La Revista de América

Date: 1927

Medium: Woodcut

Dimensions (cm.): Information to be added

Published edition: Unknown

Contemporary publication: La revista de América, 1, no 2 (31 diciembre 1927): cover

References: Information to be added

Commentary: Méndez created this woodblock print for the Mexico City magazine La revista de América in 1927, to accompany a brief article about the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who had flown to Mexico on a goodwill tour that year. Méndez depicted a group of people looking at a display of airplanes overhead, their heads re tilted toward the sky in awe,  woman and a boy in the foreground; they are campesinos (country people) as seen by the clothing they wear. Significantly, Méndez’s woodcut combines the traditional life of Mexico with the recent technology of aviation, and thus old and the new, and the indigenous with the international, a practice that came to characterize many of the prints Méndez and his comrades created from the 1920s to the 1960s. 

Ironically—in view of Lindbergh’s later unsavory political role as a Nazi sympathizer—the magazine also includes Méndez’s portrait of Lindbergh with an admiring text about the aviator, juxtaposed with a paragraph in praise of the Nicaraguan revolutionary general César Augusto Sandino. This moment of seeming innocence in 1927 holds within it the seeds of the future direction the artist would take, as he entered the world of political art that included both national and global themes, and expressed the tensions between tradition and innovation. (Deborah Caplow)

Catalogue record number: 801