In 1930, at the height of U.S. interest in Mexican art, Carl Zigrosser, director of the prominent Weyhe Gallery in New York and future Philadelphia Museum of Art curator, visited the studio of Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, where he bought a parcel of paintings he described as “among the most interesting in Mexico.” At the same time, Erhard Weyhe, Zigrosser’s partner, embarked on a mission to find new work by Diego Rivera to loan to the major 1931 retrospective dedicated to the artist organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mexican Modernism presents two pairs of newly rediscovered paintings by Rodríguez Lozano and Rivera that resulted from the visionary gallerists’ quests.
 
While Rivera is well known in the United States, Rodríguez Lozano remains unfamiliar to many Americans. Both artists’ work in Mexican Modernism represents a broad range of universal human experiences, from childhood and maternity to performance and community. Produced from 1926 to 1929, these rarely seen paintings represent a thriving creative period that emerged in Mexico following a violent civil war from 1910 to 1920. The stylistic and thematic innovations represented in the exhibition testify to the cultural and political complexities of the revolutionary era, a context that remains relevant today.
  • Diego Rivera, Niña sentada con rebozo (Seated Child with Shawl), 1929

    Diego Rivera

    Niña sentada con rebozo (Seated Child with Shawl), 1929

    © 2024 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

     

    In the 1920s, following a violent civil war known as the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) that not only destroyed lives and the economy, but scattered artists and discouraged tourism, Mexico enjoyed an unequaled cultural renaissance, partly sponsored by the new revolutionary government, that would have a powerful impact across the hemisphere, from Buenos Aires to New York. In the visual arts, this was a time of stylistic, thematic, and political complexity, marked by personal rivalries and warring factions and nurtured by a rich and interdisciplinary critical apparatus, that resulted in innovation across media—from traditional woodcuts and frescoes to the modernist deployment of photomontage and the airbrush…

    — Edited excerpt from James Oles, "Four Mexican Paintings from the Weyhe Gallery: A Ballad of Rediscovery," New York: Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

     

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  • Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, El corrido (Street Singers), 1926

    Manuel Rodríguez Lozano

    El corrido (Street Singers), 1926

    Rodríguez Lozano’s El corrido (Street Singers) is one of the artist’s most complex pictures of the decade, a picture that deeply resonates with several key post-Revolutionary themes. The Spanish title refers to the popular ballad sung by the group, perhaps written on the small sheets of colored paper held by the singing woman in the center. Although likely derived from the Spanish romancero, these narrative songs—about everything from heroes to murderers, freak accidents to sacrilegious demons—assumed nationalist and political meanings in the 1920s…corridos were embraced as a cultural form because they too were made by and for the people, their content baldly honest, their cadences free from formal training.

     

    Although references to corridos are frequent in Mexican art of this period, the focus here on an urban scene has few parallels in Mexican visual culture…Rodríguez Lozano shows urban types of different social classes, evident in their varied clothing, as well as a range of skin tones. From left to right, the men who flank the guitarist in the painting represent a soldier, a policeman, a worker, and a farmer or campesino (though almost hidden he can be identified by his palm sombrero); the women, all of whom wear rebozos, are a bit harder to categorize. A further clue as to social status…is whether they wear shoes—a sign of modern, urban living—or not: barefoot residents were far more common in a capital that, in the 1920s, remained largely rural… 

    — Edited excerpt from James Oles, "Four Mexican Paintings from the Weyhe Gallery: A Ballad of Rediscovery," New York: Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

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  • Diego Rivera, Niño (Mexican Baby), 1929

    Diego Rivera

    Niño (Mexican Baby), 1929

    © 2024 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

    Niño (Mexican Baby) belongs to a group of at least seventy portraits of Mexican children, seen alone or in pairs, sometimes accompanied by their mothers or other older women, that Rivera completed over his long career, beginning in 1925. [1] In the works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the subjects stand or sit on the floor of his studio, sometimes on straw mats or petates, often wearing traditional clothing. Rivera frequently used the same models—usually the young daughters of his household staff—and only occasionally included captions or titles identifying the specific sitter. These are less portraits than “types,” working class children from Indigenous or mestizo backgrounds who represent the future beneficiaries of the Revolution. None of Rivera’s children smile, their solemnity perhaps underscoring the difficulty of the worker’s life to which they were born...These works were in great demand at the time: Marion Koogler McNay, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Galka Scheyer, Carl Van Vechten, and Edward M. M. Warburg are among the leading collectors who acquired such portraits.

    [1] See James Oles, “From Murals to Paintings: Mothers and Children,” in Diego Rivera’s America, pp. 78–95.

    - Edited Excerpt from James Oles, "Four Mexican Paintings from the Weyhe Gallery: A Ballad of Rediscovery," New York: Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

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  • Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Maternidad (Motherhood), 1927

    Manuel Rodríguez Lozano

    Maternidad (Motherhood), 1927

    At times, there seem as many madonnas in twentieth-century painting as there were Madonnas in the Renaissance: though religious meanings slipped away, the symbolic import of fertility and sacrifice remained. In Rodríguez Lozano’s Maternidad, the kneeling woman nurses a tightly-swaddled infant, a vertical appendage to her pyramidal form. She wears a dark shirt trimmed in delicate lace, a long gray skirt that conceals her lower body, and a rust-red shawl (or rebozo de jaspe, identified by the lighter staccato brushstrokes that represent the weave) over her head, its long, fringed ends hidden behind her back. The artist—following a compositional strategy employed by Diego Rivera—places his subject on a richly-grained wooden floor, set tightly against a rear wall that is rendered in two tones of mottled pink paint. A similar space appears in other paintings of this period, including Desnudo de mujer sentada (Seated Female Nude) (1925; Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City).

    - excerpt from James Oles, "Four Mexican Paintings from the Weyhe Gallery: A Ballad of Rediscovery," New York: Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

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  • Press

  • If you would enjoy learning more about the available works, please contact Alana Ricca at (212) 879-8815, or alana@schoelkopfgallery.com. We look forward to being in touch.