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Permanent Collections — Mexican Modern
The museum's Mexican Modern Masters collection includes selections from the Pollak Collection, assembled over 30 years to represent many of the most important movements and artists in 20th-century Mexican art.
Harry Pollak and his late wife Sharley Woolover Stevens began their collection of paintings, sculpture, mixed media and works on paper in the early 1960s, traveling frequently to Mexico and often getting to know the artists.
The collection conveys their love of Mexico, its people and its art. It presents a fascinating blend of mythology, history, ritual and folklore, in a variety of styles and techniques. One of the exhibitions's strengths the inclusion of works by the great Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera.
Diego Rivera, Enrrielando, Muscú (Sawing Rails, Moscow) (1927) charcoal |
The Mexican Revolution (1910-17) created conditions that encouraged a new, accessible, public art to educate and to inspire. The results often combined progressive, even radical, politics and visual styles inspired by the European avant-garde, such as cubism. This is most evident in the large mural cycles of the 1920s and 1930s commissioned for public buildings and museums in both Mexico and the United States from Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera. Their dramatic frescoes and paintings on an architectural scale, mixing historical and contemporary themes, exerted a powerful influence on ambitious artists everywhere, particularly the future American abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to the work of the great muralist generation, the Pollak Collection is also distinguished by select groups of work by Rufino Tamayo, Francisco Zúñiga and Miguel Covarrubias and his wife Rosa Rolando. Another highlight is the group of 19 ex-voto panels — simply rendered scenes on tin or canvas, divine intercessions in the lives of ordinary people. The Mexican Modern Masters collection complements the museum's American Modernism collection. Together, the two collections show individual artists responding to tradition and modernity.
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José Clemente Orozco La Cortina Roja (The Red Curtain), (c. 1912) watercolor and pencil on paper |
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