Idols Behind Altars: Modern Mexican Art and Its Cultural Roots

by Anita Brenner

Art critic, historian and journalist Anita Brenner (1905-1974) is acknowledged to be one of the most important and perceptive writers on the art, culture, and political history of Mexico. Idols Behind Altars is her influential historical and critical study of modern Mexican art and its roots. It was one of the first books to afford Mexican art the same serious considerations as European and Asian art and remains indispensable for anyone interested in the subject. The works of such major figures as Diego Rivera, Jóse Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Francisco Goitia and Jean Charlot are examined in the cultural context of pre-Columbian times through the 19th century. Brenner's astute analysis of Mexican history, her keen insights into revolutionary politics, and her passionate advocacy of Mexican art infuse this book with seminal importance. 117 illustrations — including some early photographs by Edward Weston — enhance the text.

Genres: Art, History

432 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1929

Reviews

[Miguel Soto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Luego de leer algunos aspectos de su biografía, quedé picado de curiosidad por saber algo más acerca de Anita Brenner, o mejor dicho, de su obra como tal. Me dirigí a este libro que es un gran recorrido histórico y antropológico por la cultura mexicana y especialmente por sus valores estéticos. El libro se lee bastante bien y aunque no es exhaustivo, sí permite una visión muy amplia de sus contenidos: desde los mitos prehispánicos y cómo la conquista vino a encarnarlos, transformando los valores religiosos y permitiendo que comenzara la estética de los "ídolos tras los altares", hasta la época más reciente (del momento del libro), en que los muralistas mexicanos comenzaban a hacer de las suyas, pasando por el virreinato, la revolución, Posada, Manilla, y otros muchos artistas anónimos.

Todo el recorrido vale la pena, pero especialmente me gusto tener esta visión de los muralistas en su momento "inicial", cuando todavía no eran los artistas consagrados, los nuevos ídolos artísticos tras los altares patrios que nos enseñan en la primaria, sino verdaderos obreros de la pintura, con jornal, contrato y condiciones establecidas, y me deja reflexionando sobre cómo alguien pasa de "discutido" a "ícono nacional".

Cuenta también con varios juegos de láminas ilustrativas, principalmente fotos de obra -tengo entendido que captadas en su mayoría por Tina Modotti-, que hubieran sido magníficas si vinieran en color.

[Hana Vizcarra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anita Brenner's look at Mexican art throughout history is a must-read for any student of Mexican art. Her poetic description of art and culture is a window into the post-revolutionary period of the 1920s which has since defined so much of the nation's self-identity. Her writings helped popularize the Mexican muralists in the U.S. and elsewhere. She chronicled the rise of these giants and the larger artistic and ideological world they walked in, contributing to the new definition of what it meant to be "Mexican". Brenner had a significant hand in defining the Mexican Renaissance.

[Kerfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brenner writes beautifully and poetically about the cultural history of Mexico, and how the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors and priests changed the outer lives of the native peoples without at the same time reconstructing the core of their spiritual beliefs. They assimilated Spanish culture into their own, and remade the symbols of the Catholic Church to blend with their gods and ancestral mythology. The conversion was not towards the imported ideals, but a reflection to hold inside. Their masks remained.

When the author gets to 19th and 20th century Mexican artists and attempts to tie them into this heritage, however, she seems to get lost. Perhaps she cannot get enough distance to make the proper connections, or she tries too hard to find likeness in gestures that are really not the same at all. The influence is definitely there, but she forces a structure on these contemporary visions. They are not hiding their truths behind any imposed ritual; they are finding their own. And by idealizing the native, the peasant, she actually ends up demeaning the continued integrity and complexity of native lives.

Read parts one and two, and skip the rest.

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published in 1929, anthropologist Anita Brenner has given us an incredibly interesting work. She traces Mexican history from the pre-Columbian era up to the modern, treating Mexican culture as a continuum. Within this continuum she establishes a distinct Mexican character which, post-revolution, produced the unique flavor of Mexican modern art.

Brenner's life was itself incredibly interesting—born in 1905 in Aguascalientes, her parents were Jewish emigrants from Latvia. At age ten during the height of the Mexican Revolution, Brenner writes in the book about when Pancho Villa's army camped in town:

They camped in front of our house, a soldier to a tree. His woman unrolled the blankets and spread a petate on the roots, drove nails into the trunk for hats and dug out a niche for an image. If you adventurously walked the avenue you had to be careful or you'd step on somebody's baby and dive into somebody's stew

And of this small encounter she shares quite a few fascinating anecdotes:

A former groom, tired of being Carranzista, came home with wornout sandals and many scraps of white damask from rifled churches, to make new baby-clothes for the Infant Christ, he said. He had tales of how the women danced to the Cucaracha, that mad chant, with their mouths open and their skirts pulled up on their legs, after a battle yelping:

The little cockroach, the little cockroach
Will not travel any more, 
Because it wants some, because it has no 
Marihuana smoke to blow!

They would carry gilded chairs and parrots plundered from mansions, on their horses, and tire of the chairs and use them for firewood, as if they had been pianos or big altar-pieces.

Also of note this was right before Villa's first loss in battle, one of the most momentous periods of the whole revolution:

Buckets of filth showered heavily from the hospital windows, making little hills of dark stained cotton below them. Voices following the filth, calling to Jesus to let them die. From the hospital, meeting the belt of stretchers, a shifting line of coffins, a black ribbon hung on the day.

Villa had lost. That night he shuffled and bugled his army away. Then the jigging sound of the Cucaracha, smells of burning, and shadows—hardly more sensed than shadows—of bodies gibbeted on trees...

At age eleven her father moved the family to Texas to get away from the Revolution. Due to the generally antisemitic atmosphere of Texas at the time, Brenner persuaded her father to allow her to move back to stay with family friends in the Jewish community of Mexico City at age eighteen. By twenty two she emigrated back to the US to study at Columbia, and two years later she published this work. (She moved permanently back to Aguascalientes in 1940).

In 1929 the fires of the revolution had been extinguished for less than a decade. It was still very much in the dense atmosphere of the day, and Brenner had been soaking in that atmosphere since she returned in 1923, particularly in the cultural areas where the revolution had somewhat continued, such as in artistic practice. On this last point, Brenner gives a lot of history around how Mexican modern art took shape:

The return to native values, spiritual and artistic, which is a simplified description of modern Mexican art, in the case of the founders of this new tradition often occurred by way of modern European art. The gesture is very close to rejection of European values, very near to the violence of junking absentee landlordship. Fundamentally, however, the feeling that the artist be also a person with a definite social attitude, a consciousness that must determine his choices in daily life and in his work; and the search for structural values, and simplification, might be seen as derivations in Mexico, as also in Europe, of a mood more than local.

Some of the artists in particular were quite sharp in their attitude towards their international colleagues:

David Alfaro Siqueiros when he ruminated in Spain startled those of his friends who did not laugh with the doctrine that has become prime credo in modern Mexico æsthetic. The subject, he said, was as important as the style. The picture must derive emotion, design, construction, and colour, from the model. The model must not be chosen arbitrarily to demonstrate artistic gymnastics. This was the practice of most of his European contemporaries, he said, and this was the sterile behaviour of pedants, prima donnas and dilettantes.

In the end I found this a fair point, and overall was quite taken with how Mexican history, culture, and the moment of great revolutionary transformation combined to generate such a distinct and impressive movement in art. Personally, Mexican modernism is among my favorite forms and, written from the center of what Brenner named the "Mexican Renaissance," I can't think of what could be better contextualization than what she wrote.

[Annette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great reprint. I live in Southern California, so many Hispanics I meet on the OC Bus Lines fit into the art and culture of this book. Brings home ideas I do not see in the media.
Artists to of importance Jose Clemente Arojo.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't think of another work that resonates so clearly so long after it was written (in the 1920's). I found Anita Brenner's reflections on the Mexican people and the art of the Vanguardistas both poetic and illuminating. I found it valuable as a traveler and art historian.

[Anita Brenner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Likewise. I did not write this book. The other Anita Brenner was a great commentator and writer.