Good evening, everyone.
This week and talk about monuments and ruins, surrealism and Ortho's in the new world that is in the Americas and starting with the other side,
which in a sense is, well, I'm not going to be talking about this is on the left.
So cheque move at the bottom sculpture from the Toltec city of Tula.
And above it, a fragment of one of the serpent walls from Tula.
And beside that, Henry Moors reclining nude from 1929 at Leeds City Art Gallery.
And of course, he famously based that reclining figure on a chat room that is in the British Museum,
which is obviously not the one to love, is very similar to it.
That is a figure lying on its back, clasping something on its front.
Well, this is very interesting. This is this is in a way, not actually the kind of thing I'm going to be addressing today,
but I want to make it my starting point in a slightly negative way.
William Rubin organised an exhibition for Primitivism in 20th Century Art in 1984.
This is a monumental and stunning exhibition visually,
but it was quite controversial in its approach to the problem of what constitutes the primitive, what constitutes the primitive.
It inspired the primitivism of the 20th century artists. Now, in an effort to enforce a stylistic coherence to this slippery and value laden term,
Rubin decided to distinguish what he called pre Columbian court styles such as the Aztec,
Olmec and Inka from tribal art that is African, Estonian, northwest coast of America, Eskimo and son.
And I quote in their style, character and implications,
the pre Colombian court and theocratic arts of Mesoamerica and South America should be grouped with the Egyptian, Javanese and Persian.
They could no longer, in his view, be called primitive, although, of course, they had been in the 19th century.
So this led to an exclusion in his catalogue of, for example,
a discussion of Henry Mors transformation of the Toltec Chapel in his replanning figures.
And that only Rosalind Krauss in the exhibition catalogue defined the interdiction not to talk about pre Columbian
civilisations and thoroughly discuss Giacometti in relation to Mesoamerican art and to baptise ideas of the primitive.
Well,
I'm not primarily concerned with the formal borrowing's and the visible affinities between the modern on the non smartest and fascinating as it is,
but rather with the critical movement of thought in the context of surrealism that place new vang's on non Western societies.
This took different forms from aesthetic appreciation of the objects right through to the scholarly
research into the art and literature of the lost civilisations of the Americas and the Somalis themselves.
Of course, no notice of the end of the art of the distinction that Rubin draws between the people, I mean civilisations and tribal art.
And they were just as interested in Greek statues like this Aztec Corke heatwave, which I shall come back to again,
as in the mosques of the northwest coast with the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
Many of the surrealists went as refugees to America.
Lettow Arnst Matter and Duchamp's to New York Pepé Remedial Svara, Wolfgang Aleece Palin, Elenora Carrington, amongst others to Mexico.
And this led to an intensification of their interest in a knowledge of the indigenous and pre Colombian civilisations as well as their acquisitions.
And I want to divide this talking to into two parts.
First part I'm just going to be looking at quite broadly at their what what they exhibited and what they acquired in the 20s and 30s.
And then I'm going to be looking at the wartime experience in 1940s and there would be a brief interlude in the middle on European ruins.
In the first sort of manifesto on rebuttal comes up a place where he and his friends live and work, a castle which is not necessarily all in ruins.
The snow never made a secret of that taste. The darker side of romanticism for the Gothic.
It's uncanny for past where the marvellous took different forms and where past and present come together in a flash.
And I'm I'm just I want to look briefly at this collage by Max Ernst as an example of the dissolution of of of historical periods,
the appearance of the Sphinx beside a railway carriage with the bird headed man in it.
It's an extraordinary collage made a 19th century engravings. An artist also frequently included Easter Island statues in his collages.
And I quote from Britain's preface to Max Spense La Femme Soffit.
He describes arts colleges as veritable slits in time, space, customs and even beliefs.
History itself, he writes, falls outside like snow.
Do leaks the disorientation displacements produced by Anse magnificently haunted brain.
Amongst other things, dispatches. And he says that in order to be truly displaced, the statue had to have once lived.
The conventional statue like statue life and a conventional statue place.
So the artists treated, treated the past and treated other civilisations with great freedom at the same time.
The surrealist poets and writers very often did considerable research on to the
myths and on to the the the societies and cultures of quicklime in America.
One of the very early exhibitions at the gallery Sue at East in Paris in 1927, opened in 1925,
was of Itogi and American objects and one of the sculptures reproduced, which is the catalogue, and that was on show.
There is a version of the Carkeek way.
Let's give them a different name. Karriem Meechie. But you can see it is based on the same form,
which is it's based on an accumulation of ideas associated with a particular deity, the called Earth Goddess.
She had the seventh cert and the figure is wearing a sentence that she is wearing a mix of hands and hearts.
The centre there, as you can see in the skull and the head, is two serpents which rise out of the neck.
And in a sense, the sculpture will see it in more detail.
Little is wrong is is actually incorporating several aspects of the myth of the birth of the Aztec board, which is the push.
Now, there were other objects there in British Columbia, New Mexico, Mexico, Colombia and Peru from the smallest collections.
It's interesting to look at the 20. This is an example of the 1927 Pogi world at large painting, which is also a landscape.
I don't think the surrealists were trying to make any particular connexions,
but they were talking really about about the imagination and the potential to create new landscapes like these strange landscapes of tongas,
which are very often unclear about whether you are underwater or whether that whether there is a division between the different elements,
between the sky and of water and the creatures in them, which often cast shadows or incense themselves and invented objects.
The 1931 there was a very large sale of the collections of little and anywhere not.
And this was the same year as the enormous colonial exhibition in Paris.
Now, the surrealists were involved with the French Communist Party in mounting a campaign against the Clinton exhibition.
They distributed to attract or visit the permanent exhibition.
But at the same time, I think I'm afraid they did take advantage of the interest to so that collections.
And here we see on the left some of the Haida masks from Britain's collection.
Other objects from the north west coast and on the right's right hand page.
Top left.
It's not very easy to see, but it's a tiny little Omec figure that is from one of the earliest of the civilisations on the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
There's also a Costa Rican figure and there's other things that there were over 300 objects in this cell in 1931,
so had been collecting very, very actively for the previous five or six years.
And the the anticolonial demonstration took place.
It was those a pamphlet. There was also an exhibition of which these two photographs are taken, which attempt,
in a sense, to to reverse the notion of the fetish of the colonial colonial culture.
That that was being celebrated in the big exhibition and it was attacking French federal policy and also in the sense of,
say, reversing the gaze and labelling European products like the virgin and child in the left hand side as European fetishes.
And there's of a lot of people that oppresses others.
The matter itself, the freedom and the mystery is very, very active in their political opposition to French colonial policy.
Now, the first major exhibition of pre Columbian art in Paris took place in 1928.
Accompanied by a flurry of publications, including this one.
It's a special issue edition of the CIA, which anticipates with with an essay by George Bettye called Lenna Dispell,
who vanished except America and I quote, The life of the civilised peoples of America before Columbus is prodigious for never anywhere.
Unglue has a bloody eccentricity being devised by human madness.
Bettye notes that historians have been struck by the hideous and grotesque forms taken by gods
like [INAUDIBLE] Kathy Poca and without a disconcerted Bettye detected as well as the terror,
a kind of black humour. This is Cathy Poker from the Borgia speedboat.
And he is.
All well, a tick, tick, tick.
The intellectual lecture that he is entirely surrounded by, the 20 signs which constitute the calendar and other forms of counting.
In Mexico, it's a very complicated, extremely, extremely fine page from one of the very few surviving screen phones in Mexico.
So that's how he was hypnotised by pop sacrifice and by the joyful celebration of death in a city, as he says, as beautiful as Venice.
Its authors covered in flowers. But I dismisses both romantic admiration for the formula, aesthetic brilliance and originality of comfort,
civilisation's and nerveless ethnographic studies in favour of the recreation
of a violent world in which horror played an astonishingly cheerful character.
And I quote, Mexico is not only the most flowing of human abattoirs, but also rich city,
a veritable Venice with canals, painted temples and very beautiful flower gardens.
So the artistic capital, Tenochtitlan, combines slaughterhouse and flowery luxury.
It is not difficult to see here the Origin Bhatti's document dictionary entry,
an abattoir in which he contrasts the original temples of all religions, really as places which with sacrifices.
So both killing and religious ritual. And he contrasts that with the contemporary fear of blood and violence and
the way that present day abattoirs a quarantine well away from city centres.
Not only that, for the Aztecs able to confront death with joy, but xed it all time a spectacle for the pleasure of their gods, such as Kathy Pooper.
And this is a page from another scream whose compas vote but which was reproduced in the magazine Denge I should come back to.
And it shows a victim of heart sacrifice.
Lying overboard is actually a peace sign that this is the kind of thing that I was talking about.
But Amy suggests that the Arctic succumbs so swiftly to the Spanish conquest
because it was like the final act of this repeated sacrificial performance.
Now, his essay clearly has more to do with Betty's own state of mind,
with the struggle of a religious sensibility in a godless world than with any historical accuracy.
He was enthralled as well as repelled by the hard sacrifices and following the document,
period actually formed a small group around the world who SFL, which discussed the possibility of sacrifice in the modern world.
Recently, though, that House article belongs to the debate at the time amongst archaeologists and ethnologists
around the question of the extinction or survival of pre Colombian civilisations.
And I just want to refer to another essay from the same from the Senate issue of Kaixi by Alfred Mittel, who a very distinguished ethnographer.
But at this time, 1928 was was in his early 20s.
But he lays out this question very succinctly and I quote, The destruction of the former American civilisations was rapid and brutal.
But in many respects, parfum, the Spanish wiped out the ruling classes, exterminated the clergy, destroyed the towns and temples,
the manuscripts, and broke the ideas that the American earth has preserved the pottery, cloth, art objects and simple tools.
Most beautiful buildings have survived, though derelict,
and they resisted earthquakes as archaeological studies develop and these remains accumulate in museums.
The day will come when they would allow us to reconstruct the early history of the American continent.
Perhaps he would also be able to penetrate, which is still mysterious about the flowering of the great empires of Mexico,
Central America and the Andes, and the conditions for the study of the American past.
Mitra wrote Better the European prehistory. The ruins of the great civilisations were still inhabited less than 400 years ago.
There's a vast literature in Spanish and even the books of the Mexicans and Maya.
The Mexican books are in the process of being deciphered, but so far all attempts to read them on Harrogate's have been in vain.
What he's writing in 28, when I first started working on pre-K Lambin often teaching Knesset's,
which is back in the early seventies, there was still, in theory, parfum, one edge of my unhurriedly writing.
I kept this page up because I left. There is a drawing of.
One of the mines stelae showing a block of hieroglyphs done right hand side and at the top, and now they are almost completely deciphered.
And as a result, our picture of mine, civilisation of the classic man's civilisation of the first millennium has completely transformed.
We even have the names of artists. We have the names of the rulers. We have details of the of the governance in a sense of hope in my area.
So it's the whole the whole picture in that sense, which Metal foresaw has has indeed hasn't been transformed by by reception.
Actually, the Mexican only four of the books, the codices,
the painted books with the inscriptions have survived out of libraries and libraries of mine books.
And very, very few also of the Mexican books have survived.
And they're actually proving in some ways more difficult to decipher than than the Mayan.
And what about today's inhabitants of America? They're about to move to, again, quoting, little people usually think they disappeared,
exterminated by the Spaniards or absorbed in the new race formed after the conquest.
Nothing, he says, could be further from the truth. There are still Aztecs, Maya and Peruvians who speak.
The language is that their ancestors for the surrealists and the ethnologists and historians in the 20s and 30s.
The question of continuity from the apparently lost civilisations of the Americas and the present day inhabitants was absorbing possibility,
a move that informed both the archival research of Benjamin Pay and the wilder romantic ideals of Benjamin after and after and after.
By this point had really sit with the surrealists, but who always remained in on the fringes of the movement.
He arrived in Mexico in February 1936 and in July he wrote a Mexican newspaper, al-Nasser Now.
So I have my idea of the Mayan culture. But Toltec culture, the Zapotec culture.
What interests me now is to find again in Mexico today the lost soul of those cultures
and their survival as much in the way of life of the people as if those who govern.
While I was in Mexico City, after I wrote a lecture to earn some money, he was actually extremely poor.
And he met the painter Maria Iskander, who used to feed him and whose work he then championed.
And this is her flush called Allegory of Work.
1936. Now, commentators have been quick to emphasise Auto's disappointment at finding only the cause of European culture, Mexico.
But this wasn't quite the whole story. Writing about his KEDO in August 1936.
His desire to find the lost Indian so colours his understand he was scared, his paintings.
He was yet to make his fateful visit to the land. The Tarahumara is and to experience the peyote ceremony.
There's still controversy about whether he actually did or whether he took his description of it from another ethnographer.
But he certainly went to the Tarahumara. And he wrote a book called The Voyage The Thai Romanos.
So he came to Mexico in search of indigenous art. He thought that rather than witnessing the resurrection old world,
he was seeing its final end or he found imitations of European up with one exception,
the painting of Maria Escoto, which has a truly Indian inspiration.
But her painting, although spontaneous, he says, is not pure.
It's often influenced also by Europe. The modernity and I think you can very clearly see here that she has been very interested in
William Blake and she's so borrows these great striding legs from from Blake's watercolours.
And the reference, I think, to a cosmos that the ruins and the volcanoes and the woman that suddenly after thought belonged very much to Mexico.
He was deeply moved to encounter, as he put it, naked indigenous figures trembling amongst the ruins.
They were performing a kind of dance of the ghosts, ghosts of a life that disappeared, and then someone exploring,
reading one of her paintings in which an ancient symbol of speech is made to cancel out the modern mechanical world.
And just to try to show you, I mean, this is a little bit you'll see that this is a fragment from a mural painting it to through AKAM,
probably from the second or third century A.D. Now,
the point is that the little figures who are dancing about and possibly aiming for the
paradise have scrolls coming out of their mouths which indicate speech or song or prayer.
The mission. And so this is in black and white, but I don't have a kind of side of it.
So this this throughout central Mexico going back nearly 2000 years, war paintings of terror to a calm and continuing animistic monastic.
Scheinfeld is the sign of speech or song was was a curve Sacro issuing from the mouth.
An artist sees this sign transformed in his head is Knewton violin.
He sees it in the smoke, out of the chimneys here.
And I quote,
An Indian dude sings before an open window and the clouds of smoke from a nearby factory rise in spirals as if they were coming from the mouth.
These votes are respiration itself, the living breath of the singer.
But the canvas draws in a double idea.
Murray is ghetto's uses these clouds of smoke that symbolise machine civilisation of Europe as if she would like to cancel them out.
She doesn't necessarily. Alter says Klimt saw this for herself.
But the spirit of the Indian race speaks through her. And I think what Michael might link this to D.H. Lawrence writing in in very romantic
terms about some revival of some of the native of the native chief in Mexico.
Octavio Paz described my scareder as being looking something like a pre Hispanic goddess.
And she didn't she didn't object to that or torture. Very happy to be identified with with the indigenous cultures.
I'm just showing you this to perhaps to emphasise the Navy SEAL.
Clearly, the scrolls come out of the mouths and monocles codex.
Now and Escoto went on to have a very successful career.
This is a typical painting of hers in which she combines still life and landscape to see the ruins of of a Mexican town,
very typical of the postrevolutionary period. These these blank minus Dallas walls, contrasting with the extraordinary richness of the oak,
the squashes and the angst and the fish in the foreground. She always wanted to have a career as a muralist, but that failed.
Though she was a she was a feisty person. And she she she attempted several times to get no permissions.
But I think she's an extremely interesting painter and needs really more more work.
Come on now. I'm having to start shifting to the wartime period.
And I want to talk briefly, more generally about ruins, starting with this extraordinary essay by Benjamin Pepé called Ruinous Ruin Ruins.
This appeared in the final issue of the socialist journal Minotaur in Paris in 1939.
The same issue as a blowtorch as souvenir Dimmick Seek and Seligman's conversation assume.
And there's a real sense of the impending cataclysm in Europe of the inevitability of the war was about to come.
And Perry talks about different types of ruins.
He uses his point inspired by two things by the photograph here by Alvarez Bravo of a Mexican ruin,
an extraordinary photograph which and which turns the women arch into into a dog.
But he was also inspired by it, by photographs, fossil fossilised photographs by phone who back up the ruins that Perry reproduces.
There are all of mediaeval structures or that all the Mexican ones except for the photographs.
You back. And he talks about mediaeval ruins as about one set of ruins to the wiping out another to the ruins of the mediaeval ruins.
Former kind of lava over ruins.
He completely ignores what we Patronus familiar with in terms of celebrations of ruins from the 17th to the 18th century,
such as Pyrenees, his views of Rome. There's nothing of that kind. There's nothing classical at all in this article.
And he he ends his hat, his article by musing on what kind of spectacle the ruins of old modernity,
born of enlightenment in the French Revolution will leave for the future. And I quote him, the world through their side.
The common ditch is sugo to disappear in its term. What ruins would it leave?
The exploitation of poets from another age?
Now, the churches that have survived the past only is the complement of prisons or the banks without which neither the formal survived.
But perhaps one day they will find again when its memory would have been effaced from human recall.
The gigantic fossil of a unique animal life would have perhaps some great station long deserted,
will see its rails covered in buttercups and has lived in their burrows, will seek a home in the abandoned booking office, perhaps to the gorge.
Bethlehem, the river reclaiming its rights, will traverse the opera from wings to entrance,
bloated with crests and Arrison crosshatch Kingfisher's and the A Bible walks along.
Its seeking a forward catching sight of this ruin, bristling with brambles and chirping birds.
We'll remember that once upon a time they performed silly things that luxuries addressed dead.
And we'll say What a lovely spring the opera is in flower as never before.
And these extraordinary photographs of fossil buildings. This is the opera.
The previous one is the Eiffel Tower button back. We made by a process called inversion and montage inversion,
and the negative is placed on its transparency while continuously maintaining a slight
shifting between the two plates so as to obtain the impression of slight relief,
giving the print the appearance of an impress.
So there's a kind of fossils of future fossils of buildings, and in a sense, the ruin of the building is matched by the ruling.
The photograph, the destruction, the photograph.
And I think there is a very interesting study to be made of of ruins and the medium in a particularly amongst surrealist artists.
Britain linked by the book, the ruins that are overgrown ruins that are beginning to sink into nature.
One example for the tomb of of convulsive beauty and I put up here a quotation from Beauty will be convulsive from Minitel,
the word convulsive, which had used to qualify. The only beauty, in my opinion,
has any point which is all meaningful me where it conceived within movement rather than at the precise expiration of that movement.
There can be no beauty, convulsive beauty except in the affirmation of the reciprocal relationship that links the object in question,
in movement and at rest. I'm sorry I couldn't use his illustration.
The glorious photograph of a locomotive that had been abandoned for years. The delirium of the virgin forest.
It seems to me that the magical aspect of this monument of victory into disaster could have clarified this idea.
This is a photograph that he was that he'd been hoping to use, which never again used to illustrate.
His essay called Nature Devours Progress and as it well goes beyond it.
And this is the locomotive that was abandoned to the virgin forest.
And I think this is another important side of the fact that the surrealists romanticism was the,
in a sense, watching, watching progress visibly decay.
And I think it's it's interesting to link that to paintings by Max Ennis from the late 20s and early 30s, like this one for the entire city,
in which it seems like Beck's process of the traffic inversion, which produces suus fossils,
but it's similarly, as it were, destroys something which has been there before.
This is a painting using a car technique that is heat spread,
a canvas with oil paint needed over a textured surface, and then scraped the paint off, producing what he could get.
Cash and images like this one, which some look partly like a ruined city,
putting like rocks and the vegetation, the foreground, as with a locomotive in.
That seems to be growing over it. And I think that.
So the notion the room is is somehow inscribed through so many so many surrealist works,
both at the end of the ring were in ruins and bluffton's s.a of souvenir in Mexico when the final issue of mine at all.
In addition to the cover, which is by Andrei Muscle,
which shows you another sort of parfum ruin and labyrinth, which is within the head of the Minotaur.
And this is the we're going back to the Koiki play that I mentioned at the beginning,
which you saw in a in a small version in one of the early surrealist exhibitions, like I saw this when he visited Mexico.
He probably saw it just going to it for a long time.
It was. This is 1885. This is when it was installed outside in the garden of the museum.
And here it is in this in the cellar of monoliths, where it was until about nineteen thirty nine.
So poss probably he saw it here. You can see it from the back view.
In this case, if you look at the head, you can see that the head is the same in the front in the back and the head there.
There's a skull fast. The southern belt of the back.
And then there's a tail down the back of it.
And here you see more clearly what I was talking about in relation to the first one with the NICUs of hands and hearts.
The gap in the middle of the chest where the heart has been removed. And this quite Lakeway.
This, this, this this goddess is not really a single goddess.
It's a whole set of ideas and a complete myth. She put that in a sense she she encompasses.
She was the mother of Whitsun and possibly a very interesting.
Another example of parthenogenetic birth. She can see from born feathers that that that appeared in her in her breast one day.
And she gave birth to two possibly, who was often associated with the eagle as a son.
God. And you can see at the base of the statue, you will see Eagle's claws.
So it it encompasses the whole myth. And this is what what I actually took some souvenir of Mexico because she
quickly understood that it was not just it's not an effigy of a single thing,
a figure. It is a complete compilation of miss.
Cities like Teotihuacan, which have also visited in ruins,
were once thought just to be richel cities and it's now known that they were actually large, thriving urban districts say up to this point.
But that is an example of what we're doing because of the court society of the era.
And the service really took no notice at all of that distinction between the high civilisations and the tribal, so-called tribal areas.
We're just as interested in both.
This is Seligman's article, a conversation that's in Shahn, since Young is one of the groups in the northwest coast of Canada.
And you can see on the right hand side of the photograph on the left,
you got a bit of one of the cemeteries in the cemetery and on the right, a totem pole that has been abandoned and overgrown.
And again, this is this is an example of the ruin of a room.
The roots and mixed good in New York were actually engaged in quite active ethnographic energy research.
Pele himself was the first to publish a French translation of the Mayan book The Chilean Chimayo in 1955.
And this is a small. So I did think it's it's not his translation.
It's I think it's very interesting that he was concerned with literatures, all stories from the entire continent.
By contrast with Claude Libbey, Strauss, who was only interested in mosques that came from the long literate,
as it were, those those cultures without writing, without literature.
He was interested in both. So he was concerned not with the violent past of America, but its literature and poetry.
So much of which had been lost. And so the continued presence of indigenous peoples.
He spent years gathering material for his anthology, Myths and Legends of America, Mutilation and Dennehy.
And his letters from the 40s are many collections begging people to send him material that he wrote to his father in Lima,
for example, saying, please send me some of the stories from the income Priyanka Past.
This book was finally published the year he died in 1959,
but his introduction that in Mexico was published by the surrealists under the title that pedal it up.
It's up to Peter to speak in New York. In 1943, it was considered an essay of central theoretical importance.
And there's a double interest in the anthology, which Peter explains,
and I quote from the beginning of the of the introduction, This anthology has as its ambition to represent in its totality.
So it has no this thought. He has no ambitions to sentence, to tell Kitty the literary,
primitive and popular production of the American peoples from pre-K Lumbee in times to the present.
It only wants to present as gripping an image as possible of the poetic work of these peoples
by revealing the most characteristic text dispersed amongst the chronicles of the conquerors,
travellers and missionaries on the one hand, and then the work of ethnologists and folklorists on the other.
There was no intention of trampling on the domain of the ethnographer because the only criterion that is govern the choice of text.
This anthology is that of poetry, and this murder selection shows clearly that poetic thought has been present since the dawn of humanity.
Birds fly. Fish swim. A man invents for a loon in nature.
He is gifted with an imagination, always alert, always stimulated by constantly renewed needs.
So he talks about the way it's the human imagination that is constructed, the great collective myths of the past in all kinds of different religious,
technological and social conditions in societies, nomadic, hunter gatherer and agricultural and and pet.
His other theme is the absence of myth in the contemporary world and the miserable existence to which the mass of the population is reduced today.
Remote from any poetic thought, although the need for poetry is still latent.
And I think that this the notion that there might be a new myth information is something that grips.
The surrealists, both as in New York, who were writing in the magazine, V.V. and those in Mexico.
This is one of the mosques that was in on Britain's selection from the northwest coast.
It's it's it's truly a combination of a face and fish.
It might be it might have a sort of shamanic meaning.
Many of the mosques did. That is they referred to a particular relationship between man and animal that the man could
take on some of the of the par and the the potential of an animal could move move between them.
Very often the mosques have to do with with asking for help.
The hunting, help with fishing. It's a it's a but it's what is not yet known.
McCabe only and the other one of the other areas that this food is collected.
Well, the Katrina dolls from the south southern United States, from the hoopy areas, New Mexico.
This is one of them. This belonged to Max Elst, I think, and photographed by Bernice Abbott.
And this is one from Purple's collection with a postcard on the right hand side
with a key to the two to the symbols that are painted on the Katrina dolls.
And he he was interested to find out more about them.
He was just so dazzled by them, by the extraordinary evidence of the of the human imagination in Mexico.
Often Palin, who also moved there from Europe, started a magazine called Dinn, the way in which he photos as a kind of as well post surrealist.
And he wanted to start a new movement, which he called Didden dynamism, and he wrote a farewell to surrealism.
It's rather vague and and and high flown.
But he has the idea, I think he he considers it surrealism is not actually sufficient interested in scientific discoveries,
and it's turning too much towards a mystical, mystical interest in the world.
This is an example of one opponents paintings in which he attempted to capture
something of the sort of vigour of the invisible physical energy in the world.
So there was a there was a kind of rivalry and slipped between Dean and the New York magazine's VVA view.
But after the war, Poland became close again to the surrealists and the photograph on the left I've taken from the Post or magazine medium,
which shows Poland leaning against one of the great Omec heads in Vera Cruz.
And you can see two other photographs by gists on the right hand side.
Show one of these heads in the process of excavation and the enormous size of it.
One interesting thing about the story of the archaeology of Middle America is that at this stage in the 1940s,
there was considerable disagreement about who the Omec were.
The North American archaeologists said that they were a late offshoot of the Maya that they dated from some time post 800 A.D.
The Mexican villagers said, no, no, they're actually much earlier than that.
These these are remains that go back to 800 B.C., 2000 B.C. And there was a large round table meeting, I think, 1943.
And eventually evidence was brought forward to prove that indeed the Mexicans were right.
And the Omec, because they were known there, we didn't really call.
Well, actually, the first of those, it were the first great organised civilisation in Mexico.
Devoted one of its issues to the Amerindian cultures.
This is the cover.
And it included some wonderful photographs of Inca architecture, which Moreau commissioned from the photographer of Martin Mountain Chumby.
And it shows you one of the these these these stone buildings are constructed with extraordinary precision and brilliance,
not usually in concrete or any kind of filling tool. And that's the stone.
All right. The there has so many angles in it that it provides an extraordinary stable
centre for these walls which which actually don't fall down in earthquakes.
This is another pair of football sets of women at the top.
And these were accompanied by an article by Morrow celebrating the Inca architecture of the immediate prete Spanish period.
And I think they were also one of the influences on the painter.
I'm going to finish with good gets in.
Who is he in Mexico now? So this is now coming to an end.
This is a work back home to get. So who has been almost exclusively exhibited and commented upon in the context of Mexican 20th century art?
And within that, as a pioneer of abstraction, whisking the abstract Mexican modernism.
And the article to get so is the title of the largest exhibition so far dedicated to his work and get so was born in Mexico 1915,
spent much of his youth in Switzerland, was a stage designer in Cleveland, Ohio, returning to Mexico frequently in 1940 when he finally settled there.
Well, he is a set designer during the golden age of Mexican cinema for the surrealist Lewiston, well, amongst others.
And he was painting his spare time he found dedicated himself to painting in nineteen sixty two and he was denied his paintings for purely abstract.
People have said I'm an abstract painter. I believe my paintings are very realistic.
They're real because they express precisely who I am today still.
I am a surrealist. What I do as a species of abstract surrealism and these early paintings very frankly,
announced that surrealist influences like this one is a very violent painting called El Disquiet about or the quoted.
And this is reproduced in V.V. V in February 1944. And like Messing's paintings of this period.
It Fredman it fragments, figures and creatures, minotaurs, horns, claws, booms in the landscape.
This is a painting by get so of the little group of surrealists in Mexico City,
Elinor Carrington, who is the who is the half naked figure raised up on the left,
Remedios Varro wearing a mask and Pepé himself and get says it's all anecdotal show that
it gets shared service passion for the art and architecture of prickling in America.
In Mexico. Like his friend, the artist in caricaturist Miguel Colvert, UBS, he collected carvings and pottery figures from two telco.
And you can see them here from Veracruz.
I think Beadle's underneath the painting. His painting, that's called Apparition.
And it was the buildings of Reconquest America that had the most profound impact on Getz's painting.
He visited it so that it was accurate. Can I just say that this painting is not slash like a full time?
It the whole thing is is painted. The whole thing is an illusion.
It's a visit to the old cities like Lebanon.
Chichen Itza named paintings after them as mules that used photographs such as those my Champi that we saw just now.
And it wasn't just the structures of these walls and buildings that fascinated to get,
but the tragic past and hidden present of indigenous America, of which they had done.
Witnesses just put the first line of a poem by a pity called The Swell of Dust, which was written in Mexico.
And Perry put this this sense of the of the pain dead past when stones slammed their doors as a sign of despair.
And this is a photograph that he certainly knew. It's by another of the surrealist root quote.
It is. And it's also the Great Pyramid. But the ruined my city of Bushnell.
It's it's a it's don't photograph that. The temple is it's darkly framed with unyielding shadows at its entrance and gets it once said to Rita, Ayda,
when you try to look into one of my paintings, you always run into a wall that keeps you from going any further.
It will stop here with the brilliance of its light. But the back there's a black plain.
It's fear, fear wrought with the dark, the ghosts of the past of the dead in their ruins,
or the repressed, supposedly archaic present that confronts modern Latin America at every turn.
The book The business brilliantly captures this fear which myths and intellectuals
represented as a metaphysical threat is the labyrinth of solitude by gets his close friend,
the poet, critic and surrealist Octavia. Pass the ambiguity.
At the heart of the labyrinth is solitude is between we, the modern Mexican seeking to hold a fully modern society and then peasants,
Indians and I quote, We struggle against imaginary entities, vestiges of the past that we've engendered.
Those ghosts and vestiges are real, at least for us.
Those goes to the vestiges of past realities. They originated in the conquest, the colony.
The peasants are removed Saturday archaic and their men are addressing and speaking since everyone except for themselves, they embody the occult,
the hidden ancient wisdom hidden in the folds of the earth past romanticises the bitter reality of an indigenous present incommensurable,
he believes, with the former civilisations, those who built Bushnell sets of one, etc.
But in his secondary poem, he suggested that surrealism helped Latin America to come to terms with an overlapping eras for the
coexistence of pasts and presence that refused to conform to the normal given periodisation history.
And I quote from Paz's poem Surrealism pass will pass through Mexico far away in Mexico.
Not this one or the other. Ever buried, ever living.
Thank you.