When the little-known Mexican modernist Abraham Ángel, native of the provincial mining town of El Oro and now the subject of an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, burst onto the Mexico City art scene in 1922, he must have appeared as a variation on the theme of the noble savage. Or, rather, the artistic savage, a figure imbued with innate powers of perception and expression by close contact with the soil and the people. It was a type eagerly anticipated by the capital’s artistic milieu, which, steeped in the mania for primitivism that had swept over Europe in the previous decades, was keen to show what Mexico had to offer on that score.
Like other talented young people in Mexico City during the post-revolutionary period, Ángel fell under the spell of artist and educator Adolfo Best Maugard, whose educational “Method” taught that all the variety of primitive arts the world over—the key, it was believed, to authentic expression—could be boiled down to a vocabulary of seven simple motifs: the spiral, circle and half circle, S-curve, wavy and straight line, and zigzag. Ángel eagerly adopted this curious get-artistic-quick template, and soon became its first major success story. In just two years his work advanced from proto-symbolist watercolor-and-ink drawings to a suite of monumental oil portraits of family and acquaintances in their closely observed traditional or high-fashion garb, posed against faux-naïf ranchero vistas and scenes from Mexico’s modernizing capital. Evincing such a “national” style, with evident borrowings from folk arts like the votive paintings that would later inspire Frida Kahlo, Ángel’s paintings soon attracted the notice of glitterati such as Diego Rivera, who praised Ángel in the pages of the art and literary magazine La Falange: Revista de cultura latina in August 1923, when the latter’s Girl in the Window appeared on its cover.
Alongside the nationalist current in Ángel’s work it is also possible to detect glimmerings of a more personal side, of the uncritical, exulting child, who accepts everything, joyfully, as given. It was noted by Ángel’s contemporaries that he sat down at his easel to play, as much as he could be said to work, and there is evidence of haste and inexperience in many of his portraits of 1923 and earlier. Skin tones—such as in his striking Self-Portrait—appear to have been blended directly on the canvas, occasionally losing their integrity to become areas of blotchy brown-gray. Occasionally, a brush loaded too stingily with black paint ensured that the cloisonné-like outlines that enclose his figures would fade.
Yet it is worth remembering that, in Mexico, play carries a dual significance. Layered beneath the workmanlike ethic imposed by the Spanish conquerors is the people’s recollection that play was the domain of the vanished gods of the Valley of Mexico, who created and destroyed in equal measure.
Play also brought Ángel victory. It can be seen in the free, even surrealist way in which he solved problems of figuration and perspective, in Portrait of Hugo Tilghman or the bleak I Kill Myself for a Traitorous Woman, both of 1924. Earlier too, in his “Method”-ist Conception of 1921, or Tropical Landscape of a year later, in which a daubed hovel sags below the firework burst of orange-colored palm trees and an absinthe-green sky, it is undeniable that Ángel possessed an artistic sensitivity far beyond his years.
But victory was to be all too brief. Probably owing to philosophical differences with his conservative older brother, Ángel left his family home in early 1922 to enter into a relationship with the artist Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, nine years his senior. Describing his lover after his death, Lozano emphasized Ángel’s emotionality, the strength of his art. “His reactions to things were direct, so acute that they made him ill, he possessed and grasped them.—He annihilated them.” But a young man’s sensitivity is a double-edged sword, and when Lozano withdrew his love in 1924, Ángel took his own life, aged nineteen.
There is a hint of magic, of fantasy in Ángel’s work, and in his brief appearance out there on the horizon of Mexican art. In the young artist’s oscillations between the village and the city it’s possible to glimpse the voyager between two worlds, between an already mythologized past, which was also the backdrop of his own childhood, and the future, both his own and Mexico’s. Who knows where he might have gone next?
Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction • Dallas Museum of Art, Texas • to January 28, 2024 • dma.org
