In which way is Indian romanticism healthy?
Master Dario said it already: “Who is it that isn’t a romantic?” In the first place, what is Indian constitutes the only beauty produced by the location where it is born. Consequently, it is superior intrinsically and extrinsically to any subsequent product. The half-breed and the white in America are not a happy biological product. Everything in America that is valuable and significant is rooted in the Indian world, and just as the work of giant types like Walt Whitman, Mexican painting needs to be called giant. When it comes to that which doesn’t contain an indigenous basis, Mr. Papini was right: if you could show me a single Latin or Hispanic-American that is essentially original, I would go barefoot on a pilgrimage to ask forgiveness from the Virgin of Guadalupe. It should be well understood that by its own abstract characteristics, the poetic emotion can’t be localized in the soil that produces it, even when I can find works here of as high a quality as anywhere else in the world. For us, without the Indian component, it wouldn’t be possible to be original. America is a composite of voices emitted by our Jewish forefathers when they discovered the Antillean coasts after a time of navigating terrors. It is also a Toltec term (amerika) that means “country with mountains in its center.” That’s exactly what our continent is like. As a consequence of that (or without a romantic consequence), in these lands all that which isn’t by its root and base indigenous, and which doesn’t project itself in time as a national kind of indigenous nature, embracing past, present, and future, will lack life and is of no value.
What is art for?
Art is meant to produce in a human being an aesthetic emotion, a unique phenomenon due to the proper and complete provocation that, passing through the neuro-sympathetic system, moves its adjacent glands so that these may yield their secretions to the organism. This is as necessary to life as those products that feed the digestive system. In consequence, if art is not made, there is a danger of death.
Why are retablos so vital?
Because being paintings by the people and for the people, the folk condense in them what remains of their past genius and all that it can be with what remains.
Your concept of Mexican music?
The only Mexican music is that made using the teponaxtli, the huéhuetl, the tlapanhuéhuetl, the kena, the percussive gourds, etc. when Mexicans use them. Mexican music is also the transposition of a pre-Hispanic musical core into the present day, meaning the works of Carlos Chavez, not only his marvelous Sinfonía India, not only his H.P. [Horse-Power: Ballet Symphony, —edit.], but also his more classical works where he arrives at a purity equal to the palaces of Mitla. Chavez is one of the most ignored Mexicans due to the fact that, as has invariably happened throughout the history of art, those artists who express the life of humankind most completely and profoundly, go through a period when those same masses reject them, sometimes violently, and come to hate the essential and superior image of themselves contained in that art, which is, after all, their very expression. Sometimes people are frightened, or offended, before the real and true image of themselves which art has uncovered. That is why there are so many people who not only reject Chavez’ value as a creator, but refuse to recognize his role as one of the great builders of our contemporary culture. Neither do I undervalue other artists in close historical proximity to Chavez: men such as Silvestre Revueltas and Blas Galindo. I dearly love their music. Their work is flesh of the flesh, bones of the bones and nerves of the nerves of our Mexican painting, since one could not exist without the others.
And your concept of Mexican architecture?
Mexican architecture ended in the last days of the pre-Hispanic world (architecture, by the way, which one shouldn’t call Mexican but Anahuatlaca; in other words, American). We could say that it survived potentially in rural homes and in huts of elemental though perfect beauty, and which saw a geographic resurgence conquering the entire globe, as architects of Central Europe stated when gathered in Berlin in 1928. Fortunately today, after the lamentable grotesqueries threatening to convert our city into one of the most horrible on earth with that vulgarity, pretentiousness and ugliness comparable only with San Antonio, Texas, or pseudo-Arizona, a new generation of young architects is coming up showing evident talent, some of them true geniuses. They continue cultivating in Mexico the seeds that the giant of the north throws at us by the fistful, but using our own modality.
What is your concept of Mexican sculpture?
There is a man who began sculpting when he was 52 years old and a porter and cook at the School of Painting in the open air in Coyoacan, after rising from peonage to managing a hacienda. At 72 he had realized ten magnificent sculptures. That man can be assumed to be the only such affirmation to come from that weird desert that droughts and floods had brought, precisely where for over two thousand years the greatest sculpture in the world had been made. Today, he is an extraordinary individual, a good medical doctor, curing children and workers without charge. He had begun in obscurity to simply make sculptures, which, in their plastic value, are neither better nor worse than what was made thousands of years ago. Seeing his work we are aware that they are the same since Anahuac continues to exist. Their natural contents are not the cosmology of the Popol Vuh, but the dialectic material of Marx, Engels and Joseph Stalin. The name of that sculptor is Francisco Arturo Marín. All that is needed is the example of a generative germ from our soil for the entire territory to be covered by similar items. There are bright youth from whom we can expect a renaissance of our sculpture.
What about Mexican poetry?
I like the songs of Netzahualcóyotl, the lyrics of indigenous songs that have survived, the mestizo poems of Ramón López Velarde and the very Mexican poetry of the great word-painter Carlos Pellicer. I also like the poetry of that genius, Guadalupe Amor.
Can you give us a key thought that biographers and historians of the future can quote from this work, since you yourself will have chosen it to encompass your life?
I could adopt the motto of Charles of Bourbon: “I had no need of hope to begin with, nor of success to persevere.”
How was your childhood?
My childhood was that of a child without a childhood.
What about your awakening, your youth, your first amazement?
From the age of three to six years, I drew machines and battles. Most times I’d invent the first mentioned, not as an image for the sake of the image, but as an expression of the actual object I had devised. I would draw imaginary battles based on the tales my father told of his campaigns against the French intervention and Empire. For a long time I refused to draw mountains in spite of the fact that I lived surrounded by them in Guanajuato, the reason being that I didn’t know them from within.
Asked by my father why I didn’t draw them, I explained the reason and he patiently took me to visit as many mines as he could. I was fascinated, and full of excitement, I went down using the winches, walking the galleries, bumping into rocks with my feet. After that experience the locomotives I drew at five years of age went across bridges and through tunnels while the soldiers of my battles fought above them.
That same need made me fall madly in love with mechanical toys. There was only one store where they were sold, and it is still there in Guanajuato. The Flower Castle sold candy, pastries, and toys. The proprietor then was a Frenchman, don Enrique Regnie, who had come to Mexico as a conscript among many of the invading armies. He was my father’s friend and I was the rapt audience to the accounts of their campaigns. Each time he received a new toy to sell, he would place it strategically in a showcase in the window and I, who was forever checking the store, would catch sight of the novelty and, if I liked it (I only went for machines), I would begin to court the toy as if it were a girl; I’d feel feverish and would blush as I went back and forth in front of that case, glancing sideways at it. Then I would look at it for hours until I could declare my love. I’d march into The Flower Castle and, without