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No Surrealismo aqui André Breton, the pope of surrealism, was probably well intentioned in claiming Mexican art and culture for surrealism, but his reasons for doing so were dubious. He admired, for instance, the pictures of Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), the popular Mexican graphic artist and journalist; Posada and surrealism, in fact, have little in common. In the 1939 introduction to his Anthology of Black Humor, Breton discussed Posada (equating his use of humor to the surrealist painter and collagist Max Ernst and others) and Mexico. Breton claimed that Posada represented the pure form of “black humor” and that Mexico, with its “superb funeral play things” (referring to the toys used in Day of the Dead celebarations), was the “chosen land of black humor.” Mexico, he famously said, was the surrealist country, par excellance. But Posada’s accomplishments were achieved long before Breton classified surrealism, and his work differs in compelling ways from the pictures of the European surrealists. Posada’s work was popular and widely distributed. The surrealists’ cunning,dream-based images were not. Posada depicted the realities of daily life—its murders, suicides, natural catastrophes, robberies, and grotesques such as freak births or children kidnappers. The surrealists’s images deliberately resisted the rational world of everyday life. Perhaps Breton equated Posada’s work with the discontented European intellectuals’ return to the inner, indeterminate world of the self, liberated from the restrictions of reason and science. By doing so, Breton was missrepresenting Posada’s work and, by extension, Mexican art and culture. What was urrealistically true for France did not make it true for Mexico. —Rupert Garcia, from his forthcoming book, Rivalries of the Avant-Garde: Mexican Painting and Surrealism, 1910-1950. Garcia’s paintings have appeared in major museums and galleries around the world. He graduated from Berkeley with a master’s degree in art history in 2001.
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