The first thing you learn from “Mexican Prints at the Vanguard” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is that printmaking has been central to Mexico’s art and media since Spanish colonists arrived with devotional woodcuts in the 1500s. Three centuries later, letterpress madonnas and skeletons traveled to every corner of the vast, multicultural new nation on broadsheets and newspapers; during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), it was eye-grabbing posters of menacing plutocrats that incited the peasants.
After the Revolution, the French-born artist Jean Charlot, who spent decades in Mexico, donated prints to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and eventually, acting on the institution’s behalf, bought more than 2,000 works by artists like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Julio Ruelas and José Guadalupe Posada.
Nearly every one of the 130 lithographs, screen prints and woodcuts on display in “Mexican Prints,” the curator Mark McDonald says, comes from this collection that Charlot built. They range from an 18th-century Virgin of Guadalupe on white silk to a series of colorful silk-screens by the Guatemalan-born artist Carlos Mérida that document regional costumes and dances. But the largest share of the exhibition, and its real impact, come in two bursts — one in the late 19th century, when Posada introduced the strangely charming skeleton that came to serve every purpose, from cartoon to caricature, and another in the early 20th, when artists like Rivera worked for a Communist Party-aligned newspaper called El Machete.
From a stylistic point of view, the work in the show is almost overwhelmingly various. There’s the unflinching vigor of El Machete, the serene polish of Rivera’s lithographed peasant heroes, the rich texture of a linocut by Elizabeth Catlett, who spent much of her life in Mexico. But historically the story is just as complicated, so I called Patricia Escárcega, a journalist and critic who often writes about Mexican and Chicano art, to discuss. These are excerpts from the conversation.
