For more than fifty years, Mexican artists toiled in the shadow of revolution. So, too, does the Met with “Mexican Prints at the Vanguard,” through January 5.
The Mexican Revolution took ten long years, starting in 1910, but artists before it could see it coming in all its violence. Well after, it served as a model and a call for change. To the left, and there were many on the left, it served as a cry to support for other revolutions, in Russia and Spain. Later still, it served as a bitter memory, as a government dedicated to remaking the country and the world gave way to yet another dictator. Could, though, the cries put Mexico at the vanguard of twentieth-century art? Perhaps, but only by remaining in the trenches.
“Mexican Prints” is thoroughly out of fashion, which is to say seriously modern. These days, a proper Mexican revolution would be a cultural revolution, with women in the vanguard, like Amalia Mesa-Bains recently at El Museo del Barrio, and Mexican tradition their passion. The Met ends in 1955 as if to avoid all that. References to Pre-Colombian art do appear in square-jawed heads, but not often, and figures costumed for a carnival come only at the end, with Carlos Mérida, as one of the few spots of color. But then Mérida also produced an abstract composition, give or take a bird. Frida Kahlo, in native costume as a woman’s act of defiance, does not appear at all.
The curator, Mark McDonald, starts in the 1700s, but not with native tradition. He looks instead to Europe, much like a past show of “Painted in Mexico.” Later, Tina Modotti will depict soldiers with a debt to Baroque paintings of a Madonna rising. In between, artists turned to the satire of Honoré Daumier. But this was always art as illustration, in service to a cause. Text can overwhelm images. Tracts and newsletters precede starker lithographs by David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Of course, Siqueiros was also a muralist, and the show runs in parallel with Mexican murals. Diego Rivera, turns up a print after one of his most famous. Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary, stands beside his horse. Rivera came to New York as well, for a show of his work at MoMA. José Clemente Orozco came as well, too, with a print of a vaudeville act in Harlem. Here or in Mexico, change was in the air.
Mexican prints first entered the museum’s collection at the instigation of a French artist, Jean Charlot, who moved to New York in 1928. He contributes a woodcut of Rich People in Hell. Others, too, adopted woodcuts for their jagged edges, with praise for Lenin and Stalin as the bombs fall. Siqueiros himself depicts a Trinity of Scoundrels. This is art and ideology in black and white. After the revolution, the new regime sponsored arts education. As that became a tool for state propaganda, 
Taller de Gráfica Popular (or Graphics Workshop for the People), took up the slack.
Still, something sets Mexican prints apart from Europe and America—and from their own easy answers: revolution comes at a cost, and death enters even in triumph. Zapata looks humble and heroic enough, but he stands astride a dead body. Rufino Tamayo pictures a native couple as heros, but they might be confronting hills on fire. Alfredo Zalce sees the Yucatan, a target of agrarian reform, as a paradise. Yet his figures struggle with the overgrowth.
Death enters even before the revolution. Celebrated in his time, José Guadalupe Posada continued the tradition of pages dense with text. Couples embrace, but “death is inexorable,” and wooers, bikers, and angels alike are skeletons. So is the “people’s editor.” Less well known, Emilio Amero stands apart in 1930 with a clock and telephone in Surrealism’s ghostly light. This is modernity, and art is in the vanguard, but it might end in darkness.