­can prod­uct. I think the pri­vate paint­ing prac­tice of Car­rillo Gil ex­presses this quite neatly. I have cho­sen to show these paint­ings in a stu­dio-like dis­play to evoke a visit to the col­lec­tor’s own stu­dio dur­ing a tour of his home.

The pub­lic face of Car­rillo Gil is his pro­ject for the mu­seum in which you now stand. Any viewer to this ex­hi­bi­tion who has sus­pected a moral judge­ment in my con­trast be­tween the elite, pri­vate realm of Car­rillo Gil and the great pub­lic and pop­u­lar works of the painters dis­cussed so far, will now see the col­lec­tor re­deem him­self. For Car­rillo Gil did a re­mark­able thing and turned his pri­vate col­lec­tion into a pub­lic in­sti­tu­tion. Though the trans­fer of the col­lec­tion wasn’t as di­rect or al­tru­is­tic as I just made it sound*, the happy re­sult has been the ex­po­sure of these pri­vate works to the gen­eral pub­lic. As I men­tioned at the be­gin­ning of this text, the trans­fer of these paint­ings, orig­i­nally in­tended for pri­vate dis­play to the