A Brilliant Legacy: Abraham Ángel at the DMA

Tarra Gaines·
Dallas/Ft WorthVisual Art
·

Sometimes the drama of an artist’s life can overshadow the art itself. Case in point, Mexican Modernist painter Abraham Ángel, whose paintings are featured in almost every book or exhibition devoted to the period. Yet the beauty, complexity and creative vision of the actual artwork sometimes gets lost in the tragic story of Ángel’s early death at age 19 and the fact that only 20 of his paintings survive.

Ángel’s art cannot be separated from his life, but the Dallas Museum of Art’s new exhibition Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction (on view through Jan. 28, 2024) spotlights the artwork, while also examining how his life influenced his extraordinary vision and depiction of Mexico in the 1920s. The first survey of its kind in 35 years and the first ever in the United States, Wonder and Seduction features 19 works by Ángel, along with important pieces by some of his contemporaries, including mentor Adolfo Best Maugard and Ángel’s romantic partner, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano.

The exhibition’s curator, Dr. Mark A. Castro says he dreamed about organizing an Ángel exhibition for many years, and the DMA was quick to agree.

“What drew us was the immense quality of his paintings, which are incredibly compelling and moving. But they also often offer social commentary on the changes that are happening in Mexico from the perspective of a young person who is living in the capitol, who is queer, living with his partner in this kind of bohemian circle of friends,” says Castro.

Ángel painted some dedicated landscapes, but the majority of the surviving paintings are portraits, usually within an intriguing sometimes seductive landscape. Even a painting of a subject indoors will reveal sprawling green fields and a Modernist, pink-clouded sky beyond a window.

Castro uses the beguiling Portrait of Cristina Crespo as an example of Ángel’s ability to paint a character study amid a rich landscape while also using the images to depict the rapid social and cultural changes in Mexico after the Revolution. Crespo sits looking “boldly” at the viewer as both the powerful center of the painting and as an intersection between two distinct landscapes, one rural the other urban.

“He’s married who she is, this modern woman, with the change that is happening across Mexico at this moment,” explains Castro. “The country is modernizing. It is urbanizing at an incredible rate, especially in Mexico City. You’re seeing behind her this kind of transition from the past to the future, the old to the new.”

Castro notes that in choosing to paint a woman in this landscape, Ángel also might be making a point about the people who are influenced by this great societal movement, as well as those contributing to those changes.

“He’s put her at the kind of inflection point of modernization, almost as if to say: That path from the past to the future, it goes through women like this.”

I asked if Ángel used his art to make critical commentary on Mexican society or was he primarily observing and then depicting those changes around him. Castro says while not overtly political, Ángel likely made conscious choices in what and how he painted the world around him.

“By observing and turning those observations into works of art, I think he is offering commentary. I don’t believe him necessarily to have been a political painter with an agenda for this work; however, in choosing to paint what he chose to paint and doing the kind of work he chose to do, that evokes certain kinds of political agendas.”

The exhibition’s title references the last major book on Ángel by Luis Mario Schneider who wrote that seeing the paintings created an experience between wonder and seduction. This is also the experience Castro hopes for those DMA visitors who come to the exhibition knowing little about Ángel.

“I would tell people to let the work do its magic on them because it will.”

And for those already seduced by the sorrow of Ángel’s life and death, Castro hopes the paintings themselves give us a new perspective on that story’s ending.

“I think it’s a great opportunity to punctuate that narrative and not let the end of his story be one of tragedy but instead be one of endurance. His work is still celebrated and still creating a sensation and attracting attention almost a hundred years after his death, that’s the legacy. The legacy for me is the work.”

—TARRA GAINES

Tarra Gaines

Tarra Gaines is a writer and teacher in Houston.