GUNTHER GERZSO (1915-2000)

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Gerzso's Mastery Richly Detailed at Mexican Fine Arts Center

By Alan G. Artner
Chicago Tribune, March 21, 2004

A year ago the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum mounted a group exhibition of 20th century Mexican art that beautifully made the institution more visible. Near the end of the show was a group of abstract paintings by a former set designer who had worked with the collector, Jacques Gelman, in the Mexican film industry. That artist is now the subject of the richest solo exhibition to appear at the Center (1852 W. 19th Street.) "Risking the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso."

The artist is not, however, the subject of a personality cult such as the one that attends the "star" of last year's show, Frida Kahlo. Neither his life nor art was sensational, and both were carried on out of the glaring spotlight.

Although Gerzso is regarded as Mexico's leading abstract painter in the 20th Century, the present exhibition is his first major show in decades and serves as an unusual re-evaluation just four years after his death.

Additionally, it's the first retrospective to have had access to a large cache of works from the collection of Thomas Ireland, a friend of the artist when he studied in the United States at the celebrated Cleveland Play House in the mid-1930s. These early pieces, more of which appear in a complementary exhibition at the Aldo Castillo Gallery, substantiate tendencies Gerzso later minimized or expressly denied, so to have them on view suggests that this career-long survey is at long last probably close to complete.

Such completeness clearly shows the trajectory of Gerzso's art, which departed from traditional Mexican subjects to embrace a Surrealism that unpredictably developed into a personal form of abstraction with links to the Mexican past. For much of his long life - Gerzso dies at age 85 - that trajectory made him seem to Mexicans an outsider whose work did not seem "Mexican" enough. But now his blend of European education and Mexican rootedness may be seen to have given the work a largeness that goes beyond any one place to command the world's attention, finally and solidly.

Gerzso was born in 1915 in Mexico to a German mother and a Jewish father. The father died when Gerzso was barely 6 months old, and the mother soon remarried. The stepfather was a German jeweler who moved the family to Europe when Gerzso was 7. They returned to post-revolutionary Mexico two years later, by which time the mural movement promoting the ideals of the revolution had taken hold.

By the end of the 1920s, Gerzso's mother had divorced his stepfather and Gerzso had been sent to live in Switzerland with Hans Wendland, his uncle. Wendland was an influential art historian, dealer, collector and educator. In recent years his reputation has suffered because of later involvement with the Nazis. But at the time Wendland became a father figure to Gerzso, his connoisseurship provided the highest example and his collection, as Gerzso said, "a veritable art museum."

The Great Depression forced Wendland to sell his estate and collection, though he intended Gerzso to continue his classical humanist education in Prussia. Gerzso, however, protested and returned to Mexico, where he attended a German school while teaching himself art technique. His focus became set and costume design, a practical realm in which he would excel for decades. His earliest period of drawing and painting began while serving as a student assistant to a director of stage design in Cleveland.

Gerzso said his first "true" painting was Two Women from 1940, which depicts with modern crispness and gentle color a conversation taking place on what appears to be a raked stage. But earlier unacknowledged drawings often are stronger, showing the fantastic influence of Jean Cocteau as well as the expressionism of George Grosz. Set designs also indicate a political awareness that before might only have been assumed from a deathbed portrait of Leon Trotsky.

In the early drawings, too, treatments of the human figure show Gerzso's attraction to Surrealism, which would deepen through close association with Europeans who fled to Mexico during World War II. His paintings from the early 1940s explore both abstract and representational varieties of Surrealism, and they're so derivative that the singular style Gerzso began to develop in the late '40s takes a viewer by surprise.

The first examples are like a kind of landscape viewed from the air. Irregular polygons of a singular dominate color - brown or green - form what appear to be vast complexes of architecture. One of them Gerzso calls Lost City. Others seem literally lost, having fallen through the crust of the earth into enormous sinkholes. The artist reveals them from a godlike perspective. Gradually, more literal associations drop away, with a sense emerging that we look through layers of time at Mexico's pre-Columbian past.

That much fills the first of the Center's two temporary exhibition halls, which are distant enough from each other, not to be able to smooth over the break. Last year the show from the Gelman collection negotiated the gap uneasily. This time the first, smaller, hall introduces Gerzso's abstract style; then it's shown after having reached maturity in the vaster spaces of the second. The artist's accomplished variations on his theme thus roll out to maximum effect, without interruption.

Evolution of Work

As the work proceeds, Gerzso's color becomes bolder and his forms more hard-edged. That is accompanied by two radical shifts, first, from the overview to the detail and, second, from above to in front. So what we see in the mature work of suggests clasps of wall fragments that conceal or give access to other fragments set apart by differences in texture, color and shape. Sometimes the differences are blaring, sometimes hushed.

The architectural association never quite goes away despite the work's pure abstraction. And individual pieces give hints of the human body and the natural landscape as well. All are evoked rather than expressly stated, and such evocations fairly tumble from the show, each distinct from the others yet part of the same imaginary archeological expedition.

More than 120 works are in the show, with about two-thirds being pure abstractions. Such is their variety, however, that only in the final room do we feel the artist's inventiveness flagging. The juxtaposition of works on walls painted with colors related to those in paintings ensures a fairly uniform buzz throughout, convincing us that a high reputation can, at time, actually survive prolificacy.

Gerzso said late in life that all his works were surreal, which suggests something of the mystery he sought to impart on canvas. Because it's a mystery that takes place under bright light in shallow spaces, it proves difficult to convey, and many will miss it altogether. But Gerzso's mastery is not simply as a mosaicist or decorator. Through the finest adjustments of shape and color and texture he succeeds in cheerfully giving a glimpse of divine order as well as the darker side of things hidden and perhaps in decay.

It's a strong achievement, persuasively outlined in a memorable exhibition and admirable catalogue that surely will become the primary English-language source on the artist.