Carlos Mérida

Biography

Four thousand square metres of mosaic on the façades, stairways and roofs of the Benito Juárez housing complex in Mexico City were designed to be seen from passing cars. The subjects came from the “Popol Vuh”, from the myths of the four suns and the eight gods of the Mexican Olympus; architects, draughtsmen, craftsmen and the artist, Carlos Mérida said, worked as a single nucleus, like the builders of medieval cathedrals. The earthquake of 1985 destroyed the buildings, and the murals with them. The surviving fragments were assembled by Mérida’s pupil Alfonso Soto Soria, following the old plans, into a monument at the Fuentes Brotantes complex in the south of the city.

He was born on 2 December 1891 in Guatemala City, the son of the lawyer Serapio Santiago Mérida and the teacher Guadalupe Ortega Barnoya, and was registered as Carlos Santiago Ortega; he chose the surname Mérida later, as more sonorous, and his brothers and children took it after him. He spoke all his life of his Spanish and Maya-Quiché roots. First there was music: piano lessons, study with Jesús Castillo in Quetzaltenango, where the family moved in 1907. At fifteen he began to lose his hearing, and his father turned him towards painting; music, in his words, had defeated him. He studied with the draughtsman and photographer Santiago Vilchi, then at the Institute of Arts and Crafts and the Institute of Sciences and Letters in the capital, where he already had a reputation for the avant-garde. At nineteen he went to the Catalan Jaime Sabartés, Picasso’s future secretary, who helped him organise his first exhibition at the offices of the newspaper El Economista in 1910.

In the same year he sailed for Europe with a friend, the painter Carlos Valenti, on a German cargo ship. Until 1914 he lived in Paris; from 1912 he attended the Académie Vitti, visited the studios of Modigliani, Van Dongen and Anglada Camarasa, knew Picasso and Mondrian and, among the Latin Americans, Rivera, Enciso, Zárraga and Dr. Atl; he showed at the Salon des Indépendants and the Galerie Giroux. Valenti killed himself in his studio; Mérida lost his taste for work for a long time, and it was Roberto Montenegro who pulled him out of it. With the war he returned to Guatemala and saw it differently, through its folklore: his exhibition of 1915 in the Rosenthal Building is considered the beginning of modern painting in the country. In 1917 he made his first trip to the United States, where he met the poet José Juan Tablada, and in 1919 he moved to Mexico City.

His first Mexican exhibition was held in 1920 at the National School of Fine Arts, and in the same year he showed at the Hispanic Society in New York. He joined the group known as the Mexican Renaissance, in 1922 was an assistant to Rivera at the Bolívar Amphitheatre together with Charlot, Amado de la Cueva and Xavier Guerrero, and painted the children’s library of the Ministry of Education (“Little Red Riding Hood and the Four Elements”); he drew for the archaeologist Manuel Gamio. His subjects were those of the muralists, Indigenous America, but without narrative and without politics: in 1927 in Paris, after Klee, Kandinsky and Miró, he moved for good into abstraction and became one of Mexico’s first non-figurative artists. The critics took it badly and the paintings sold slowly, and yet between 1928 and 1948 he had forty-five exhibitions in the United States and eighteen in Mexico, including one shared with Rufino Tamayo in New York in 1930 and the International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City in 1940. From the graphic work of those years: the portfolio “Images of Guatemala” (1936), the albums “Dances of Mexico” (1938) and “Carnival in Mexico” (1939). In 1932, with Carlos Orozco Romero, he founded the dance school of the Ministry of Education and ran it for three years; his daughter Ana Mérida became a choreographer, and he himself designed twenty-two productions between 1940 and 1979 and documented 162 Indigenous dances. In 1942 he was invited to teach fresco at the North Texas State Teachers College in Denton.

He came back to the wall in the late forties: the Ministry of Water Resources (1949), the kindergarten of the Miguel Alemán housing complex (1950) with the architect Mario Pani. From this grew his idea of “plastic integration”, art built into architecture; in 1950 he went to Italy to study Venetian mosaic. Then came the glass mosaic “Stylisation of Maya Motifs” on the Reaseguros Alianza building (1953), the Banobras tower in Tlatelolco, the Cine Mácar, the stained-glass wall of the Cora and Huichol hall in the National Museum of Anthropology (1964), a wall in the Civic Centre of San Antonio, Texas (1968). In Guatemala the architect Roberto Aycinena invited him in 1952 to work on the Civic Centre, and Mérida agreed on condition that young Guatemalans work alongside him: “Song to the Race” in the Municipal Palace (1956), “History of Social Security” on the façade of the Social Security Institute (1959), sixteen panels after the “Popol Vuh” for the National Mortgage Credit (1963) and “Dancing Maya Priests” in the Bank of Guatemala (1963–1966), made of two thousand enamel plates on copper. The majolica “Integrated Abstraction” from the Champion spark-plug factory (1967) he gave in 1984 to the National Autonomous University of Mexico; earlier still, in 1963, he had given the university canvases, graphic work and mural sketches.

In 1957 he received the prize of the IV São Paulo Biennial, in 1958 the Order of the Quetzal, in 1966 his first retrospective, organised by the Bank of Guatemala, in 1980 the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Mexico’s highest honour for foreigners. The Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City showed his retrospectives in 1981 and 1992.

Mérida died in Mexico City on 21 December 1984. Since 1999 the National Museum of Modern Art of Guatemala has borne his name.