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8
ver a Raúl Anguiano experimentando velozmente
con varios lenguajes visuales diferentes del robusto
“arte proletario”. Uno de ellos fue el surrealismo.
Como búsqueda de la verdad basada más en
Freud que en Marx, el surrealismo fue una de las
estrategias visuales más socorridas en México a fi
nales de los treinta y principios de los cuarenta,
sobre todo entre artistas más preocupados por lo
privado que por lo público. Aun así, como es el
caso de otros intentos de hacer cuadrar la historia
del arte mexicano en periodos estilísticos estableci
dos en Europa (y sobre todo en París), debemos ser
cuidadosos con nuestras definiciones. Muy pocos
pintores o escritores mexicanos tuvieron contacto
directo con el movimiento surrealista impulsado por
André Breton en 1924. Entre las pocas excepciones
estaban Jorge Cuesta, quien había conocido a
Breton en 1928, y Agustín Lazo, quien trabó amis
tad con simpatizantes del surrealismo (entre ellos
Max Jacob y posiblemente Antonin Artaud) durante
project in Morelia
4
; and numerous lithographs and
posters for the
tgp
(fig. 3).
5
Organizations like the
lear
and the
tgp
united a wide range of Mexican
artists and intellectuals in a common alliance
against fascism in the 1930s: not surprisingly, the
art produced in these collectives was stylistically
diverse, unlike the increasingly standardized so
cialist realism promoted in the Soviet Union. By
the later 1930s, in fact, we find Anguiano quickly
experimenting with visual languages other than
robust “proletarian art,” and one of these lan
guages was Surrealism.
A search for truth based more on Freud
than Marx, Surrealism was one of the visual strat
egies most widely employed in Mexico in the
later 1930s and early 1940s, especially among
those artists who were concerned more with pri
vate thoughts than public issues. Yet, as with
other attempts to fit the history of Mexican art
into stylistic periods established in Europe
(mainly in Paris), we must be cautious with defini
tions. Very few artists or writers in Mexico had
direct contacts with the actual Surrealist move
ment launched by André Breton in 1924. Among
the few exceptions were poet Jorge Cuesta, who
had met Breton in Paris in 1928, and Agustín
Lazo, who had befriended surrealist sympathizers,
including Max Jacob and possibly Antonin Artaud,
while living in Paris in the 1920s. Lazo also saw an
important show of modern painting (including
works by Carrà and De Chirico) while in Rome in
1925, and his published ideas about “suprarreal
ismo” (a term widely used before 1938) provided
Mexico City readers with one of the earliest first
hand accounts of the movement.
6
Indeed, for those who remained in Mexico,
surrealist ideas and images were chiefly seen in
the pages of local magazines like Revista de Re-
3.
Raúl Anguiano, Salvemos al mundo del fascismo [Let’s
Save the World from Fascism], 1939, litografía [lithogra
ph], 63.7 x 50 cm. Davis Museum, Wellesley College.