Mexico: The Cauldron Of Modernism
J. Hoberman writes: ‘In 1929, the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard did away with the United States. In a map of the world attributed to him that year, the American republic (except for a giant Alaska) has been subsumed by Labrador in the north and a sprawling Mexico in the south. The image of Mexico as the center of the new world—and as what André Breton called “the surrealist country par excellenceâ€â€”is a take-away from the exhibition “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950,†now showing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Just as Éluard’s map can
be read as an early polemic against Eurocentrism, so “Paint the Revolution†presents a Mexican response to European art that, at least up until World War II, was equal to and in some regards stronger than that of North America.’
