“The Dawn of Modernism: Early Twentieth-Century Mexican Photography” at Throckmorton Fine Art

Catch it before ends September 11^th. Throckmorton Fine Art is pleased to offer an exhibit of the work of six celebrated photographers who were active in Mexico during the early twentieth century. This period was buffeted by strong political, social, and artistic “crosswinds.” The tumultuous Mexican Revolution, from 1910-1917, upended political institutions, and introduced— often brusquely—new ideas and norms about state and society. The Mexican Revolution also derailed a formal, elitist, and academic approach to art. Meanwhile, from Europe came news of avant-garde experiments like Dada, Cubism, abstraction, and Surrealism. Painting in Mexico came to be dominated by the muralist movement, which combined realism, primitivism, myth, and politics. 

In photography, there was more play, more experimentation, and, seemingly, more room for individual development and expression. Pictorialism, dominant since the 1890s, with its soft-focus quality and sentimental narrative, no longer seemed to resonate, but its influence sometimes lingered, or merged quietly into a new approach, that of modernism. With modernism there were sharp-focused compositions, often with abstract motifs, fragmentation, distortion, and the highlighting or even estrangement of objects. And in play, too, was the very intensity of Mexico itself.