Demon Child

Girl with a Mask, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1945. Oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 39 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1947.

“In 1920 was born this fragile, sickly demon,” the Mexican poet Octavio G. Barreda wrote of the Mexican artist Juan Soriano in 1945. Borrowing that phrase for the title of the first exhibition of Soriano’s work in the United States at the PMA, Edward J. Sullivan’s Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 brings this well-known name in his native country out of obscurity for an American audience. In doing so, Sullivan not only presents a unique, multi-dimensional artist, but also a whole new way of looking at the perception of Mexican art as primarily the domain of the grand muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. The same alternate “reality” found in pseudo-Surreal works such as Girl with a Mask (above) surrounds the story of Soriano—homosexual and conservative—versus the Marxist machismo of the muralists.

The Dead Girl, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1938. Oil on panel, 18 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Clifford, 1947.

Born a sickly child, Soriano’s family encouraged him to paint and draw his fantasies. That encouragement and the imaginative material supplied by the religious processions, home altars, and other sacred rites of his native Guadalajara shaped Soriano’s unique sensibilities. Soriano’s small stature and slight build gave him a child-like air even as an adult. “An eternal child, ageless, bitter, cynical, naïve, malicious, hardened, helpless,” the poet Octavio Paz writes in a 1941 meditation on his friend reproduced by Sullivan in the catalogue. Soriano the demon child finds painting children irresistible. “Soriano’s children are often unruly, misbehaving, fighting, or about to get into some other form of trouble,” Sullivan writes, demonstrating Soriano’s imp of the perverse in multiple works. When Soriano’s children aren’t getting into mischief, they’re dead. The Dead Girl (above) represents just one of many depictions Soriano made of the emotion and spirituality surrounding the death of a child in Mexico. He painted The Dead Girl after seeing a freshly dead girl displayed in the window of a home. A tiny piece of cotton peeks out of her nostril, placed there to hold back post mortem excretions. Disembodied hands hover over the girl, standing in for the devout mourners. Six years later, Soriano titled another painting The Dead Girl, creating a more elaborate setting for the deceased child featuring angels bearing flowered crosses. In such works Soriano taps into the same native spirituality and fascination with death that Frida Kahlo does explicitly in works such as The Dead Dimas and less explicitly in the more macabre elements of her self-portraits. “Death imagery nourished and entertained him,” Sullivan writes of Soriano’s fixation on these dead children, “and he later portrayed death as an amusement, a challenge as well as an inevitability.” Soriano both genuflects and laughs in the graveyard, living up to the collection of contradictions ascribed to him by Paz and others.

Still Life, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1942. Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 27 5/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph J. Gersten, 1951.

Sullivan excels in presenting Soriano as outside the mainstream of twentieth century Mexican art dominated by Rivera and his brethren, surpassing even Kahlo in straying from that center. While Rivera, Kahlo, and other artists embraced Marxism as Mexico’s best hope, welcoming even Trotsky into their home, Soriano resisted accepting any ideological savior. His political conservatism hurt his chances at obtaining commissions in that politically charged atmosphere. Barreda, the man who called Soriano a “demon” in print, linked Soriano with similar non-political artists who still retained a sense of Mexican-ness in their art. The non-political art of Still Life (above) and other works placed him in a category with Kahlo, whom Soriano loved, in spite of her marriage to Rivera, whom he loathed. “She had a tremendous personality,” Soriano once said of Frida, “like a little child full of life.” Soriano’s homosexuality also marked him as radically different from the macho muralists and mainstream Mexican culture. “Soriano’s frank affirmation of his sexuality in his paintings, drawings, writings, and interviews would remain a hallmark of his personality throughout his life,” Sullivan asserts. Saint Jerome (1942) shows Soriano’s lover, Diego de Mesa, posed nude before a mirror containing a skeleton assuming the same pose as Diego, linking desire and death. Guardian Angel (1941) depicts a falling male nude saved by a winged, male, nude angel in another homoerotic exercise by Soriano. Critic Jose Luis Martinez encapsulated Soriano’s ex-centric (i.e., out of the center) qualities in 1941: “He does not paint, nor does he pretend to illustrate social themes… His painting evidences three themes: eroticism, religiosity, and death, whose expression comes about with the intimate sensibility of the Mexican.” Soriano pushes the envelope of what being “Mexican” could mean in the larger context of the art and society of his time.

Girl with a Bouquet, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1946. Oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 23 3/4 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1957.

Soriano’s friendship with Henry Clifford, a long-time curator at the PMA, makes the PMA the idea place for this exhibition. Sullivan credits the 30-year correspondence between Soriano and Clifford archived at the PMA with providing the basis of his research. Clifford and his wife donated the four Soriano paintings that make up the core of the exhibition, which offers a fascinating postscript to the epic Frida Kahlo exhibition also running at the PMA. Sullivan concentrates on the period from Soriano’s arrival in Mexico City in 1934 to his departure for Europe in 1951, when Soriano becomes more “universalist” in his themes, although he always carries his own private Mexico with him in his heart. Soriano’s slipperiness arises from his rejection of all convenient labels, even the tag of Surrealist that he resisted placing on works such as Girl with a Bouquet, arguing that the Surrealists practiced a brand of “self-indulgence” he couldn’t abide. Sullivan agrees with Soriano’s self-assessment, arguing that these works “incorporate dream-like or otherwise surprising elements,” but never fully realize the status of Surrealist art. Despite this absence of handles, Sullivan retains a firm grasp on the elusive demon Soriano and brings him vibrantly back to life for us today. As the novelist Carlos Fuentes says in his essay “The Eye of Dawn: Juan Soriano,“ “Soriano, like all great painters, is present in this present that doesn’t sacrifice its past or its future… Soriano in himself is dawning: a beginning charged with pasts, a daybreak that does not deceive us with the promise of an innocent future.” Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 allows Juan Soriano to live again as he once did—fully in the present moment, free of the lies of the past and the false promises of the future.


[Many thanks to the PMA for providing me with a review copy of Edward J. Sullivan’s Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 and for the images above from the exhibition.]

Face to Face With Frida

Walking through the galleries of the PMA’s Frida Kahlo exhibition at the press preview last Friday, I actually could feel the presence of the artist. Perhaps it was the amazing collection of personal photographs that serve as a powerful prologue to the paintings. Looking at a photo of Diego Rivera and then being able to see the other side, upon which Frida placed a heavily lipsticked kiss, I sensed the more than five decades since her death in 1954 melt away. Of course, looking at the paintings, so many of them self-portraits, such as her masterpiece, The Two Fridas (above, shown in the United States for the very first time), you find it easy to believe that you know the artist like a beloved old friend.


Co-curators Elizabeth Carpenter (above, explaining Kahlo’s Portrait of Luther Burbank) and Hayden Herrera led the tour through the galleries. The PMA’s own modern art curator Michael Taylor introduced the tour by pointing out the choice of wall colors for the exhibition. The early works begin surrounded by blue walls, much like the famous Blue House of Frida’s childhood, featured prominently in several of the paintings. Blue gives way to deep, blood red in the rooms housing the more tortured, intimate works such as The Two Fridas. It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive collection of Kahlo’s work assembled than this one, which makes it a must-see for anyone interested in her life or the trajectory of modern art, especially the role of women in that history still being written.

The preview provided yet another chance to hear Hayden Herrera (above, with Michael Taylor looking on) speak upon the subject that her biography helped launch into the consciousness of mainstream culture. I found it fascinating that Herrera confessed that she herself had never seen many of the paintings in person until this exhibition. When she mentioned that she had never seen the gouges in the frame of A Few Small Nips, engraved by Frida during a moment of Diego-inspired fury, it heavily impressed on me that even such “well-known” artists as Kahlo remain a never-ending source of revelations even for authorities such as Herrera.

Perhaps the greatest revelation of the exhibition to me was the sheer physicality of the works, or their lack of it. With the exception of The Two Fridas, most of the works are relatively small in size, understandable considering that Kahlo painted many of them while convalescing in bed from injuries or her innumerable surgeries. The tininess of these works draws you in, pulling you into the artist’s embrace. Her choice of materials, such as metal supports to mimic the ex voto of Mexican folk art, becomes clearer through the PMA’s presentation of ex votos in their own collection. An 1803 ex voto of a woman and child surviving a fall from a balcony (above) recreates the context Kahlo worked within wonderfully when hung close by The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, the surreal portrait of the dead actress and perhaps Frida’s most wonderfully bizarre ex voto.

This exhibition showcases the PMA’s special interest in Mexican and Latin American art. All of the signage appears in both English and Spanish in anticipation of a heavy Hispanic audience (such as the text beside The Broken Column above). In support of the exhibition, the PMA created a side show of Frida Kahlo in Context, featuring works by her Mexican contemporaries David Alfaro Siqueiros, Federico Cantu, Dr. Atl, her beloved Diego, and many others. The gift shop offers the obligatory kitsch, but kitsch with a specific flavor. The tiny doll of Frida as seen in The Broken Column and the ready-to-display Frida shrine were personal favorites for their capturing of the baroque nature and black humor of Mexican spirituality. It will be interesting to see just how many people buy into and literally buy the more Frida-esque items versus the safer t-shirts, scarves, and prints.

Another great extra-Frida touch is the Juan Soriano exhibition, Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico, 1935 to 1950 (the exhibition title and The Dead Girl [1944] shown above). Soriano knew Kahlo, who was 13 years older. Although they came from slightly different generations, the same Mexican and modernist drives inform their work. The PMA’s exhibition shows Soriano’s work in the United States for the first time, bringing this well-known name in Mexico to an American audience perhaps primed by the Kahlo show for further explorations into Mexican and Latin American art. (I’ll be running a review of the Soriano catalogue soon.)

Although this exhibition previously appeared at the Walker Art Center and will later travel to the SFMoMA, I doubt either can replicate the experience the PMA offers with their own supporting collections (both of the ex votos and pre-Columbian art, which appears often in late works by Kahlo, such as My Nurse and I), the Kahlo in Context gallery, and the Soriano show. Hopefully, people in Philadelphia and even New York and Washington, D.C., will realize the opportunity the PMA is offering and take full advantage of coming face to face with Frida and her world.

[Many thanks to the PMA for inviting me to the Frida Kahlo press preview.]