Profesor Juan Martínez Escobar (version b)
Date: 1939
Medium: Lithograph
Dimensions (cm.): 29.0 x 20.6 (as published in portfolio)
Variants: This is one of two versions of this lithograph, each with subtle differences from the other. The reason for the two versions is unknown; perhaps the stone was damaged and had to be redrawn.
Alternate titles: La cara de traición; El desenmascarado; Desenmascarado
Published edition:
In portfolio En nombre de Cristo... han asesinado más de 200 maestros. Editorial Gráfica Popular, Mexico City, 1939
Unknown number of impressions outside the edition printed on loose sheets
Contemporary publication: See published edition, above
References: Exposición de Homenaje 364, Méndez INBA 108; Prignitz 395 (these references do not specify which version of this print they refer to).
Commentary: One of the images in En nombre de Cristo, Profesor Juan Martínez Escobar makes use of Surrealist strategies. A worker in cap and overalls, at the head of a mass of ghost-like figures, points to a figure of Jesus holding a dagger. The hands of both the assassin and his accuser are larger than life, and the worker’s hand appears directly in the center of the image. A sinister campesino, wearing a sombrero peers out through the top of Jesus’s head. Eyes play an important role: the eyes of Jesus are downcast, but the murderer and the worker have wide-open eyes, and a sea of staring eyes forms the background of the work. The eyes, some overlapping, others attached to sketchy faces, are a kind of visual metonymy, standing for the witnessing eyes of the world. Méndez employed the device here specifically as a sign for accusation; even the pointing finger of the worker serves to direct his gaze of condemnation toward the assassin, focusing the eyes of the multitude and the viewer as a multiple, accusatory eye. Typical of Méndez’s representations of masses of people, the faces are individualized; the staring eyes have different shapes and their gazes take different directions. This print is another example in which the Surrealist presence in Mexico appears to have influenced Méndez. The many disembodied eyes and the dual identity of the unmasked campesino/Christ reflect the Surrealist interest in bodily fragmentation, and the dreamlike gazes of the multitude are also reminiscent of Surrealist concerns.
The print bears some striking similarities to Orozco’s 1935 lithograph, Las Masas (The Masses) in which Orozco depicted a multitude of tightly massed bodies, their legs and arms moving in Futuristic lines of force. Here the mouths, eyes and pointing hands are repeated with the kind of same Surrealist distortions, but Orozco focused on the mouths of the crowd; the grotesque mouths are a synecdochal reference to demagoguery, to the mindlessness of the masses. (Deborah Caplow)
Catalogue record number: 248
