49 Fun Facts About Mexican Art

Which culture, flourishing from about 1200 BCE, is regarded as Mesoamerica's first great civilization?

The Olmecs' own name for themselves is lost: 'Olmec' is an Aztec word, usually translated 'rubber people', after the rubber tapped in their Gulf Coast lowlands.

The colossal stone heads of Mexico's Gulf Coast were carved from what kind of stone?

Basalt boulders weighing six tons or more were moved from the Tuxtla mountains to sites dozens of kilometres away; how is still unclear, though river rafts are one guess.

Mexico's colossal Gulf Coast stone heads are thought to portray whom?

Rulers, in the leading view: each face is distinct, like a portrait, and each wears its own headgear, perhaps the helmet of a warrior or ballplayer.

Mexico's UNESCO-listed Great Mural rock paintings, with larger-than-life human figures, are found in which region?

Baja California's Sierra de San Francisco shelters them in canyons so hard to reach that the painted figures have stayed remarkably well preserved.

Into which three eras is the Mesoamerican period usually divided?

Pre-Classic, Classic, Post-Classic: the Classic era, about 250 to 900 CE, is when Maya cities and Teotihuacan reached their height, and the other two are simply named around it.

The small clay figurines of early Mexican villages such as Tlatilco mostly depict whom?

Women, often young and wearing elaborate headdresses, dominate these figurines; Tlatilco also produced so many two-headed ones that some researchers have wondered about conjoined twins.

Which Aztec monolith, a carved disc of about 25 tons, was unearthed in Mexico City's main square in 1790?

The Sun Stone is often called the Aztec calendar stone, but its centre tells a creation story: the five successive worlds of the sun in Aztec myth.

On Yaxchilan's Lintel 24, a famed Maya relief, Lady Xoc draws blood by pulling a studded rope through what?

Her tongue: the blood drips onto paper to be burned as an offering, while her husband, the king Shield Jaguar, holds a flaming torch over her.

Which Aztec manuscript, named after the first viceroy, records tribute paid to the ruler?

Codex Mendoza seems never to have reached the Spanish court: French privateers are said to have seized the ship carrying it, and by 1659 it had ended up in Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Which Franciscan friar directed the creation of the Florentine Codex?

Bernardino de Sahagún worked on it with Nahua scholars for decades; after Philip II ordered such writings seized in 1577 it went to Europe, and the Medici library in Florence gave it its name.

Frida Kahlo grew up and died in which Coyoacán house, now a museum of her life?

La Casa Azul, the Blue House, was Kahlo's family home; Rivera gave the house and its contents to be her museum, which opened four years after she died there.

Aztec artisans called amanteca made shields and headdresses from what prized material?

Feathers, above all the green plumes of the quetzal: after the Spanish conquest the amanteca turned the same craft to Christian images made in feather mosaic.

Sebastián López de Arteaga's 1643 'Doubting Thomas' shows the apostle doing what?

Touching Christ's wound: Arteaga, a painter from Seville, shows the finger entering the flesh in the hard light and shadow he is credited with bringing to Mexico around 1640.

Which Flemish painter's compositions, spread through engravings, were widely copied by Mexican Baroque artists?

Peter Paul Rubens never saw the Americas, yet engravings carried his compositions there, and painters in Mexico copied and reworked them on their own canvases.

Whose colossal canvases decorate the sacristy of Mexico City Cathedral, painted 1684-86?

Cristóbal de Villalpando also painted Mexico City's main square around 1695, a view that records the viceroy's palace still damaged by the riot of 1692.

What is 'estofado', a technique used on Baroque sculptures?

Paint applied over gold leaf was then scraped away in fine patterns, so the gold shone through like the brocade of a real robe on carved saints.

By tradition, the Virgin of Guadalupe's image appeared in 1531 on what?

A peasant's cloak: in the story Juan Diego opens his mantle before the bishop, winter roses spill out and the image is there. The cloth is enshrined in Mexico City's Basilica of Guadalupe.

Which Latin phrase, meaning 'painted in Mexico', did 18th-century Mexican artists add to works bound for Europe?

Pinxit Mexici was a boast of origin; in 2017 it became the title of a Los Angeles and New York exhibition billed as the first serious effort to reassess Mexico's 18th-century painters.

What did 18th-century 'casta' paintings depict?

Racial hierarchy in New Spain was set out canvas by canvas, each showing a mixed couple and their child with a label; the genre stopped once independent Mexico scrapped legal racial categories.

Which painter made a celebrated set of casta paintings in 1763?

Miguel Cabrera is also known for a portrait of Sor Juana, painted decades after the poet-nun's death, and for Maravilla americana, his 1756 account of examining the original image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Colonial folding screens called biombos took their name from a word in which language?

Japanese byōbu, roughly 'protection from wind', named the screens that reached Mexico with Asian trade goods by 1610; local workshops were soon painting their own, with scenes of the conquest.

Which Pacific port received the Manila Galleon's Asian luxury goods?

Acapulco was the galleons' American port from 1565 to 1815; their silk and porcelain were sold at its trade fairs, then carried overland by mule to Mexico City and Veracruz.

Which Mexico City art academy, founded in the 1780s, was the first in the Americas?

The Academy of San Carlos took Diego Rivera as a pupil when he was about ten, and in 1929 he came back to run it as its director.

Manuel Tolsá's bronze horseman 'El Caballito', unveiled in 1803, portrays which Spanish king, later forced out by Napoleon?

Charles IV nearly lost his statue too: after independence it was hidden under blue canvas and almost melted down, until Lucas Alamán persuaded the government to spare it.

Which style did the Spanish Crown promote in Mexico from the 1780s, replacing the Baroque?

Neoclassical taste came with a royal academy and plaster casts of classical statues, shipped from Spain for its students to copy.

Bavarian painter Johann Moritz Rugendas brought which style to Mexico in 1831-34?

Romanticism coloured his dramatic views of Mexican towns and landscapes, but his stay ended abruptly: he was jailed and expelled in 1834, accused of plotting against the president.

Nineteenth-century Mexican painters of everyday scenes, such as kitchens and street vendors, were known as what?

Costumbristas painted local types and habits; the best known, Agustín Arrieta, lived in poverty all his life, and his reputation was rescued only by a book published in 1943.

José Obregón's 1869 painting shows a Toltec king being offered which newly discovered drink?

Pulque, the fermented sap of the agave: in one legend a noble sends his daughter Xochitl to present it to the Toltec ruler, who marries her, and Obregón painted the moment she offers the bowl.

Which president unveiled Mexico City's Angel of Independence in 1910?

Porfirio Díaz opened the column for the centenary of independence in September 1910; eight months later the Revolution forced him to resign, and he died in exile in Paris.

Who is credited with launching the muralist movement by commissioning painters in 1921?

José Vasconcelos, then a government minister, handed painters the walls of public buildings so that Mexico's history could be read by a population that was largely illiterate.

Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros led a failed 1940 gun attack on the Mexico City home of which exiled revolutionary?

Leon Trotsky survived the raid of May 1940, though his 14-year-old grandson was wounded; three months later another Stalinist agent killed him with an ice axe.

Painter Gerardo Murillo renamed himself Dr. Atl after the Nahuatl word for what?

Water, 'atl' in Nahuatl: he took the name in Paris in 1902, then climbed Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl and made Mexico's volcanoes his great subject.

Who are 'los tres grandes' of Mexican muralism?

Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros: Siqueiros, the youngest, had joined the revolutionary army at 18, while Orozco, the eldest, painted with one hand after losing the other in an accident.

Which Mexico City building, then a prep school, hosted the muralists' first big government commission in 1922?

San Ildefonso, then the National Preparatory School, gave the painters a rough start: conservative students vandalised several of Orozco's first murals, and he later repainted many of them.

Siqueiros broke with fresco tradition by applying industrial lacquer to murals with which tool?

A spray gun let Siqueiros cover huge walls quickly with synthetic lacquer; at his 1936 New York workshop a young Jackson Pollock was introduced to pouring and dripping liquid paint.

Which sculptor, briefly Frida Kahlo's lover, made a 1936 relief for Mexico City's Abelardo Rodríguez market?

Isamu Noguchi built History as Seen from Mexico in 1936, his first public work, in coloured cement on a market wall; he and Kahlo stayed friends until her death.

Whose portrait caused Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural to be destroyed in 1934?

Vladimir Lenin was not in the approved sketch: Rivera added him after a newspaper attacked the mural as communist propaganda paid for by a Rockefeller, then refused to paint him out.

Where did Rivera repaint his destroyed Rockefeller mural in Mexico City?

The Palacio de Bellas Artes version, rebuilt from photographs an assistant took before the original was destroyed, adds a jab: John D. Rockefeller Jr., a teetotaller, drinking in a nightclub.

Which Mexican muralist painted Prometheus above a dining hall at California's Pomona College in 1930?

José Clemente Orozco lived in a campus dormitory for two months while painting the fire-stealing Titan, his first major mural in the United States; students still eat beneath it.

Which painter, a contemporary of Rivera, rejected the muralists' politics and left Mexico for New York in 1926?

Rufino Tamayo said his only commitment was to painting; critics at home called him a traitor to the cause, yet the watermelons he kept painting became emblems of Mexican identity.

Frida Kahlo's 'The Two Fridas' shows two selves joined by what?

Blood flowing between hearts joins the Frida in Mexican dress to a European-dressed double who clamps the cut vessel with forceps; Kahlo painted it in 1939, the year she and Rivera divorced.

Frida Kahlo collected hundreds of which Mexican folk artworks, borrowing their style for her own paintings?

Ex-voto retablos are small paintings on metal that thank a saint for a rescue or cure; Kahlo borrowed the format for Henry Ford Hospital, putting her own miscarriage where the miracle would be.

Which 1950s-60s group of artists rejected muralism's social realism and nationalism?

The Rupture generation took its cue from José Luis Cuevas, who in the 1950s mocked the state-backed muralists as a 'cactus curtain' closing Mexican art off from new ideas.

Which British-born Surrealist fled wartime Europe and spent most of her life painting in Mexico City?

Leonora Carrington reached Mexico in 1942 after a breakdown and a spell in a Spanish asylum; she lived there, on and off, until her death in 2011, painting dreamlike scenes of fantastical creatures.

Which German-born artist co-created the Torres de Satélite and planned the 1968 Olympic 'Route of Friendship' sculptures?

Mathias Goeritz and architect Luis Barragán planned seven towers, the tallest 200 metres high; budget cuts left five, the tallest 52 metres, which became the emblem of the Ciudad Satélite suburb.

Which mid-1980s movement gave Social Realism a kitsch, postmodern, pop-culture twist?

Neomexicanismo painters such as Julio Galán and Nahum Zenil recycled folk symbols, from wrestlers to the Virgin of Guadalupe, to ask ironic questions about personal and sexual identity.

Which printmaker created La Calavera Catrina, the elegant skeleton now tied to Mexico's Day of the Dead?

José Guadalupe Posada etched her around 1910 as a satire on society ladies, and she seems first to have been printed after his death in 1913; Diego Rivera later gave the skull a full body in a 1940s mural.

Talavera pottery, the tin-glazed ware named after a Spanish town, comes from which Mexican city?

Puebla's potters have made it since the 16th century, and since 1997 only certified workshops in a designated zone around the city may legally call their ware Talavera.

Frida Kahlo's father Guillermo was a noted photographer of what subject?

Colonial architecture was a government commission: the German-born immigrant photographed Mexico's churches and monuments on large glass plates, work later used in a six-volume survey of the country's churches.