Homenaje póstumo a Silvestre Revueltas

Date: c. 1954

Medium: Type metal engraving

Dimensions (cm.): 8.8 x 9.7

Alternate titles: Homenaje a Revueltas; Silvestre Revueltas muerto

Published edition: Unknown

Contemporary publication: Guillermo Contreras, Silvestre Revueltas, genio atormentado (Mexico City: n.p., 1954), p. 101

References: Exposición de Homenaje 451; Prignitz 1442

Commentary: Méndez made the memorial print, Homenaje póstumo a Silvestre Revueltas, one of eleven images the TGP produced for the book Silvestre Revueltas, genio atormentado, by Guillermo Contreras. Revueltas (1899-1940), Mexican composer and leftist activist, was a close friend of Méndez, as were his brothers, writer José Revueltas (1914-1976) and painter Fermín Revueltas (1902-1935). The shrouded figure lies in the foreground, attended by mourners, as in Kollwitz’s woodcut Memorial for Karl Liebknecht of 1919, and in Méndez’s Asesinato de Jesús Menéndez. Méndez used an extremely close-up, detailed rendering of Revueltas’s face and chest, and did not include any references to Revueltas’s political life or musical career. In the background, above and behind the dead composer, three seated women in shawls bend their heads in a poignant display of grief. In this work Méndez may have been referring to the painting Tata Jesu Cristo by Francisco Goitia. Méndez probably also drew on a Posada’s Llegada del cadáver del C. General Manuel Gonzáles (The Arrival of the Body of General Manuel González) when creating both Silvestre Revueltas Muerto and Asesinato de Jesús Menéndez. Posada’s print portrays the subject in the near foreground, and the face and chest of the dead man are the focus of the image, as they are in both of Méndez’s images. (Deborah Caplow)

Cataloging note: Label on an impression held by the Museo Nacional de la Estampa, Mexico City, gives the medium as linocut ("grabado en linóleo"). Other sources give it as type metal engraving ("grabado en metal tipo").

Catalogue record number: 400