Word: merida
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Marxist revolutionary murals on which Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros rode to fame has pretty well petered out today, but the art of easel painting is running full blast. A flourishing group of some 40 able painters, including Abstractionists Carlos Orozco Romero and Carlos Merida, splashily realistic Jesus Guerrero Galvan and Federico Cantu, are beginning to be known in the U. S. Among the new ones touted by Critic Helm are Antonio Ruiz, who paints street scenes in a Covarrubias-like style, and 21-year-old Guillermo Meza, who took up painting be cause he didn't have enough money...
There were also a few Mexican artists of ability who had never paid much attention to politics. Two of these last week had one-man shows in Manhattan. They were 48-year-old Carlos Merida, who painted cactus and Aztec idols before Rivera did and 32-year-old Expatriate Federico Cantú, who dwells in Greenwich Village...
Guatemala-born Merida, who for '14 years had painted nothing but abstractions inspired by French modernists during his visit to Europe, surprised Manhattan visitors to the Buchholz Gallery by a complete change of style. His perspectiveless, daguerreotypical canvases, brightly colored and surrealistically childlike, depicted toy hons and paper-doll-like human figures sedately waving the stumps of amputated arms. Critics were not sure that Painter Merida's new style was any improvement over the old, but found his ashy reds, yellows and blues loudly decorative...
...Painters Merida and Cantú have done little fresco painting, but they are loud in their praise of Compatriots Rivera, Orozco, Siquieros. Says Merida: "They are three great painters, but the plastic expression of each is different. Diego makes politics in his pictures, Orozco is more poetic and lyric, Siquieros continues to be a great painter in spite of his politics." Cantú would have liked to do frescos, but says he got no commissions from the Mexican Government because he refused to paint Christ with the head of a donkey saints with the heads of pigs. "Although...