Exhibit at the Amparo

(The photo is from the entry to the museum and does not do the murals nor the installation justice.)

I am in Mexico for a couple of days. Thursday night we had a great dinner after an opening at the Amparo Museum in Puebla. I did not get to go to the opening because we got caught in traffic but the dinner was great.

The Amparo is a small museum that has a reputation much larger than its size It has a wonderful collection of Mexican art but it also has a continuing series of other art that puts it in a small group of museums that look beyond their own genre.

The museum has two special exhibits both running through June. The first is a presentation of the Miguel Covarrubias murals about the Pacific Rim. Covarrubias, in some ways, is less famous than other Mexican painters of the time. In one sense that is because his work is considerably less political. He lived for several years in New York and was a key part of that city’s art scene for a decade or more. He did covers for the New Yorker and had commissions from several prominent industrialists. His scenes from Harlem are magnificent for their energy. A good deal of his work captures his times but it is also timeless.

I first saw his work in San Francisco. The 1939 Expo in San Francisco featured a series of murals done by him that depict various aspects of life in the Pacific Rim. After the exposition they were displayed in San Francisco until the late 1950s and then boxed up for storage. As I remember them in San Francisco they were displayed without a great deal of imagination. That is not true for the Amparo.

Since the paintings are about the Pacific Rim they have a lot of blue in them. The Amparo has chosen to display them on a blue wall. But they also use the space well. The interpretive text is presented as it were floating in the space. Each of the murals (there are ones on the people of the rim, their dwellings, the fauna and flora of the region, means of transportation, and the economy) is displayed in a way that gives the viewer a chance to see the scope of the individual work. The exhibit even includes a lithograph of one mural which was lost on forms of art. (After being exhibited in New York this mural was lost on a train while being transported back to California.)

The second artist is Jan Hendrix who is Dutch but lives in Mexico City. The title of this exhibit is called Storyboard. Hendrix’ work has an immense amount of depth. The signature work is 1976 postcard sized prints of various forms of nature. The prints are all in black and white and repeat in form, but Hendrix changes perspective and color (black and white to white and black) to offer variation. A second work which is quite interesting is mounted directly on the wall. It is a series of paper or wood cut outs arranged like a forest floor but contained in a natural frame. Like the other work, this one must have taken a very long time to mount. But Hendrix also works in metal and displays some quite striking examples of intricate patterns. The exhibit also presents some very modernist images in a high gloss finish as well as some striking large serigraphs on primitive paper.

There is a lot of abstract art which I find a bit too abstract. But Hendrix use of color and light and depth makes these works come alive.

The Amparo is one of those places that is worth going out of the way to see. It is an excellent and ground breaking museum.