Leopoldo Méndez was a social and political activist throughout his career. A young man at the height of the Mexican Revolution, he later joined the Mexican Communist Party. In 1937, he co-founded the Taller de Gráfica Popular [People’s Graphic…
Manuel Álvarez Bravo captured images of everyday life in Mexico City with a keen eye for the ironic and the uncanny. Parábola óptica (1931) shows an optician’s storefront, where modern advertisements give us an unsettling sense of being watched.…
Manuel Álvarez Bravo captured images of everyday life in Mexico City with a keen eye for the ironic and the uncanny. In El eclipse (1933), Álvarez Bravo achieved a dynamic geometry of crisscrossing diagonals. Standing on a shallow corner of a…
Manuel Álvarez Bravo captured images of everyday life in Mexico City with a keen eye for the ironic and the uncanny. Los agachados (1934), showing a group of workers eating at a Mexico City diner, suggests a similar unveiling of a hidden reality.…
The Rural Teacher, based on a scene from Diego Rivera’s monumental frescoes at the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City, highlights the complexities of the role of female teachers in the aftermath of the revolution. Here we see a woman of…
Satan looks out over a terrifyingly ordered monument outfitted with two fire-breathing demons, a manifestation of his reign over hell. In the sky two transparent orbs emerge, perhaps symbolizing different spheres of existence. Milton wrote that this…
Milton takes us inside Pandemonium, where Satan sits enthroned on a massive black dome. The vastness of this interior space is incomprehensible, as row upon row of sinners multiplies into infinity. Rings of gaslights, like those seen in Martin’s…
Martin was one of the first artists to apply the mezzotint technique to steel. A rocker, a tool with a curved serrated blade, is used to roughen the entire surface of a copper plate, creating burrs, or tiny hooks of metal, that hold ink for printing.…
The archangel Raphael’s warnings are unheeded: while the snake looks on, Eve offers the apple to Adam. Realizing that she is already doomed and unable to comprehend being apart from her, he knowingly follows.