Modern Mexican Art

Words and painting meet on the television screen to deliver an enriching vision of José Maria Velasco, the painter, and José Guadalupe Posada, the engraver. We also discover a great but little known portraitist, Hermenegildo Bustos, as Octavio Paz illuminates the creations of these masters of the nineteenth century. Velasco painted breathtaking scenes of South American landscape in a precise yet fresh style unique to himself. He captured the strong, expansive light of the continent, picking out trembling water, glittering grasses, radiant cloud. In contrast, Posada's engravings, executed for the press, captured and caricatured the personalities and political and social events of his day in a style somewhere between eighteenth-century political cartoons and Germanic Expressionism of the twentieth century. Bustos provides an equally fascinating chapter in the history of South American art. He was self-taught, close in some ways to the naïve painters of religious images in his culture, yet endowed with a gift that makes his portraits arresting and authentic.

© 1998-2001 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.