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Images of Mexico: The Contribution of Mexico to 20th Century Art
Erika Billeter (editor)
*Images of Mexico: The Contribution of Mexico to 20th Century Art* is the catalogue of a landmark exhibition that set out to show just how much modern Mexican art gave to the wider century. Organized by the Swiss curator Erika Billeter, the show traveled from the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt to Vienna and then to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1988, gathering muralists, painters, and photographers — Rivera, Orozco, Kahlo, Álvarez Bravo and many more — alongside the folk and pre-Hispanic traditions that fed them. The hefty catalogue pairs full-color plates with essays by an international roster of scholars, making it both an exhibition record and a substantial reference on twentieth-century Mexican art. For readers drawn to Mexican modernism, it remains a rich, image-heavy survey of an extraordinarily fertile artistic moment.
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The editor
Erika Billeter (1927–2011) was a German-born Swiss art historian, curator, and writer, known for ambitious international exhibitions and a particular commitment to Latin American art and to photography. She conceived and edited this project, drawing together contributions from a large group of Mexican and European scholars.
The book
Running to more than four hundred pages, the catalogue accompanied an exhibition mounted in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Dallas across 1987–88. It surveys twentieth-century Mexican art in breadth — the great muralists, easel painters, and photographers — while setting that work against the folk and pre-Hispanic heritage that shaped it, all supported by essays, a chronology, and artists' biographies.
How to read it
As with most serious exhibition catalogues, it is part picture book and part scholarly reference. It rewards both the browser turning through the plates and the reader who works through the essays for a fuller account of Mexican modernism's origins and reach.
For more context
Readers can explore the Dallas Museum of Art's records of the exhibition and go on to focused studies of individual figures such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Frida Kahlo.
Sources
- Type
- Exhibition catalog
- Author / Maker
- Erika Billeter (editor)
- Publisher
- Dallas Museum of Art
- Place of publication
- Dallas, Texas
- Year
- 1988
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine