An Artist You Have Probably Never Heard Of

On Friday I went downtown again to see an exhibit at Mexico City's National Museum of Art.

The exhibit showcases the works of a painter that you have probably never heard of, unless your are Mexican.  His name was Saturnino Herrán, and the show commemorates the centennial of his death.  I have to admit that I did not know him by name, but the posters for the exhibit showed a painting which I have seen in books about Mexican art.

Herrán was born in the city of Aguascalientes and moved to Mexico City where he continued taking art classes.  He eventually became a professor at the National Institute of Fine Arts where Diego Rivera was one of his students.

Herrán was a proponent of an art movement of the early 20th century known as Modernism.  Although it was an movement that was international in scope, it was concerned with local identity and the depiction of everyday life.  

The painting which first earned Herrán recognition as an artist was entitled "Labor".  Painted in 1908, it was an allegory on the virtue of work.

Many of his paintings depict ordinary people going about their daily chores.

 "The Pottery Vendors"  1909

"The Banana Seller" 1912

For an exhibition celebrating the centennial of Mexico's independence in 1910, he painted "The Legend of the Volcanoes"  which depicts the ill-fated lovers Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhautl whom the gods turned into volcanoes.

Herrán's most famous painting, the one that I recognized from the exhibit posters, was done in 1913.  It is entitled "La Ofrenda", and it is an allegory about the passage of life.  It shows a group of people of all different ages traveling along a canal in a boat.  They are transporting a cargo of marigolds to take to a cemetery for the Day of the Dead.

Herrán was interested in depicting the Mexican identity as a mixture of the Spanish and the indigenous cultures.  He painted his wife in both Spanish clothing and the traditional attire of a native of the Tehuantepec region of Mexico.

A self-caricature of the artist

Tragically, Herrán died at the age of 31 in 1918.  At the end of his career he had begun to do mural paintings.  One can't help but wonder, had he lived a longer life, if he might have joined the ranks of Diego Rivera and others as one of the great artists of the Mexican muralist movement.  The name of Saturnino Herrán might have been a name widely recognized beyond Mexico.