Zona Maco, the Mexico City art fair that opened earlier this week, has flooded
my Instagram feed with images of long-table lunches, multicolored booths, and special events held around the city, which has become an art destination over the past several years. The pandemic certainly accelerated interest in Mexico City, where a number of Americans took refuge during that time. But the city has a long history as an art capital, dating to the female surrealists who lived there during the 1940s and are now in vogue, or Elizabeth Catlett, the artist who
taught there for decades and whose retrospective just closed at the Brooklyn Museum. Meanwhile, as many museums do when a well-established fair lures so many art world professionals to town, the Museo Jumex opened a retrospective. This one is Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional. 

For a number of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that I just don’t do well at altitude, I did not
go to Zona Maco. But to mark the occasion, I’m writing about Mexico City’s Orozco show as well as a new show at London’s Royal Academy of Art: Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, which traces the unique path of 10 representative modern artists. 

Don’t mistake my intention here: I’m not trying to flatten the distance and differences between Mexico and Brazil, or between Orozco and his South
American modernist predecessors. Instead, Zona Maco’s appeal as a vanguard space where art and design converge provides a convenient and connective excuse to appreciate the extraordinary range and vitality of what we consider art.

Orozco emerged in the 1990s, the child of two Mexican artists; he moved to
Spain because he found the art education in Mexico too conservative, and has since lived in a number of cities around the globe. In many ways, he is a fairly representative postmodern artist—his work is syncretic and worldly, and it speaks with a vocabulary that is truly international. He also makes so many different kinds of pieces—from whale skeletons to tabletops filled with objects to oval billiard tables with no pockets—that it’s impossible to categorize him. One of his most famous works is
a surgically reduced Citroën DS, narrowed by a third but otherwise eerily intact. 

According to curator Briony Fer, who worked closely with Orozco to assemble, organize, and present the 300 objects in this show, the artist views himself primarily as sculptor—“which presumes a very expansive sense of what sculpture is,” as Fer wrote in an accompanying booklet. Be that as it may, some of the artist’s best works are paintings that mix his interest
in rules-based outcomes with abstraction, or simply overlay geometric patterns on photographs or maps with striking and memorable results.

 Gabriel Orozco, Dark Wave (2006). Photo: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR
Estudio)

As if Orozco’s output weren’t already difficult enough to categorize, the show
adds yet another element to complicate any taxonomy. The Jumex retrospective is organized not chronologically, but rather in stratified layers based on the artist’s own “groupings of material objects in time and space.” The top floor is “floating, aerated and streamlined matter.” One flight below is “vegetal, an entanglement of life-matter, ranging from the primordial through to the artifice of gardens.” The ground floor is “an aquarium but also … a ground of action, leading onto the
dry world of the terrace that is also a sculpture garden.” Beneath all of this is a basement gallery that is meant to function as the “compost, a composite of ideas and voices.” In case you haven’t been paying attention, the intent here is to create an ecosystem of air, earth, and water where Orozco’s ideas can circulate—or the viewer can circulate within them.

If all of that is too abstract and high-minded for you, the
simple beauty of Orozco’s objects makes it easy to jettison the lofty concepts and simply enjoy the atavistic pleasures of his river stones carved with circles and lines, or his found objects arranged in forms that reflect his interest in geometry or have recursive geometric forms painted on them.

The Royal Academy of Arts’ new show of 130 works by 10 artists who define
Brazilian modernism provides the other bookend to understanding how modernity emerged in Latin American art. Whereas Orozco is a conceptual artist, these Brazilians—five with formal training and five whom we would still think of as outsider or self-taught artists—forged a distinctive modernism that set up the neo-concrete abstraction that Brazil is best known for. 

Organized by the Zentrum Paul Klee,
the Royal Academy’s show began five years ago when the team of curators worked on a large, three-venue Paul Klee retrospective in Brazil. The huge public response to Klee in Brazil provoked the museum to mount a show that would introduce Brazilian modern artists from the first half of the 20th century to European viewers. The rest of us could use some of the same education.  

The Royal Academy isn’t new to exhibiting works
by these artists. In 1944, it hosted the first, and probably still the largest, show of Brazilian modern art in Britain. Then, 168 works were offered for sale, with funds supporting Royal Air Force veterans. Four paintings by three artists from that original show are included in the current one, the R.A.’s current president, Rebecca Salter, proudly writes in the exhibition catalogue.

As the catalogue notes, Brazilian modernism
emerged in two almost contradictory phases. The first was a group of wealthy Brazilians who went to study art in Europe and came back deeply affected by expressionism and European modernism’s juxtaposition of a frenzied, enervated urban life with the fantasy of the unspoiled immediacy of indigenous life. The show documents artists like Anita Malfatti, who studied in Berlin but returned to Brazil in 1914 to find that her family and local critics were scandalized by her embrace of
expressionism. A decade later, she settled in Paris briefly before returning to a slightly less hostile São Paulo. Vicente do Rego Monteiro also shuttled between Paris and Brazil, equally pursuing writing and painting. 

Tarsila do Amaral may seem the most strikingly familiar to viewers accustomed to contemporary art. Several of her works from the late 1920s bear a
striking resemblance to the distorted limbs and body parts of Louise Bonnet. A coffee heiress, do Amaral fled a failed marriage to become an artist and eventually studied in Paris. Her landscape paintings will also be familiar to collectors who recently fell for the Italian painter Salvo. 

Candido Portinari, also born on a coffee plantation, was one of the few
Brazilian modernists trained in Europe with a working-class background. There’s also Lithuania-born Lasar Segall, who moved to São Paulo briefly as a young man but returned a decade later after having been active as an expressionist painter in Berlin. Still other figures included in the show are Flávio de Carvalho, Geraldo de Barros, and Rubem Valentim.

Lasar Segall, Banana Plantation (1927). Courtesy of Royal Academy of Arts

The other half of Brazilian modernism, the exhibition contends, emerged from a
new generation who had not studied in Europe. Around 1950, that second generation of modern artists began to address “themes characteristic of the Brazilian context,” especially race, religion, and work. Reversing the modernist fantasy of an unspoiled natural state, these Brazilian painters, especially some of the self-taught artists like Alfredo Volpi and Djanira, were able to incorporate Brazil’s close proximity to indigenous people and
cultures into their increasingly modern and sometimes abstract art. That allows the show to chart a path from expressionism to abstraction that is familiar to European eyes, but also entirely novel.  

Both Brazil’s and Mexico’s contributions to modern and contemporary art are hardly unrecognized, but the increasing depth of our exposure and understanding of their art history continues to be a source of fascination
and inspiration to further study.

The Sotheby’s Stradivarius Julie
wrote about sold for $11.25 million today.

Also, The Atlantic is reporting that President
Trump is planning to dismiss multiple members of the board of the Kennedy Center, possibly even replacing Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein, the current board chairman, with himself. 

Talk Sunday,

M