Mathias Goeritz

German artist Mathias Goeritz found plenty of ways to unsettle the luminaries of Mexican modern art. Arriving to Mexico by way of Spain in 1949, Goeritz produced sculptures, architectural forms, paintings, and manifestos, many of which were overtly polemical in defying artistic convention. In Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico, art and architectural historian Jennifer Josten shows how Goeritz challenged and eventually helped shift the aesthetic expression of Mexican state politics, which prominent muralists, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, had initially legitimized with social realism, beginning in the 1920s. Goeritz participated in political battles fought through public art in midcentury Mexico, a central arena that we can better understand through his work.As its title suggests, Mathias Goeritz is an “artist's monograph,” and it examines larger cultural and political questions through the story of Goeritz's life, art, and ideas in Europe and the Americas (p. 18). Josten argues that Goeritz's religiosity—which manifested in many ways, from the spiritualism motivating his concept of “emotional architecture” to his sculptures of Jesus—was part of a deliberate strategy that she deems a “minor-key approach to modernism” (p. 2). Even as he positioned himself in opposition to the Mexican school, experimenting with abstract art in a Cold War context in which realism was linked with socialism and communism, Goeritz also integrated primitivist elements to differentiate Mexico from the industrialized West. Josten utilizes Goeritz's photographs, newspaper clippings, brochures, sketches, and agendas, and she is the first to analyze many sources, including dozens of letters. Chapters proceed chronologically through different phases of Goeritz's artistic practice, from its beginnings in Spain in 1945 to overseeing commissions for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Particularly key chapters look at the Mexico City creations of the Museo Experimental El Eco, an experimental art gallery that Goeritz designed in the early 1950s; and the Torres de Ciudad Satélite, a set of monumental towers for a commercial residential project on which the German artist worked with Mexican architect Luis Barragán. The last chapters demonstrate that though Goeritz was ostracized by social realist painters, who had initially been aligned with the state, he came to be embraced by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) as part of a strategy of nonalignment, despite the artist's ultimate unease with increasing state repression in the 1960s and 1970s.The text—which looks like an art history book, with glossy pages and nearly 100 color images—works adeptly with elements of art and architectural history as well as various historical subfields. With regard to art and architectural history, Josten builds on a revisionist turn in the scholarship that has examined with more nuance the “rupture” between veterans of the Mexican school and independent artists around 1950 as well as Mexican state-sponsored cultural initiatives, including those for the 1968 Olympics (p. 19). More broadly, she advances a growing field at the intersection of architectural and political history, which, from the art side, has seen scholars utilizing politics as integral to artistic production rather than as mere context (and, from the political side, has conceived of actors in the cultural sphere as performing meaningful political work rather than operating within a detached aesthetic realm). Josten also works in the timbre of global history. She shows the extent to which postwar art and architecture were internationalized in this period, relying as they did on a newly fluid circulation of ideas and people across the globe. Yet she also remains attentive to localized responses within the broader framework of global exchange. Goeritz, for example, engaged with local history, media, ideas, and labor. The sense of variable scale allows Josten to uncover mobility even as she points to meaningful contextual specificity.Mathias Goeritz makes a significant contribution in infusing art history with politics, yet Josten could go further in discussing the implications of some findings, especially in relation to questions of power. Goeritz's migration to Mexico, for example, constituted cultural exchange, but did it also come freighted with long-standing histories of European and US imperialism in the region? Goeritz engaged meaningfully with local culture, but could his outsourcing of labor, as well as his use of local “primitivist” aesthetic, be read as exploitation or related to ideas of racial difference? Josten demonstrates that Mexico's level of “development” had an effect on artistic practice, during a period of rapid capitalist economic growth and urbanization, but development in itself seems static, a status that exists in the concrete world. Could development have also been a rhetorical creation in flux, constructed too through aesthetic and spatial production? Despite these lingering questions, it is a testament to the book's political engagement—and its ambitious use of multiple scales—that it begs them to begin with. Josten's is an important contribution to art and architectural history from which historians of Latin America can draw to teach a more vibrant, diverse, and globally integrated version of Mexican Cold War cultural history. The book serves as an adept model for diverse disciplinary scholars to grapple with the interrelationship between politics and culture with more local specificity and formal grounding in the plastic arts

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