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Lot Essay
"I imagine that the artist's mission is to teach people how to see what they don't see," Zalce once reflected, "to teach them the world from different points of view, not least the social and the broadly human."[1] Working in the social realist tradition of the Mexican School, Zalce is renowned for the expressive humanity of his murals and his prolific printmaking. A member of the Communist-aligned Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios and, following its dissolution, the collective Taller de Gráfica Popular, he remained committed to the ideals and goals of the Mexican Revolution--particularly, to the plight of the rural worker--throughout his career. Zalce moved from Mexico City to Morelia in 1950, accepting a position there as Director of the Escuela Popular de Bellas Artes. Two of his most celebrated murals, both at the Museo Michoacano, date from his early years in Morelia: Defenders of National Integrity (1951) and Brother Alonso of the Order of the True Cross (1952).
Zalce's easel paintings retain the strong graphic sensibility and ideological message developed in his prints and murals, pairing clean, almost sculptural lines with subtly variegated patches of color. His subjects are typically drawn from the working classes--bricklayers, laborers, fishermen, loggers--but occasionally, as in the present work, he chose to foreground their oppressors. A rousing image of political injustice, Los abogados takes aim at the systemic corruption of Mexico's legal system, caricatured by four sharp-suited lawyers who shield their faces and portfolios while trampling--literally and figuratively--over the body of a young worker. Anonymous and virtually indistinguishable, the lawyers stride in rhythmic unison, their legs thrust dynamically across the worker's prostrate, all-white form. The vertical compression of the painting--the lawyers, even hunched over, barely fit within the frame--amplifies the feeling of subjugation, symbolically reenacting the social and economic disenfranchisement of Mexico's rural peasantry. The momentum of the lawyers suggestively carries them beyond the space of painting, and their incursion into the real world of the viewer--in a way like contemporary murals-- intensifies the image's immediacy and its raw emotion.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Alfredo Zalce, quoted in Beatriz Zamorano Navarro, "El devenir de la memoria: las obsesiones creativas de Alfredo Zalce (1908-2003)," Zalce: memoria de lo cotidiano, homenaje aniversario 100, 1908-2008 (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alfredo Zalce: Secretaría de Cultura del Estado de Michoacán, 2008), n.p.
Zalce's easel paintings retain the strong graphic sensibility and ideological message developed in his prints and murals, pairing clean, almost sculptural lines with subtly variegated patches of color. His subjects are typically drawn from the working classes--bricklayers, laborers, fishermen, loggers--but occasionally, as in the present work, he chose to foreground their oppressors. A rousing image of political injustice, Los abogados takes aim at the systemic corruption of Mexico's legal system, caricatured by four sharp-suited lawyers who shield their faces and portfolios while trampling--literally and figuratively--over the body of a young worker. Anonymous and virtually indistinguishable, the lawyers stride in rhythmic unison, their legs thrust dynamically across the worker's prostrate, all-white form. The vertical compression of the painting--the lawyers, even hunched over, barely fit within the frame--amplifies the feeling of subjugation, symbolically reenacting the social and economic disenfranchisement of Mexico's rural peasantry. The momentum of the lawyers suggestively carries them beyond the space of painting, and their incursion into the real world of the viewer--in a way like contemporary murals-- intensifies the image's immediacy and its raw emotion.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 Alfredo Zalce, quoted in Beatriz Zamorano Navarro, "El devenir de la memoria: las obsesiones creativas de Alfredo Zalce (1908-2003)," Zalce: memoria de lo cotidiano, homenaje aniversario 100, 1908-2008 (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Alfredo Zalce: Secretaría de Cultura del Estado de Michoacán, 2008), n.p.