From the Archives: Notes on Artist Xavier González (1898-1993), "Moonlight Over the Chisos" and a Visit to Mexico City's Antigua Academia de San Carlos

>> READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

From the Archives: A Visit to the Primera Casa de la Imprenta de América in Mexico City

>> READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Spotlight on Mexican Fiction: "The Apaches of Kiev" by Agustín Cadena in Tupelo Quarterly, and Much More

Delighted to announce that my translation of the short story by Agustín Cadena, "The Apaches of Kiev," appears in the very fine U.S. literary journal, Tupelo Quarterly. It's a story at once dark and deliciously wry. It caught my attention because, well, everything Cadena writes catches my attention-- he is one of my favorite writers in Mexico, or anywhere-- and he happens to be living in Hungary, so the Eastern Europe angle is no surprise. In all, Cadena's is a unique and powerful voice in contemporary fiction, and I hope you'll have a read.


>>CONTINUE READING THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

THE APACHES OF KIEV

BY AGUSTIN CADENA

(Originally published in Spanish on Agustín Cadena's blog, El vino y la hiel) 

Translated by C.M. Mayo

The story about the body they found in the Botanic Garden came out in the newspapers and on television. The Kiev police identified it immediately: Dmitri Belov, reporter and political analyst known for his scathing criticism of President Poroshenko’s administration. Presumably it was a suicide, but until they could confirm this verdict, the police had been ordered to put all resources to work.

Among the underemployed— peddlers and prostitutes— who roamed the Botanical Garden, very few were aware of this. So how was anyone else to find out? They didn’t have televisions and they didn’t spend their money on newspapers. Understandably, those who knew about the body avoided that area. They knew there would have been a commotion, and especially if the body belonged to someone important. The police would go around searching for possible witnesses to interrogate, and by the way, shake them down on other charges. It wouldn’t do any good to explain to the police what they already knew: that every week all of these underemployed people paid a bribe to be left in peace. 

Ignorant of everything, three men of approximately 40 years of age, exotic-looking, dressed like Apaches in a Western movie, appeared after 11 in the morning. They were Ernesto Ortega, Gonzalo Acevedo and Milton Guzmán: Mexican, Salvadorean and Venezuelan, respectively. The three of them dressed identically: a headdress of white feathers that went from their heads down to their waists, jacket and trousers of coffee-colored leather with fringe on the sleeves and the back, moccasins, and ritual battle makeup. They carried assorted musical instruments and they took turns playing Andean music: “El cóndor pasa,” “Pájaro Chogüi,” “Moliendo café,” etc. They knew the music did not go with the costumes nor the costumes with their ethnicities, but this strange combination was what worked for them commercially. Americaphilia was at its height in Kiev, and passersby were happy to give money to these “North American Indians” who played the music “of their people.” Perhaps the happy notes of “La flor de la canela” led the Ukrainians to imagine the beauty of life in teepees, among the buffalo, wild horses, mountain lions, and bald-headed eagles. The fact is, in addition to playing and signing, the “Apaches” also sold their CDs of this same music, displayed on a cloth spread on the ground. [... CONTINUE READING] 

P.S. My amiga the poet and writer Patricia Dubrava also translates Cadena. Check out some of her excellent translations at Mexico City Lit.


# # #

This past Saturday I had the good fortune to be able to attend Cadena's book presentation in one of my favorite Mexico City bookstores, the FCE Rosario Castellanos in Condesa. (Here is where I interviewed Michael Schuessler about his biography of Pita Amor, among other works.) Cadena was presenting a novel for young readers, La casa de los tres perros (The House of the Three Dogs) and along for the ride came a group of Mexican writers who have stories in his latest anthology, Callejeros, cuentos urbanos de mundos soñados (My rough translation of that might be, Street People: Stories of Urban Dreamworlds). Happily for me, this also meant a chance to visit with my friend the Mexican novelist and historian Silvia Cuesy. Here we are with Agustín Cadena:

C.M. Mayo, Agustín Cadena, Silvia Cuesy
at the Rosario Castellanos FCE Bookstore, Mexico City

Agustín Cadena's anthology of short fiction, Callejeros
and novel for young readers, La Casa de los tres perros

Mexican writers in Agustín Cadena's anthology, Callejeros
Front row:
León Cuevas, Sandra Luna, Agustín Cadena
Back row:
 Eduardo islas, Cristina Manterola, ?, ?,
José Antonio Bautista, Silvia Cuesy

Table of contents, Callejeros

Back cover, Callejeros

Cadena, right in white hat, presenting his novel for young readers.
La casa de los tres perros,
in the FCE Rosario Castellanos bookstore in Mexico City
August 5, 2017

Watch the video for Kickstarter with Mayte Romo of Editorial Elementum, publisher of Callejeros:

Click here to watch the video

Putting on my armchair-sociologist sombrero now: Aside from its high quality (both its literary content and as an object), what is especially interesting about Callejeros is that the editor lives abroad and the publisher is based in a provincial town-- Pachuca, in the state of Hidalgo. Mexican literary culture and publishing has long been overwhelmingly concentrated in Mexico City, but with the digital revolution it seems this is opening up quickly. I talked a bit about this in my talk for a 2015 American Literary Translators Association panel I chaired:

Translating Contemporary Latin American Poets and Writers:

Embracing, Resisting, Escaping the Magnetic Pull of the Capital

P.S. I mention both this wondrous Mexico City FCE bookstore and Cadena in my longform essay now available on Kindle, "Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla," an overview of the Mexican literary landscape and the power of the book.

And for those who follow this blog, yes, I remain at work on the book about Far West Texas. Stay tuned for the next podcasts. My latest writing on the subject includes a review of Patrick Dearen's Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Reading Mexico: Recommendations for a Book Club 

of Extra-Curious and Adventurous English-language Readers

Translating Across the Border:

Transcript of My Talk for the American Literary Translators Association

Panel, "Translating the Other Side"

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises

A Visit to the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América in Mexico City

>> READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM


This is an excerpt from my long essay, of creative nonfiction, "Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla," which  is forthcoming now available in Kindle.

In the shadow of the National Palace:
La Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América,
the House of the First Printing Press in the Americas,
Mexico City.
Photo by C.M. Mayo, 2017.

...There is one more a pearl of a place that cannot go unmentioned in any discussion of our sister republic’s literary landscape. 

From the Claustro de Sor Juana, in less than twenty minutes’ walk north and slightly east—weaving your way through the shoppers, touts, tourists, beggars, businessmen—honking cars and buses and motorbikes—and a skate-boarder or two—blaring music, freighters with their trolleys piled to toppling with boxes—don’t get run over by the pedicabs—and once at the Zócalo, wending around the Aztec dancers in feathers and ankle-rattles, the toothless shouter pumping his orange sign about SODOM Y GOMORRA MARIGUANA BODAS GAY, and an organ grinder, and to-ers and fro-ers of every age and size, you arrive, out of breath, at a squat, terracotta-colored three-story high building. This is where the first book was printed in—no, not just in Mexico—then New Spain—but in the Americas. 

La Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América.

To step into the foyer of its museum and bookstore is to relax into an oasis of peace. 

The uniformed guard hands me a pen to sign the guest book. It’s late afternoon; I am the third visitor for the day. 

I take a gander at the exhibition of contemporary textile art—a few pieces reference one of Frida Kahlo’s drawings in the Casa Azul of a tentacled monster of paranoia, each limb tipped with a staring eye. 

In the second gallery I find the replica of our continent’s first printing press soaking in sun from the window. The wooden contraption is taller than I am, but so spare, it occurs to me that it might serve to juice apples.

How my Mexican amigos scoffed at the auction of the Bay Psalm Book in 2013. Not about the record sum—14.2 million US dollars—for which that little book, printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1640, went to a private collector, but about the report in the international media that the Bay Psalm Book was “the first book printed in America.”

To Mexicans, America is the continent, not their sister republic. Mexico is part of the same continent, of course, and so the first book printed in America—or, as we estadounidenses prefer to say, the Americas—was Breve y más compendiosa doctrina Cristiana en lengua Mexicana y Castellana (Brief and Most Comprehensive Christian Doctrine in Nahuátl and Spanish), printed right here, in Mexico City, in this building, in 1539.

Mexico beats out Massachusetts by 101 years! But this sinks to silliness. That printer in Cambridge, Massachussetts, was English, and the one in colonial Mexico City, a native of Lombardy named Giovanni Paoli, Hispanicized to “Juan Pablos.” The technology that found its way to the Americas with these printing pioneers—to the north, Protestants, to the south, Catholics, separated by religious schism and the whirlwinds of European politics, and that century, and moreover, by the staggering distance of desert, swamplands, oceanic buffalo-filled prairies, and sunless and unmapped forests—had one and the same root: the fifteenth-century workshop of a German goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg. 

Gutenberg was inking his little pieces of movable type more than half a century before Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” and the indigenous on this continent chanced to hear the first stirrings of vaguest rumors and weird omens.

Still, 1539 is an early date indeed for that first book printed in the Americas: only eighteen years after the fall of Tenochitlán. Three years after Cabeza de Vaca’s miraculous arrival in Mexico City. Fray Sahagún was still a year away from launching the research that would result in the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, or the Florentine Codex. The lodes that would turn Mexico into an industrial-scale silver exporter had not yet been discovered. The Manila Galleons, treasure ships bringing porcelain, spices, and silks from China to Acapulco, would not begin their annual crossings for another twenty-six years.

In England, Henry the VIII was between wives three and four. It would be sixty-eight more years until the first, disastrous English settlement at Jamestown. The Pilgrims who would land at Plymouth Rock? As a religious community they did not yet exist.

Tucked in the shade of the National Palace and a block east from Mexico’s cathedral, the Casa de la Primera Imprenta was built, it turns out, over the ruin of the Aztec Temple of Tezcatlipoca, Smoking Mirror, trickster god of the night sky, of time, and of ancestral memory.

Aztec snake head on display, 2017.

Who knows what still lies beneath in the rubble? Dug up in the eighteenth century during a renovation, a gigantic Aztec stone snake head was, no doubt with a shudder of horror, reburied. But we live in a different time with a very different sensibility. In 1989 when renovations unearthed that same Aztec stone snake head—elegant with fangs, nostrils, scales, eyes the size of melons—it was carefully excavated and cleaned by archaeologists. This monumental sculpture, heritage of the nation, is now displayed atop a roped platform in the Casa de la Primera Imprenta’s Juan Pablos bookstore, surrounded by a shelf of fiction, a table of poetry, and a sign informing us that the Aztec snake head is carved from grey basalt and weighs approximately one and a half tons.

The Juan Pablos bookstore, named for that original printer Giovanni Paoli, retails books from the press of Mexico City’s Universidad Autónomo Metropolitana (UAM). Such are my interests du jour: I came away with a copy of the first Spanish translation of an eighteenth-century Italian’s journey to Mexico and the 2015 El territorio y sus representaciones. 

A splendid and very important book:
El territorio y sus representaciones
by Luis Ignacio Sainz Chávez and
Jorge Gonzlález Aragón Castellanos
winner of the 2016 Premio de Investigación
Published by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana,
Mexico.

END OF EXCERPT

From "Disptach from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla" by C.M. Mayo
Copyright 2017. All rights reserved.
#        #        #

When the Kindle is available I will be sure to announce it here. If you'd like to get my very occasional newsletter, I welcome you to sign up for that here.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

> Another excerpt from this same long essay, on Cabeza de Vaca's Relación, is forthcoming in Scoundrel Time; another, on Mexico's great baroque poet, Sor Juana, appeared in this blog Monday before last; and yet another, on Lord Kingsborough's colossal Antiquities of Mexico, was posted back in February.



UPDATE: "Dispatch from the Sister Republic or, Papelito Habla," my long essay pon the Mexican literary landscape and the power of the book, is now available in Kindle.

amazon.com

What the Muse Sent Me About the Tenth Muse, 

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Reading Mexico: Recommendations for a Book Club of 

Extra-Curious & Adventurous English-Language Readers

Peyote and the Perfect You

"La Chora Interminable" on Marfa and the Gonzálo Lebrija Show at Marfa Contemporary

Well, Marfa's made it to Vanity Fair, 60 Minutes, Martha Stewart's Living, and now... drumroll... La Chora Interminable. ("La chora interminable" means, more or less, "the never-ending yadda-yadda.")

LA CHORA INTERMINABLE
José Ignacio Solórzano Pérez
and
José Trinidad Camacho Orozco "Trino"

If you don't speak Spanish, dude, fuggedit. Anyway, it's not easy to listen to but, well, I guess you could call it "chido" (that's Mexico City slang for "the bomb"): "La Chora Interminable" radio show's episode on Marfa, Texas. 

> Click here to listen to these guys on iTunes

It starts out with a chipmunk-goes-alien thing and if you can get past that, which you might not, you'll hear a couple of middle-aged Mexico City guys going on about Marfa, e.g., 

"Nada más son cowboys and hipsters" (it's just cowboys and hipsters"); 

"parece como pueblo fantásma" (it seems like a ghost town);

"Shopping, no hay" (No shopping, pronounced chopping-- sorry, I found that hilarious. Ditto the "whatsappazo"). 

So who are these guys? Two of Mexico's best-known cartoonists: José Trinidad Camacho Orozco, aka "Trino." (Uf. Trino is the bomb.) And: José Ignacio Solórzano Pérez, who is also philosopher and conceptual artist. The latter went to the inauguration of Mexican artist Gonzálo Lebrija's show at Marfa Contemporary, "La Sombra del Zopilote" (The Vulture's Shadow), and in this eposide, in between a lot of chuckling, he tells Trino all about the town.

GONZALO LEBRIJA'S INSTALLATION
IN WHAT USED TO BE THE PIZZA FOUNDATION,
AND BEFORE THAT, A GAS STATION,
NOW "MARFA CONTEMPORARY"

More out-takes:

"Es como un lote baldío chic... rasquache cool" (It's like a vacant lot that's chic... skanky cool); 

"viene la snobeada del mundo de arte" (the Snobdom of the Art World comes here);

"me gustaria ser el cherife de Marfa" (I'd like to be the sheriff of Marfa);

"un día si no me vez, estoy en Marfa" (If one day you don't see me, I'm in Marfa).

Yes, I am still, in my turtle-like fashion, working on my book about Far West Texas.... Check out my podcasts, the comparably sedate (OK, maybe even a little nerdy) but super crunchy "Marfa Mondays," here.

> Your comments are always welcome. Tweet @marfamondays

Chimalistac Mañana

Some Mexico City news: The Spanish edition of my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual, translated by Mexican poet and novelist Agustin Cadena as Odisea metafisica hacia la Revolución Mexicana, Francisco I. Madero y su libro secreto, Manual espírita, will be presented tomorrow Wednesday February 25, 2015 at 7 PM in the Centro de Estudios de la Historia de México CARSO in Chimalistac. The panel will include Mexican historians Luis Cerda, Javier Garciadiego, Manuel Guerra de Luna, and Yolia Tortolero Cervantes. This will be for the beautiful edition just published by Rose Mary Salum's Literal Publishing, based in Houston, Texas.

The venue, by the way, is the home of Francisco I. Madero's personal library, a treasure-trove of extremely rare esoterica, including works by Annie Besant, Dr; Peebles, Majweski, Alan Kardec, and one inscribed to Madero by its author,  Dr Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, aka "Maestro Huiracocha" who was a his personal doctor, fellow Mason, Spiritist, and Rosicrucian.

Odisea metafísica hacia la Revolucion Mexicana is now available in major bookstores in Mexico City. If you show up at the event, you will no doubt learn some very interesting things and I shall be delighted to autograph a copy for you.

The Kindle and print-on-demand editions of Odisea metafisica are also available from Dancing Chiva, as are the English editions. All super easy ordering options are right >> here.<<

>> Listen in anytime to my talk about this book (in English) for the UCSD Center for US-Mexican Studies.

>> Listen in anytime to my talk about this book (in English) for PEN San Miguel at Bellas Artes in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

>> Read excerpts in English and/ or in Spanish

>> Check out the reviews 

Your COMMENTS are always welcome.

(Want to know when I'm doing another event? I welcome you to sign up for my free newsletter.)

An Interview with Mexican Historian Alan Rojas Orzechowski about Painter Santiago Rebull, "One of the Most Creative Minds of the Academic Movement"

>> READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM AT WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

He was Maximilian's Court Painter, a leading figure in 19th century Mexican painting, and one of the important influences on Diego Rivera, yet few people have heard of Santiago Rebull— until now.

Santiago Rebull: The Outlines of a Story
at the Museum of the Diego Rivera Mural in Mexico City
Through February 15, 2015

If you're anywhere near Mexico City, make the effort to come in and visit the Santiago Rebull show at the Museo Mural Diego Rivera. >>More information here.<< For those aficionados of the history of the French Intervention, and in particular the brief reign of Maximilian von Habsburg as Emperor of Mexico, this is an especially important show not to miss, for Rebull was Maximilian's Court Painter and, interestingly, one of the few individuals close to the monarchy who managed to remain in Mexico and even thrive in subsequent decades under the Republic.

Herewith, my interview with the show's curator, Mexican historian Alan Rojas Orzechowski.

Santiago Rebull

Self-portrait, 1852

C.M. MAYO: What gave you the idea for the show?

ALAN ROJAS ORZECHOWSKI: The exhibition Santiago Rebull: Los contornos de una historia (Santiago Rebull: The Outlines of a Story) presented in the Museo Mural Diego Rivera is our own way to pay homage to one of the most creative minds of the Academic Movement in Mexico, an illustrious painter and educator who molded the minds of pupils such as Roberto Montenegro, Ángel Zárraga and Diego Rivera.

As an outstanding teacher, he taught Diego Rivera as a young student in the San Carlos Academy of Arts. Rivera in return, always considered him as a mentor and guide, respecting him as both, as an instructor and fellow artist. Exploiting this connection, the Museo Mural Diego Rivera and external curator Magaly Hernández, thought suitable to present an exhibition which honored Rebull´s artwork, underlining his influence on Rivera and his generation.

CMM: How did Santiago Rebull, so close to Maximilian, manage to remain in Mexico and continue working as a successful artist for decades afterwards?

Santiago Rebull

La muerte de Marat, 1875

ARO: I personally think that it was his undeniable talent as an artist which enabled him to continue teaching in San Carlos Academy during three more decades. In the immediate years after Maximilian's fall he did receive severe reproaches from fellow artists and local newspapers as a monarchist and “afrancesado” (pro-French), but he carried on painting members of the political, economic and cultural elite. As a testament of this, the portraits of Presidents Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz are shown in the exhibition. Both pieces are dated in the 1870s, less than a decade after the monarch´s disgrace.

He retained his position as a teacher in San Carlos and also imparted drawing lessons to female pupils in the Colegio de Vizcaínas which was the only female and secular school in Mexico throughout the XVIII and XIX centuries. Along with his academic career, he remained a prolific painter, authoring remarkable pieces such as La muerte de Marat (Marat's Death) and several portraits.

CMM: What has been the reaction from art historians and historians of the Second Empire?

ARO: The Academic reaction towards the Second Empire, from both, historians and art historians, has changed through time. During the first half of the XX Century, the posture was very much aligned to the official history, characterized by a nationalist stance in which Maximilian was portrayed as an invader and many of his actions as an imposition to Mexicans. Nevertheless, this has shifted to a fascination for both, Maximilian and Charlotte, partly thanks to literature. Examples of this are the book Noticias del Imperio (News from the Empire) by Fernando del Paso or The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire by C.M. Mayo. 

Historians have now a much more benevolent gaze to the Second Empire, emphasizing on Maximilian's liberal measures that assisted the indigenous groups and regulated Ecclesiastic influence on civilians—which certainly made him unpopular with his original supporters.

Art historians tend to be cautious with their judgments, stressing the continuity on San Carlos Academy trough its curriculum, academic cluster and board, all of them dramatically modified with the Republic's restoration. For instance, Eduardo Báez Macías, in his volume History of the National School of Fine Arts (Old San Carlos Academy), mentions Maximilian's patronizing attitude towards Mexican art, believing it to be provincial to what he was used to in Europe.  

My personal view is the opposite. Maximilian was a very intelligent ruler, he was aware of the necessity of his government's legitimacy, and knew that the main way to achieved it was through art and Court protocol. In the first case, he arose from the liberal vs. conservative's discussion over national heroes and entrusted several talented young artists to create a portrait gallery of the libertadores, including characters such as Hidalgo and Iturbide along. Also, in several Imperial projects he preferred to employ talented Mexican students over well-known established European teachers as Eugenio Landesio or Pelegrín Clavé.

CMM: Which of all the 68 pieces do you consider the most essential for understanding Rebull and his place in Mexican art?

Santiago RebullLa muerte de Abel, 1851

ARO: Santiago Rebull is one of the most relevant XIX century painters in Mexico's history. He is a fundamental artist of the Academicism generation, and keystone to understanding the shift in the Art Scene towards the Vanguards and the Mexican Painting School of XX century, since he was an inexhaustible teacher to many of its participants. 

One of Santiago Rebull's anchor pieces is La muerte de Abel (Abel's Death). It was painted in 1851 and earned him a scholarship to travel to Rome. He there attended the San Lucas Academy, a conservative catholic art school that followed the principles of the Nazarene Movement, specially influenced by the German painter Johann Friedrich Overbeck.

Rebull studied under the guidance of Academic artist Thomaso Consoni, who molded and perfected his technique through a careful series of exercises consisting on copying masterpieces from Renaissance maestros. 

Therefore, La muerte de Abel best represents the Academic ideals of trace, color use and proportions so faithfully followed by Rebull. 

CMM: Was it difficult to find these 68 pieces, and were there any you couldn’t get for the show that you wish you had?

Santiago Rebull

El sacrificio de Isaac, 1859

ARO: Unfortunately there was a piece we were unable to obtain, El sacrificio de Isaac (Isaac's Sacrifice) painted in 1858 during his sojourn in Italy and displayed in the Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia and later shown in New Orleans. The image is almost 118 inches tall and it’s a flawless sample of Rebull´s work during this formative voyage under Consoni's guidance. Alas, it was a crucial piece in the National Museum of Art (MUNAL), therefore, they were unable to lend it.

It was relatively unproblematic to secure the greater part of the assortment since it belongs to the painter's descendants, most of them eager to promote their ancestor's work. The rest of the pieces were graciously provided by significant institutions such as the San Carlos Academy, the National Museum of Art and the Colegio de Vizcaínas.

CMM: Was the museum at Il Castillo di Miramar involved in any way? (The original of Rebull's portrait of the Emperor Maximilian was sent there, is that right?)

Joaquín Ramírez

Portrait of Emperor Maximilian I, ca. 1866. 

ARO: The original full length portrait of Maximilian was painted by Santiago Rebull in 1865. The Emperor took such pleasure on it that resulted on the appointment of Rebull as court painter; he was also awarded the Order of Guadalupe, the Empire's uppermost honor. 

The monarch relocated the painting in Miramar Castle in Trieste, Italy that same year. Nonetheless he commissioned Joaquín Ramírez, another Academic painter to produce an exact copy of his portrait. Currently, the latter is part of the National Institute of Fine Arts collection and it's shown at Chapultepec Castle. We exhibit a contemporary reproduction of the Ramírez painting.

CMM: The decorative bacchantes that Rebull painted for Chapultepec Castle-- were these Maximilian's idea or the artist's? What do you think was the message of such decorative paintings?

Santiago Rebull

Bacante para la terraza 

del Alcázar de Chapultepec, 1894.

ARO: The decorative bacchantes of Miravalle (Chapultepec) Castle were the Emperor's idea but Rebull only painted four of them during Maximilian's reign since the remaining two were created later, during President Porfirio Díaz administration when he occupied the castle as his summer residence.

The message behind the bacchantes is clear: the ideal of graciousness that courtesan life implied. Maximilian was convinced that through art and elaborate court rituals his regime would gain the legitimacy and acceptance of Mexican elites. The creation of new titles, honors and reinstated old colonial titles were strategies followed by the sovereign. Thus, art and protocol were undeniably intertwined in the imperial residences. In the words of art historian Justino Fernández “Rebull planned six bacchantes figures […] the romanticism of the epoch finds here one of its classical expressions, these women, or better said, demigoddesses, highly idealized, wear the magnificence of their figure, in a movement attitude.” *

*Justino Fernández. El arte del siglo XIX en México, Mexico, Imprenta Universitaria, 1967,  p. 77.

CMM: What do you consider Rebull's most essential achievements as an artist?

Santiago Rebull

Portrait of Porfirio Díaz, 

1872

ARO: His personal career is bound to the history of San Carlos Academy; we may consider him as a founding painter of Mexican art of the first decades of independence, when the elite and middle classes were shaping an identity of their own, which they found in the expressions of Academicism and Neoclassic Art. 

He perfected his education with the European sojourn—not remaining solely in Rome, but traveling extensively through Spain—and returned with a refined paintbrush imbibed by Purism and Nazarene precepts. The preparative drawings are a testament of Rebull´s expertise of trace and copying, the two cornerstone of a XIX century Academic education. 

Upon his return he grew as a prolific portraitist, the most important being that of Emperor Maximilian. But his talent was enjoyed not only by royals; both Presidents Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz were also depicted by the artist. The latter, is embodied as a young aspiring president, unlike later representations where an elderly and heavily ornamented military men is shown. Furthermore, common and quotidian characters were also portrayed by him.

Santiago Rebull

Portrait of an unknown man, undated

CMM: Why is the show in the Museo de Diego Rivera? Can you talk a little about Rebull's influence on Diego Rivera?

Santiago Rebull

Profeta Elymar, 1853

Diego Rivera

Cabeza masculina, 1900

ARO: Since the Museo Mural Diego Rivera has the commitment of preserving Diego Rivera's legacy, promoting the artistic expressions created during the XX century and especially those influenced by Rivera himself, we thought there was a great breach with his predecessors. Who were they? Who particularly influenced him?

Rivera was educated at the San Carlos Academy of Arts in Mexico City where he was an accomplished student, tutored by the great artists of the XIX century Academic movement. He received a refined instruction from painters such as José Salomé Pina, José María Velasco and Santiago Rebull. Diego always felt in debt towards the latter, recognizing him as his mentor.

My photos of Chapultepec Castle

(includes a painting by Rebull)

My photos of Miramar Castle 

(does not include anything by Rebull, but it's in there!)

My blog Maximilian ~ Carlota for Researchers of the Second Empire / French Intervention

My novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire 

and in Spanish (translated by Agustin Cadena) 

El último príncipe del Imperio Mexicano

Q & A with Rice Freeman Zachery, 

host of "Notes from the Voodoo Lounge" on Creative Podcasting

"Looking at Mexico in New Ways" 

An Interview with Historian John Tutino

A Conversation with Mexican Writer and Editor Rose Mary Salum, 

"Making Connections with Literature and Art"

Cyberflanerie: Mexico City, Patzcuaro, Tijuana & Tulum Edition

You're Eating Fake Tacos and Diana Kennedy is Pissed About It  by Daniel Hernandez
P.S. Diana Kennedy is a true treasure: teacher, caretaker, visionary. Her name may not be hispanic, but she knows Mexican cuisine better than anyone, including, yes, the Mexicans.

The always excellent and informative Exploring Colonial Mexico, lately on Enrique Luft Pávlata.

Sam Quinones doesn't like Tijuana, he loves it! (Yes, Yours Truly has visited and had quite a bit to say about it, too. But I didn't get to the opera.)

Victor: Artes Populares Mexicanas, now in new digs near the Claustro Sor Juana, upstairs from Librería Madero. I was about to blog about this charming rinconcito, but my amigo, artist and travel writer, Jim Johnston, beat me to it in his blog, Mexico City: An Opinionated Guide for the Curious Traveler. 

Speaking of rinconcitos, Mexico Cooks! has another bodacious post about the new market in Col. Roma. Nicholas Gilman chimes in on his blog, Good Food in Mexico City.

My amiga the ever adventurous DC-based writer Judy Leaver is learning Spanish in Tulum.

David Lida says Federico Gama is the best photojournalist working in Mexico City today.

Burro Hall is still reporting on the usual wackiness. (Hey, karma police, the guy has an elderly pug.)

COMMENTS always welcome.