muralist in the group, who decorated the chapel in Martyrs Park in Havana; and Romero Arciaga (b. 1905), whose paintings of modest social intent are done in Victor Manuel's unadorned style. The other polar figure was Mariano Rodriguez (b. 1912). In 1937, after visits to Paris and Mexico, he joined the Free School of Painting and Sculpture headed by Eduardo Abela (1891-1965). There the uncertainties of the generation active in 1942 found expression in excursions into folk themes and modern European trends. The generation represented by Mariano in 1943 was characteristically eclectic. Works such as Cane Cutters by Mario Carreno, who had received training in Mexico in 1936; The Party by Rene Portocarrero (b. 1912); Musicians by Cundo Bermudez (b. 1914) (pp. 38, 39); Mariano's female bathers; the aggressive scenes of labor unrest which Luis Martinez Pedro (b. 1910) did in 1937; and Antonio Gattorno's (1904-1980) Women with Bananas fall into the category of "the universally commonplace." Nonetheless, they represent the best in Cuban painting of the time. Max Jimenez (Costa Rican, 1900-1947) was an outsider, a littleknown prophet of the changes that art would undergo after World War II. A work such as Waiting at Ariguanabo hints at the explosive force of ethnic and cultural cross-breeding. In 1943 an exhibition of modern Cuban art was presented at the Hispano-Cuban Cultural Institute, under the aegis of David Alfaro Siqueiros, who had just executed a powerful Duco mural entitled Democracy in America. A counterpart to this exhibit was provided in the same year by the first retrospective of the work of Amelia Pelaez (1897-1968), covering the years 1927 to 1943. Her work will be studied in the next chapter. Carlos Henriquez (1900-1957), generally classified as an "irrealist," went to extremes in seeking to define Creole types. The Abduction of the Mulatto Woman, Creole Balladeer, and The Burial of the Cuban Peasant Woman are titles indicative of his recurring themes. Depiction of the Cuban peasant—treated dramatically by Abela, with elusive delicacy by Aristides Fernandez (1904-1934), and with power and romance by Henriquez—was a step toward acceptance of the myth of a mulatto society, as invented by Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) in Paris during the '30s and brought back to Cuba in 1943, the year he painted the extraordinary fetish-women of The Jungle. Mexican Muralism lent direct or indirect support to artists who in the years from 1920 to 1950 displayed an inclination to explore social themes, particularly as they involved Indians, mestizos, Negroes, or mulattoes. At the same time, however, another group of artists was seeking to create an atmosphere propitious to a radical change in the academic imagery of the nineteenth century. The language of plastic expression was their primary concern. The way was open for Latin America to join in the work of updating imagery and renewal in matters of form that has been the characteristic of twentieth-century art.
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• 50 • MEXICAN MURALISM