Works by one of Mexico’s most unorthodox personalities, artist Gerardo Murillo (“Dr. Atl”), are gracing several rooms of the stately Cabañas Cultural Institute and should be considered a “must” by anyone with more than just a passing interest in this nation’s art history.
Born in the San Juan de Dios barrio of Guadalajara in 1875, Murillo features high up on Mexico’s artistic hierarchy, partly because his talents were not solely restricted to art – he was also an accomplished author, poet, explorer, philosopher, historian, geologist and volcanologist.
His interests seemed never ending. His greatest, a love of nature and the outdoors, led him to spend hour after hour visiting and studying Mexico’s volcanos, which he painted with gleeful abandon. At least one-third of the works on view in the Cabañas exhibit are colorful representations of the glories of Mexico’s countryside. Easily the most dramatic series of paintings – his “epiphany,” one critic called them – show the eruption of the Paricutín volcano in Michoacan in 1943. It was during this event that he injured a leg that later had to be amputated.
The traditional image Mexicans have of Murillo comes from old black-and-white newsreels – some included in the exhibit – showing a craggy, one-legged, bearded man nestled in a rolling landscape, easel and brush in hand, earnestly dabbing paint onto a canvass. In several interviews for television conducted as his life approached its close, he comes across as world wise and world weary, but with that spark in the eye that few really creative people ever lack.
Murillo was anything but a sedate young man. A few years after moving to Mexico City to study art, he received a grant from President Porfirio Diaz to continue his apprenticeship in Europe. The exposure to the “old world” at the dawn of the 20th century transformed his life. He enrolled in the University of Rome to study philosophy and became involved with Italian socialists, once receiving a terrific beating at the hands of police during a political demonstration.
During this time he was baptized by Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones (with champagne, no less) as “Dr. Atl” – the Náhuatl world for water and a reference, he later explained, to his experience crossing the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean. His art blossomed and in 1900 he won a silver medal for a self portrait (he produced many during his lifetime) at the Salon de Paris.
Murillo returned to Mexico after six years in Europe and started teaching at the Academia de San Carlos, where he had earlier been a student. His political activism intensified, and in 1906 he issued a manifesto calling for the development of a monumental public art movement in Mexico. This became a precursor to the mural movement of the 1920s, although Murillo showed scant interest himself in the muralist genre.
Murillo braved the ocean again in 1911 after the dictator Diaz was ousted and Mexico slipped into revolutionary turmoil. He remained in Paris until Victoriano Huerta’s coup d’état brought him scurrying home to join up with the Constitutionalists of Venustiano Carranza. In July 1914, under instructions from Carranza, Murillo met with the “Caudillo del Sur,” Emiliano Zapata, to ask him to unite with the Constitutionalist forces. After accepting the proposal, Zapata remarked that Murillo was the only person he had ever met allied to Carranza whom he trusted.
Convinced of the righteousness of the subsequent institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution, Murillo sided with the government’s anticlerical forces in the Cristero (Holy) War of the 1920s. He had short shrift with Marxism, viewed Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas as a communist and openly embraced fascism and Hitler’s rise to power. Most of Mexico’s historical analysis of Murillo’s life tends to brush over the implication that he was anti-Semitic, as he is known to have spoken out about the dangers of the “Jewish conspiracy.”
Full of contradictions, Murillo was a dreamer who saw himself primarily as a “citizen of the world” rather than a Mexican. Later in his life he created a utopian plan to build a city dedicated to the arts and sciences, to be known as Olinka or the Centro Internacional de la Cultura. He drew up plans for temples to the cults of man and woman, museums, a clinic specializing in heart-related diseases, as well as institutes to research solar energy and the conquest of space. The Jalisco government showed some interest but his fantasies came to nothing.
Murillo had many lovers but his tempestuous and brief affair with the artist and poet Carmen Mondragón (he was the one who named her Nahui Ollín, a symbol of Aztec renewal meaning “four movement,” the symbol of earthquakes) is perhaps the most publicized. Hailing from
a prominent military family, Mondragón eschewed the social norms of the age and became a daring artist’s model, posing for some of Diego Rivera’s murals, as well as for Tina Modotti, Antonio Garduño, Roberto Montenegro, Matías Santoyo, photographer Edward Weston and, of course, Murillo.
Murillo never married or expressed a desire to have a family, an institution which he sometimes referred to as a “den of prejudice and ambition.”
Murillo died in 1964 at the age of 89. A statute of the artist can be found by the Rotunda of Illustrious Jalisco Citizens in downtown Guadalajara, although his remains lie in a similar monument in Mexico City’s Dolores Cemetery.
While the Cabañas retrospective includes plenty of texts providing background and color to Murillo’s fascinating life, unfortunately none are in English – a faux pas for an institute that charges foreigners twice as much to enter as Mexican citizens.
The exhibit, “Dr. Atl. Rotación cósmica a cincuenta años de su muerte,” at the Cabañas Institute features 34 paintings, 27 drawings, 11 photographs and printed documents, as well as newsreel footage of Muriilo. The Cabañas (at the far end of the Plaza Tapatia in Guadalajara Centro) is open from 10 a.m to 6 p.m. Tuesday to Sunday. Entry is free on Tuesdays. The exhibit will be up through February 2015.