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«Rescue forgotten chapters of the History of Art that need a story. That’s what museums have to do.” It is the declaration of principles of Manuel Borja-Villeldirector of the Reina Sofía, determined for more than a decade to tell us that other story that is on the margins of the canon and outside the artistic capitals: Paris and
New York. On this occasion, the object of investigation has been graphic art, undervalued due to its anachronism (a priori, an old-fashioned, old-fashioned medium in the technological age) and which has not enjoyed much prestige, to which the Reina Sofía is dedicating two exhibitions this year, as a diptych. From today, and until the
august 29, you can visit the first part, the most historic. The second will focus on the more contemporary graphic twist.
The first thing that catches your eye walking through the rooms, where they hang more than 450 works (it is a very ambitious exhibition), is that we have not learned anything from the mistakes of the past and that history is cyclical: it repeats itself over and over again. Many of the images on display are too reminiscent of what is happening these days in Ukraineafter a month of Russian invasion: bombardments, combats, trenches, wounded in hospitals, dead in the streets, millions of refugees and exiles… And that almost a century has passed since Otto Dix will reflect the traumas of World War I in a portfolio of 50 engravings in which he addresses the war in the style of the Goya’s ‘Disasters of War’. His impressive prints are, unfortunately, extremely topical.
As are the racial protests of Elizabeth Catlett in 1970, whose ‘Black is Beautiful’ remember the ‘Black Lives Matter’, movement in favor of racial rights that was reborn after the murder of George Floyd. Likewise, the graphic art of the 20th century reflects the demands for the rights of women and indigenous people, the rise of fascism, the revolts of the peasants… Topics that today, as then, are the order of the day. It is enough to see the demonstrations in the agriculture, livestock and transport sector these days in our country or the rise of far-right parties in Europe.
Graphic art like political and social vindication weapon sharpest and most effective in the first half of the 20th century in Germany and Mexico is the focus of this interesting exhibition, whose origins lie in a seminar in the Harvard University. Benjamin HD Buchloh, a professor there, offered the project to German museum directors, but they rejected it. The Reina Sofía did host it with Buchloh and Michelle Harewood as curators. Both have carried out exhaustive investigation about this moment in the History of Art that has not been sufficiently studied and they have obtained loans from important collections: the Metropolitan in New York, the Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute in Chicago, the United States Library of Congress…
The tour starts with two engraving figures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the Mexican Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) and the German Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), far removed from each other. The first, called ‘the Warhol and the Walt Disney of the time’, made scathing political caricatures about the Mexican Revolution, advertisements, pamphlets, newspaper cartoons, always aimed at the general public, with a great sense of humor and using the skull, an icon of Mexico, as a house brand. He aroused the interest of Eisenstein, Breton, Diego Rivera… he died drunk and poor. Kollwitz, for his part, comes from a more classical academic tradition (Durero, Rembrandt). She focused on the lives of women and, after the death of her son, championed pacifism. Both left a mark on the political graphic art of the United States, China and the former USSR.
The exhibition continues with a splendid space dedicated to German expressionism during World War I and the postwar period (Otto Dix is joined by Max Beckmann and George Grosz) and six rooms on the work of the Popular Graphics Workshop (TGP) of Mexico, a group founded in 1937 to support social and political causes. African-American artists such as Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, John Woodrow Wilson, and Charles White took refuge in Mexico during the McCarthy era.
See them
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