Cuando nace un hombre todos los animales se alegran

Date: 1949

Medium: Lithograph

Dimensions (cm.): 39.0 x 42.7

Alternate titles: Unknown

Published edition: Unknown

Contemporary publication: Unknown

References: Exposición de Homenaje 541

Selected additional references (illustrated): Academia de Artes 1970, cat. 541.

Commentary:  “Cuando nace un hombre todos los animales se alegran,” Cuautla 1945 (“When a Man is Born All the Animals Rejoice,” Cuautla 1945), from 1949, expresses the idea of rebirth, symbolized by the harvest at the year’s end (in Mexico the corn is harvested in the winter.) Méndez made this print as a New Year’s card, a source of income for members of the Taller, all of whom made cards for sale each December during the 1940s and '50s. 

Mariana Yampolsky remembers seeing Méndez make this print, and she recalls that image equated human birth with the birth of the new year.  The print portrays a humble, dilapidated village in the state of Morelos, where a woman has given birth in a small adobe house. The house is open to view, revealing a kind of nativity scene: an iron bedstead, a mother with a baby, a midwife, and religious pictures on the walls. Outside, crows perch on cornstalks with ears of dried corn. Three large coscomates, round thatched granaries traditionally used for storing corn, frame the village in a triangular composition. 

In keeping with Méndez’s increasing versatility and ability to adapt his style to his purposes, this print is very different from his other images. He depicted the house where the birth has taken place with a cut-away device common to portrayals of the stable in Renaissance nativity scenes. The village is filled with odd, complicated details, reminiscent of Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs. Several peculiar scenes of thievery take place: a cat with a chicken in its mouth emerges from the window of the upper story of a house; across the road a fox jumps out of a window with a bone in its mouth; and around the side of that house, by one of the granaries, a dog dressed as a person in a hat, looking like a caricature of a thief, fills a bag with corn that pours out of a hole in the coscomate, loading it onto a horse. Méndez has included an anti-clerical statement in this image, as two sinister, owl-faced figures, dressed in long robes, stand poised to enter the house where the birth has taken place. The taller of the two is dressed as a priest, holding a stole with a cross on it over his arm, and the smaller figure is dressed like an altar boy. The whole village is in a state of disrepair, but human efforts to maintain  life are also in evidence. While the animals, including the priest, steal from the humans, the people are working hard – a man loads corn into the top of the coscomate and another person disappears around a corner carrying a heavy load of harvested cornstalks. 

The print is ambiguous. The year in the title, 1945, corresponds to the end of the war, but Méndez signed his initials and put the date as 1949. The image seems to say that humans are born into the natural world, and provide the food for themselves and the animals around them, but the hopeful symbolism of the print is contradicted by the oddly desolate quality of the cornstalks, the crows and the surreal images of animals in human guise. As a whole, the dark humor of the print points to both the poverty and the endurance of Mexican village life. (Deborah Caplow)

Catalogue record number: 293