Leopoldo Méndez is considered the finest printmaker in the history of Mexico. In 1937 Méndez, Luis Arenal, and Pablo O’Higgins founded the Taller de Gráfica Popular (Peoples’ Graphic Workshop) in Mexico City, which was active through the 1960s and produced thirty-five major portfolios of woodcuts, linocuts, and lithographs. The TGP was grounded in a belief in art’s capacity for social protest and the betterment of the nation’s people.
Méndez was born in Mexico City, one of eight children, to a shoemaker father and a farm worker mother who was of indigenous Nahua heritage. His parents died before he turned two years old and he was raised primarily by his aunt. He became interested in drawing in primary school and he later related that he had competed with another boy in his class to be the best at drawing battleships. His father’s family had been activists—his paternal grandfather died in a battle during the French intervention in Mexico and his father resisted the Porforio Diaz regime, resulting in the burning of his store. Méndez became politically active, supporting the goals of the Mexican revolution but working quietly and mostly anonymously, opposing the concept of making art for profit due to his belief that the true value of art was its social utility. An artist whose whole life was influenced by the early violence and moral promises of his country’s revolution, Méndez continually worked in collaboration with other artists to express his belief in the revolution’s vision.
In general there is little written about the artist's personal life as he kept this separate from his career. In addition, there are few published photographs of the artist.
Méndez was born on June 30, 1902, in Mexico City. His background was poor as one of eight children born to a father who was a shoemaker and a mother who was a farm worker of Nahua indigenous background from the State of Mexico. His father's side of the family was politically active. His paternal grandfather died fighting the French Intervention in Mexico. His father worked against the Porfirio Díaz regime on the late 19th and early 20th century. His father and uncles worked as vendors in a mining town called El Oro until the political strongmen of the area forced them to leave, burning down their store.
However, both his parents had died before Méndez was two years old. During his childhood he lived at his father's house, his grandmother's house and his Aunt Manuela's house, but was primarily raised by his aunt.
Méndez says that he was told that he was ill-tempered and picked fights, especially with his brothers. As a child, he was the family gofer, as well a chaperone for his older sisters, which allowed him to see his neighbors struggling to make a living. Later he used these experiences in his art. He would also be strongly influenced by the Mexican Revolution, as the Decena Trágica happening when he was only ten years old.
His interest in drawing began in primary school. He competed with another boy in his class as to who could draw better, with the topic being battleships. He also drew portraits of Venustiano Carranza both at school and at home, which was the topic of his first piece of artwork to be sold.
Directly out of primary school, he entered the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. His teachers included Saturninio Herrán, Germán Gedovius, Ignacio Rosas, Francisco de la Torre and Leandro Izaguirre. After three years at the academy, he left to attend the new Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre opened by Alfredo Ramos Martinez in the Chimalistac area in the south of Mexico City. One complaint he had about both schools was that he was never permitted to paint movement, only stationary objects and landscapes without people or animals. He learned to draw movement illustrating periodicals, which he did to earn money to live on.
He developed strong political leanings which influenced not only his art but other aspects of his life. They led to friendships with artists and writers such as with Manuel Maples Arce, Germán Cueto, Arqueles Vela, Fermín Revueltas Sánchez, Ramón Alva del Canal, Germán List Arzubide and others, forming a group called Los Estridentistas. It also gave him the opportunity to live in work in Xalapa, Veracruz from 1925 to 1927, which was a center of this movement. He stated in an interview with Elena Poniatowska what it was very Bohemian at the time and during this time his politics became more radical, focusing on the ideal of the Mexican Revolution, especially Emiliano Zapata. This coincided with the state government under General Jara, but when he fell out of power, Méndez moved back to Mexico City and joined the Mexican Communist Party. His time here and other parts of rural Mexico gave him an appreciation of the country's handcraft and folk art tradition, making him a collector during his life.
Much of his life and work was dedicated to promoting leftist political causes, remaining faithful to the political beliefs of his youth in post-Revolution Mexico to a large degree. In 1930, he founded the Lucha Intellectual Proletaria and traveled to the United States to give presentations. In 1939, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and moved to New York where he continued to associate with workers’ groups. One of these beliefs was that artists should work for the people and therefore, his financial situation was always modest. His role in the political activities of many artists and writers of his time was large but he tended to claim little individual credit and to stay in the background.
In 1940s, he was under arrest for a few days after David Alfaro Siqueiros and his group assaulted Leon Trotsky’s house in Coyoacán, kidnapping and killing his secretary. The reason for this was that the attackers left “evidence” to frame the Taller de Gráfica Popular. However, Méndez was released with no charges.
In 1946, he left the Mexican Communist Party, founding the Partido Popular in 1947. He and was a candidate for district representative in Mexico City with this party in the 1953. In 1958, he left the Partido Popular and supported Adolfo López Mateos for president.
His political efforts went international starting in the 1940s traveling to the USSR in 1953. After World War II, he focused on issues related to world peace. These efforts gained him the International Peace Prize from the World Council of Peace in Vienna in 1952.
Méndez continued to work in both art and politics until February 1969 when he fell ill and died while working on a book dedicated to Mexican handcrafts and folk art. He left behind one son, Pablo Méndez.
Méndez's career mixed political activism, painting, art education and book design but is best known for his engraving work, creating over 700 during his lifetime. This engraving work started early for book and magazine illustration. In the 1920s, he began with two publications called Irradiador and Horizonte as part of his involvement with a political and artistic movement called Stridentism. In 1929, he began teaching under the Cultural Missions programs of the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education in Jalisco and the State of Mexico which included contributing to the El Sembrador and El Maestro Rural magazines. Both were aimed at farm communities and served as a sources of materials for teachers, so the use of graphics along with text was considered fundamental because of high illiteracy. In 1942, he published En el nombre de Cristo a series of seven lithographs about barbarism attributed to the Cristeros and the assassination of teachers. Méndez's change in political activity often led to a change in the publication he contributed to. For example, in 1946 he left the Mexican Communist Party and joined the Grupo Insurgente José Carlos Mariátegui, initiating collaboration with its official publication called El Insurgente.
His first major body of work was created as a founding member of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) begun in 1933. The group produced works and exhibited together as well as published its own magazine called Frente a Frente. During this period, Méndez's work became militant; believing that only art created to promote the interests of the working class had value. This coincided with much of Mexico's politics at the time under Lázaro Cárdenas.
Méndez was able to change style of his prints to account for the materials being used and for his intended audience. However, his work is characterized by a distillation of the images into their essential components for impact. These images included pre-Hispanic, Renaissance and Baroque art of both Europe and Mexico as well as nineteenth century Mexican art and Mexican muralism. He generally focused on secular, rather than religious images as well as popular themes taking after the work of José Guadalupe Posada. While his work is mostly realistic, it has incorporated imaginative elements from Cubism, Italian Futurism, Russian Constructivism, German Expressionism and Surrealism. One influence generally missing from his work is Russian-style Social realism despite his socialist and communist politics.
However, by 1937, Méndez had left LEAR, disappointed with the group's lack of activity. He founded a new group that year called the Taller de Gráfica Popular along with Pablo O'Higgins, Alfredo Zalce, Luis Arenal, Ignacio Aguirre, Isidora Ocampo and others. Like LEAR, its function was political solidly to the left but anti-Trotsky and allied with Silvestre Revueltas, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Lombardo Toledano and others. It was a collective work center producing paintings and engravings, creating realistic but simple designs with its more abundant engraving work. They considered artistic development inseparable from political development, mostly working with cultural and political institutions of similar views. It was most active during World War II, producing propaganda against Adolf Hitler and his allies along with that against capitalism and the U.S. Méndez was central to the Taller, taking part in all its activities, supervising its production and doing most of the relations work with other organizations, such as unions and art galleries. Despite his importance, by 1959, political differences with the more ardent Communists of the Taller marginalized him and he formally resigned in 1961.
Méndez had limited exhibitions during his career. His first major exhibition was in 1930, when he traveled to Los Angeles as a collaborative effort with Carlos Mérida. In 1945, he had an individual exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by one in 1946 at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura.
Méndez's greatest volume of work was produced in the latter 1940s, when he worked compulsively and sold it for very low prices. At this time many American museums and private individuals from the U.S., Mexico and Europe purchased his prints. This has resulted in his work scattered among various collections including those of Carlos Monsiváis and the Graphic Arts Institute of Oaxaca, and of various institutions in Chicago, New York, Prague, Moscow and Warsaw, mostly in graphic arts museums.
Méndez worked on two notable murals during his career. In 1946, he created one mural with Pablo O'Higgins called La materidad y la asistencia social located at the Clínica No. 1 of the Mexican Social Security Institute. He created an engraving mural of José Guadalupe Posada in 1956.
His political graphics work waned after 1950 as political art was becoming devalued and his work less collected. However, he had begun to create engravings for the Mexican cinema, with a series for the film Río Escondido by Emilio Fernández, then others such as Pueblerina (1948), Un día en la vida (1949), El rebozo de Soledad (1949), Memorias de un mexicano (1950), La rebelión de los colgados (1953) and La rosa blanca (1959). For the film Macario by Roberto Gavaldón, he designed the images of God, death and the Devil.
In 1958/1959 Méndez left the Taller de la Gráfica Popular due to ideological differences and founded a new publishing concern called the Fondo Editorial de la Plástica Mexicana along with Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Carlos Pellicer, Rafael Carrillo Azpeitia and Ricardo J. Zevada. The first book published by the organization was La pintura mural de la Revolución Mexicana, followed by Los maestros europeo de la Galería de San Carlos de México and José Guadalupe Posada, ilustrador de la vida mexicana. It became a major art book publishing company producing several high-quality books about Mexican art while he directed it. When he died, he was working on a book about Mexican handcrafts and folk art.
The last major organization that Méndez founded during his lifetime was the Academia de Artes de Mexico in 1968.
Méndez was part of a generation of artists that emerged in the 1920s and played an important role in the culture and politics of Mexico after the Mexican Revolution. However, he has been a relatively obscure figure since during his career for two reasons. One was that he remained faithful to the idea that artists should work collaboratively and anonymously so he did not seek fame like others from his generation did. A second reason is that his socialist ideas, his association with the USSR and Joseph Stalin make him seem less relevant to the generations that followed him. During his lifetime, his only formal recognitions included one of his books, Incidentes melódicos del mundo irracional, receiving a local prize in 1944, the first Premio Nacional de Grabado in Mexico City in 1946 and the International Prize of Peace as a member of the Taller de la Gráfica Popular in 1952. In 1962, the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno exhibited a retrospective of his work. He was also honored at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes the same year.
Since his death, he has received some recognition. Mexican academic research generally ranks him as high as other artists of the 20th century such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, but little documentation of his life exists. In 1971, David Alfaro Siqueiros included a portrait of Méndez along with another engraving great José Guadalupe Posada at his Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros in Mexico City. Another early homage was an exhibition of his work at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in the 1970s. In 2002, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, writer Carlos Monsivais sponsored a conference on Méndez's work at the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL). The same museum held a retrospective of his work in 2003.
The Taller de la Gráfic Popular also organized an exhibition in honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth. In 2012, the Museo de Artes Gráficas in Saltillo held a retrospective of his work. However, there remains no museum dedicated to his work and the only formal catalog was created by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1977.
Despite his obscurity, he is generally regarded as one of Mexico's most important graphic artists and one of the most important artists of the first half of the 20th century. Mexican academia also considers him to be the heir of José Guadalupe Posada, who he admired greatly.
Leopoldo Méndez led and co-founded Mexico’s most famous printmaking collective, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) (the Popular Graphic Arts Workshop). A virtuosic printmaker himself, Méndez used his artwork to further the causes of agrarian reforms, Indigenous rights, and anti-fascism. He and the other members of the TGP initiated a tradition of activist printmaking that continues in Mexico to this day.
Méndez was born and studied art in Mexico City. In 1933, he joined the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists), with whom he developed a philosophy of art as a means of activism and liberation for the people of Mexico. Soon after, in 1937, Méndez founded the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a collective of artists who made everything from ephemeral prints to high-quality illustrated books in service of leftist political reform. Méndez remained with the TGP until 1961, after which he devoted himself to publishing books on Mexican printmaking and folk art, as well as supporting leftist movements around the world, until his death in 1969.
The Art Institute of Chicago houses one of the largest North American collections of Méndez’s work and hosted a 1945 exhibition, Prints and Drawings by Leopoldo Méndez, of works acquired from the artist. Méndez created What May Come, a woodblock print commenting on the future of Mexico and the brewing World War II, specifically for that exhibition.
Leopoldo Méndez, muralist, printmaker, painter, political activist, teacher, and administrator, was born in Mexico City on 30 June 1902, the youngest of eight children. At the age of fifteen, Méndez became the youngest student to have enrolled in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with Saturnine Herran, Leandro Izaguirre, Ignacio Rosas, German Gedovius, and Francisco de la Torre. Following his graduation, he continued his studies at Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre (the open-air painting school founded by Alfredo Ramos Martinez) until 1922.
To keep himself financially afloat while creating his art, Méndez designed book jackets, taught drawing and printmaking in elementary and technical schools, and contributed drawings and prints to journals and liberal publications. In 1930, he made his first trip to the United States with a group of friends; while there, he was invited to illustrate a limited edition of Heinrich Heine's The Gods in Exile.
Méndez was one of the founders of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), but he is perhaps most well-known as the leader and co-founder of the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a cooperative printmaking workshop dedicated to serving the needs of the Mexican people.
Méndez joined the Stridentists, a group of artists, writers and musicians whose goals were not unlike those of Dadaists and Futurists. He became known internationally for his art and activism, and received many awards for his accomplishments in both fields. Among these were a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1938 for travel and study in the U.S.; appointment to the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, held in Poland in 1948; the Premio Internacional de la Paz del Consejo Mundial de Partidarios de la Paz in 1952 which was presented in Vienna the following year; and in 1960 he received the José Guadalupe Posada Prize in Printmaking at the Second Interamerican Biennial of Painting, Printmaking, and Sculpture sponsored by the City of México.
The work of Leopoldo Méndez is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; the Kemper Art Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; the British Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the La Salle University Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Leopoldo Méndez died in Mexico City on February 8, 1969.
Leopoldo Mendez, muralist, printmaker, painter, political activist, teacher, administrator, father and husband, was born in Mexico City on June 30, 1902, the youngest of eight children. At age fifteen, Mendez became the youngest student to have enrolled in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied with Saturnine Herran, Leandro Izaguirre, Ignacio Rosas, German Gedovius, and Francisco de la Torre. Following his graduation, he continued his studies at Escuela de Pintura al Aire Libre (the plein-air Impressionist school founded by Alfredo Ramos Martinez, until 1922.
One of the founders of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas (LEAR), Mendez is perhaps most well-known as the leader and co-founder of the Taller de Grafica Popular, a cooperative printmaking workshop dedicated to serving the needs of the Mexican people. He joined the Stridentists, a group of artists, writers and musicians whose goals were not unlike those of Dadaists and Futurists. He became known internationally for his art and activism, and received many awards and appointments for his works and accomplishments in both fields. Among these include the Guggenheim Fellowship for travel and study in the U.S.; the International Peace Prize in Vienna; was appointed from Mexico to the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Poland; and the Posada Prize for Printmaking at the Second InterAmerican Biennial of Painting, Printmaking, and Sculpture, among others.
By Caplow, Deborah
Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Washington, 1999
This dissertation situates the Mexican printmaker, Leopoldo Mendez (1902--1969), as a leading member of the Mexican art world of the twentieth century, revealing his central role in Mexican art and politics. His significance is demonstrated through analysis of his extensive body of politically motivated prints and his participation in a number of important art movements and organizations. Mendez came to maturity in the dynamic artistic environment of post-Revolutionary Mexico. In the 1920s he participated in the Stridentist Movement, a group of Futurist and Dadaist-inspired avant-garde writers and artists, and produced prints with revolutionary themes. In the late 1920s Mendez committed himself to leftist political action and refined his graphic skills. Mendez's participation in the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR), from 1933 to 1937, led him to develop a graphic idiom based on Mexican and international sources. Mendez was the first to adapt the style and motifs of Jose Guadalupe Posada to political printmaking, publishing satirical prints in LEAR's journal Frente a Frente. In LEAR Mendez evolved a new model of artistic practice based on the collective method and the production of prints and murals for the proletariat. In 1937 Mendez was a founder of the Taller de Grafica Popular (Popular Graphics Workshop, TGP), a collective printmaking workshop. Under Mendez's leadership the Taller created ephemeral political prints, portfolios of prints, illustrated books, and, from the late 1930s to 1945, powerful anti-fascist and anti-Nazi images. The TGP became an international art center in the 1940s and 1950s. In the late 1950s, Mendez turned to publishing fine art books that reproduced the paintings of the Mexican muralists, prints by Posada and folk art.This dissertation demonstrates that Mendez deserves to be considered a major figure in the history of twentieth-century art because of the high quality of his work and his leadership in the creation of modern Mexican art.