La Jornada: New permanent room on the 20th century opens in the Munal

With the aim of expanding the narrative about the art of our country between 1890 and 1950, as well as showing proposals less perceived since then, including work created in the entities of the Republic, the room Art and visuality in modern Mexico: Munal Siglo XX collection was inaugurated yesterday.

At the National Museum of Art (Munal), for the first time in seven years, there is “the opening of its 20th century rooms in a permanent exhibition.” This new tour could have some substitutions and the inclusion of pieces, and it is expected to do something similar with works from the 19th century and New Spain art, curator David Cáliz explained to The Day.

The more than 340 pieces, most of which belong to the venue’s collection, extend the reading to a diversity of creative languages ​​such as painting, photography, graphics, cinema and prints. Includes work by artists Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Tina Modotti, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Roberto Montenegro, Dr. Atl and Lola Cueto, among others.

Mireida Velázquez, director of the Munal, referred in a conference to the purpose of this initiative to “expand the traditional paradigm of the arts to recognize that other visual manifestations such as cinema, photography, engraving and illustrated magazines also built the visual imaginary of our country between 1890 and 1950.”

The exhibition, added the art historian, is organized with thematic axes that include the “cosmopolitan horizon of the Contemporaries; for example, the combative graphics of the Taller de Gráfica Popular against fascism and the visualities around the indigenous, the landscape and the dreamlike.”

Claiming the feminine gaze

He highlighted the main objective of settling an outstanding debt with female artists so that “they have broader visibility in our journey,” creators who “actively participated in the definition of the visual, political and affective languages ​​of Mexican modernity.”

In her speech, Claudia Curiel, head of the federal Ministry of Culture, mentioned that the commitment is to once again value the collections of the museums that are in charge of the agency: “research, rethink and ask them new questions so that recent generations can get closer to something that perhaps is already natural for us.”

He added that it is not about reorganizing the rooms by disciplines, era, authors or theme, but about assuming “the questions of how we have told the history of Mexican art, what practices we placed at the center, what it has to do with the moment in which you look at it, what languages ​​were left in the background and what creators should be looked at.”

The room is divided into nine thematic sections: continuities and ruptures inherited from the 11th century; the break with the Academy and its teaching methods; the importance of artistic education in the post-revolution; the presence of native communities in visual culture; the recovery of popular arts; Estridentismo, the performing arts and the Contemporáneos group; the representations of modern cities, the landscape and, finally, the disenchantments of modernity in various artists.

In his turn, David Cáliz mentioned that it is essential to give space “to narratives that have been erased or marginalized by the hegemonic aesthetics of the moment and also understand that the 20th century was a crucible of multiple aesthetic sensibilities.”

He emphasized that it is “a feat to be able to have this collection” and that after seven years without presenting a renewal, it is reopened to the public.

The curator explained that the museum proposal appreciates modern art as something in which “things overlap as if it were a palimpsest, that ancient document in which someone else writes on top and gains another meaning; therefore, we cannot understand María Izquierdo without visiting the popular arts and without seeing the painters of the 19th century.”