El gran obstaculo

Date: 1936

Medium: Linocut

Dimensions (cm.): 28.1 x  x 39.4

Alternate titles: Unknown

Published edition: Unknown

Contemporary publication: Unknown

References: Academia de Artes 1828; Exposición de Homenaje 357, Méndez INBA 59

Commentary: In the late 1930s, perhaps influenced by Surrealism, Méndez began to make images with more fantastic characteristics than previous work. In a linoleum block print from 1936, El gran obstáculo (The Great Obstacle), a gigantic fist grows out of a desolate field to block the progress of an advancing tank. The figures in the tank represent capitalism, fascism and corrupt labor unionism using specific images: a top-hatted figure, with a dollar sign on his hat, a man in a pork-pie hat with the letters, ARM, and a man with a pear-shaped face, a caricature of the corrupt labor leader, Luis Morones, at this time associated with Calles. Here Méndez quoted a section of Rivera’s 1926 mural cycle at Chapingo, in which Rivera portrayed a giant red fist emerging from the ground. Like Méndez, Rivera painted the fist as a symbol of protest, although his image is more iconic and less narrative than Méndez’s print. However, both symbols are synecdochal evocations of the same idea, the hand standing for the militancy of the workers. The extreme contrast of scale and the dramatic symbolism in the giant fist in El gran obstáculo set this print apart from Méndez’s earlier work. The image represents a new direction for the artist, who followed this one with two similar images of 1937, La protesta and Tierra de chicle, which make use of the same kinds of magical realist strategies. (Deborah Caplow)

Catalogue record number: 391