Gunther Gerzso
Mexican

Mal de Ojo, 1957
oil on masonite
25 x 18 in.

SBMA, Gift of Charles A. Storke
1994.57.14



Undated photo of Gerzso

RESEARCH PAPER

Gerzso is considered one of the fifteen great Latin American artists of the second half of the 20th century. His personal expressions were a very deep part of his life and led to a painted diary on the Mexican spirit – past, present, and future.

The four dominant influences in his work were: set/scene design, surrealism, cubism and Mexican landscape/pre-Columbian architecture.

In addition to Gerzso’s four major influences, he included numerous repetitive themes throughout his paintings. They are:

a. emotional content
b. spirituality
c. paradoxes
d. hiding and revealing
e. geometrics
f. secrets
g. eroticism and sensuality
h. other spaces
i. windows

Gerzso initially made his career in stage set and cinema scene design. In 1936 he accepted an offer to work as staff set designer for the Cleveland, Ohio Playhouse. His extensive work with scrims, backdrops, partitions, construction, layout, and costuming design shaped 56 operas and plays over a period of five years. During these years he began to hobby paint on his set breaks during rehearsal schedules. In 1941 he returned to Mexico City to develop a distinctive and personal style of painting.

Between 1960 and 1980 his work in scene designing as artistic director encompassed over 250 films, which brought him to survey the entire country with a telling abstraction. The walls and facades in his paintings could also be a curtain as might exist on stage.

Gerzso considered himself a part-time painter throughout his entire life. Many titles of his paintings allude to Mexican landscapes. Others refer to imaginary spaces – termed by Gerzso as landscape myths (not landscapes of mythology). They have become metaphors for human intellectual and artistic endeavors as well as the physical yearnings of desire. The color titles were derived from the pigments he used in his work.

In the 1940’s surrealism took on a more privatized and introspective means of expression. The hidden recesses of the human mind and the cavities of more secret places – both in turn found a cosmology in Gerzso’s landscapes. In his early paintings we can see through his use of composite and biomorphic imagery that man finds himself echoing lifeless forms that are capable of containing and transmitting erotic tensions. Gerzso’s paintings remained rooted in surrealist philosophy and he proceeded to develop a highly refined form of geometric abstraction with surreal overtones that were uniquely his.

A transition from surrealism to cubism became more evident in his work during the 1950’s. This influential art movement remained in the forefront of Gerzso’s painting. Evil Eye, an example, is in the SBMA’s permanent collection. In it there are smaller geometric clusters, which float against wide-open spaces. Overlapping patterns drift back and up this two-dimensional picture plane. The form that recurs most frequently in Gerzso’s work is the square – completely self-contained and secret in the perfection of its symmetry. The colors are shimmering tones, which allude to Mexico’s abundant flora and fauna as well as her special quality of light.

Gerzso was able to produce paintings that were surface conscious with deeply instilled spatial feeling. Lights against darks became a featured hallmark of his work. One such piece was Landscape – Black, White, Red, Blue, an acrylic on paper, which remains in his permanent estate collection. Another work, Person, Red, Blue 1964, suggests a human form resembling stone pieces found in Mezcala, the southwest region of Mexico. That form even resembles early Cycladic sculptures of the Mediterranean. His irregular shapes and slit-like lines within the larger composition create a sense of mystery about a deeper space behind the perfectly balanced composition. This space is more open and emotionally generous than those in his prior works.

Gerzso’s paintings are also a system of allusions as well as a system of forms. The color, lines and masses play the game of echoes and correspondences. Sameness and difference summon and reply. The shapes and colors suggest another reality. In all of Gerzso’s paintings there is a secret – invisible but actual. Its existence is behind the canvas – alluding to what lies in a parallel world. His paintings signify but do not represent.

Although he was a studio painter, nature was his inspiration. He found that the beauty of landscapes moved him more than any other natural element.

The Mexican landscape with its pre-Columbian architecture is the central theme in much of his work. The architecture is an art of silhouettes and most importantly of edges. Edges that overlapped, cut back, indented and incised, edges that are formed by steps, grooves, slots, doors, windows, and secret chambers. Gerzso was the master of the painted edge. There are razor cutting and overlapping shapes and forms with recessed openings of darker colors. The lines were drawn on first then the color was applied. Nothing was subtracted once he began work.

Gerzso was a refined colorist. He admits that his paintings speak largely of color and the translating of pigment into something more was very important to him. That something more was sensuality inherent to all his work. His multiple layered color glazes and tonal variations provide a visual depth and texture despite the actual smoothness. This smoothness gives off a glacial emanation that appears to be very glassy on the surface. Each color makes another shine. His transparent glazes were comprised of oil, pigment and varnish. Sand, ground pumice and charcoal were also added for a courser texture.

The painter’s thirst for another space extends outward in search of equilibrium. Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet, refers to this equilibrium as "balance painting” and he describes Gerzso’s work as painting at the halfway point in time. Gerzso’s answer to balance painting was geometry.

The paradoxes created in his paintings are so meticulous and complex that they appear simple and empty – so ripe with influences of the past that they appear to be years ahead of their time and so full of passion and depth they must be studied and reflected upon.

The surrealists of the 1930’s set out to paint vistas, that stretched away and out of sight. Gerzso’s vistas never stretch; they only suggest infinite space. His landscapes bring us an awareness of our psyche and it’s creative and visionary capacities. These are not landscapes and figures of his dream but rather configurations of his mind, imagination and creative spirit.

In conclusion:
Gerzso blended the traditional values of the Mexican preoccupation of mystery and suffering with the blossoming experimentalism of the cubists and of the French revolutionary movement, while creating a style that is also characterized by his years as an artistic director. His rich jewel-like glazes of color, and his sharp-edged architectural forms with the suggestion of other space – are at once erotic, spiritual, and psychological. His paintings honor the pre-Columbian world of art and architecture as well as the varied landscapes of Mexico that retain an edge of vibrant tension that remains relevant.

Bibliography:
Gerzso Editions du Griffin, Neuchatel, Switzerland, 1983
Latin American Artists in Their Studios Marie Pierre Calle
New York, United States, 1984
Resumes Reproductions de Arte Mexicano Lomas de Chapultepec,
Mexico, 1997
Periodicals
Documents from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art archives
Exhibitions and Collection Catalogs
Santa Barbara Museum of Art Permanent Collections

Prepared for SBMA Docent Council by Scarlett Dawn, March 28, 2001

COMMENTS

To most outsiders, Mexican art is easy to recognize. Many consider it powerful but limited in range, direct and boldly realistic, shaped by haunting images like Diego Rivera's exploited Indians and Frida Kahlo's tormented women.

A show at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art aims to subvert that stereotype. It presents the work of Gunther Gerzso, who is widely considered the finest abstract painter Mexico has produced and a figure of growing repute in the art world. It is the first Gerzso retrospective since he died in 2000 at 84.

''This show really catapults his fame, and it comes after a decade when he's been getting much more attention,'' said Ilona Katzew, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art who specializes in Latin American painting. ''I hold him in very high regard. He developed something uniquely his own, a crisp, clean artistic style that's very intense and charged with emotion.''

While other Mexican painters were using art as a platform for social and political protest, Gerzso preferred to paint scenes from what he called his ''landscape of the spirit.'' ''A painting is like a screen on which a world of emotional anxieties are projected,'' he said. ''I don't produce happy art; it's more philosophical. I'm more of a sad man.''

Gerzso was born in Mexico City to a Hungarian father and a German mother. He was educated partly in Switzerland, where he lived with an uncle who was an art historian and collector. While in Switzerland he discovered the abstract art of Kandinsky and the spiritual prose of Hermann Hesse, a neighbor of his uncle.

These experiences gave Gerzso a view of the world that was unusually broad for a Mexican of his generation. He was fascinated by Mexico's traditional cultures and pre-Columbian art, but he also embraced modern ideas like psychoanalysis. Throughout his life he was, in his own words, that of ''a European with Mexican eyes.''

Although Gerzso incorporated many distinctly Indian images in his paintings, some Mexican critics found his art too foreign. After his first big show, in 1950, some of them complained that his work lacked Mexicanidad, a sense of being Mexican.

Gerzso was one of the handful of Latin American artists who were transfixed by abstraction, surrealism and other artistic movements that convulsed Europe in the 20th century. Their work mixed the subtlety and psychological depth of European art with Latin America's vibrant passions and tragic sense of life.

Among others in this group of pioneering artists were the Uruguayan Joaquín Torres-García, who studied in Barcelona and developed a style of sculpture influenced by Braque and Juan Gris; the Chilean Roberto Matta, who worked in Le Corbusier's architecture studio in Paris and embraced a wild, swirling form of surrealism; the Brazilian Lasar Segall, who studied in Berlin and Dresden and in 1932 was a co-founder of the São Paulo-based Society for Modern Art, which helped revolutionize Latin American painting; and the Cuban Wifredo Lam, who used traditional Latin and African patterns in strikingly modern ways and was admired by titans from Picasso to Jackson Pollock.

As these artists were transforming Latin American culture by opening it to modern European influences, Gerzso was becoming famous not as a painter but as a set designer. He had been fascinated by architecture since childhood, and by 1935, when he was just 20, he was designing sets for plays by Shakespeare and Molière. Later that year he was hired by the Cleveland Play House, then one of the leading regional theaters in the United States. After five years of designing sets and costumes there, he returned to a Mexico that was entering its golden age of cinema.

Almost every leading film director who worked in Mexico in the 1940's and 50's, from John Ford to Luis Buñuel, called on Gerzso's design talents. He painted when he could but did not feel driven to display his introspective work while Mexican art was dominated by passionately political muralists.

In 1962 Gerzso finally decided to abandon his successful stage-design career and devote himself to art. He wavered only once, coming out of retirement to become production designer for John Huston's 1984 film ''Under the Volcano.'' His paintings, however, continued to show a distinctly cinematic sense of compressed narrative, a result of the years he spent telling stories onstage with shapes and colors.

Gerzso also illustrated books by the Nobel Prizewinning Mexican author Octavio Paz, who considered him ''one of the great Latin American painters.'' ''In all Gerzso's pictures there is a secret,'' Paz wrote. ''His painting indicates its existence behind the canvas. The depicted renderings, mutilations and sexual hollows have a function: they allude to what lies on the other side.''

Many of the 122 paintings and works on paper in the Santa Barbara show are Mexican images portrayed with a European sensibility. ''Nocturnal Landscape'' is entirely in shades of blue, with a lightly colored square standing for the moon and elongated rectangles below representing natural and man-made features. ''Personage-Landscape'' is dominated by layers of green shapes and has one of Gerzso's trademark painted rips in the middle.

''So much is about myths and sources and origins,'' James Oles, a professor of art history at Wellesley College, said when asked to describe Gerzso's work. ''Then think of the 40's Pollocks or Rothkos with similar themes, but so different formally.''

In the catalog that accompanies the show, the curator, Diana C. Du Pont, asserts that Gerzso's art is defined by ''a belief in expressing a reality beyond surface reality; the value of intuition and free association; the importance of unconscious thought and emotional feeling; and the necessity for mystery and poetry in art.''

- Stephen Kinzer, "Just For Art, Mexican Broke The Mold; A Retrospective Is Gerzso's First Since His Death," The New York Times, Aug. 26, 2003

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Gunther Gerzso has been hailed as one of Mexico’s premier abstract painters. Creating a style of abstraction rooted in nature, architecture, and the human figure, the artist articulated a new direction in modern Latin American art. Looking beyond the socially committed and dramatically expressive mural painting of Los tres grandes, he embraced a new spirit of internationalism and a firm commitment to the possibilities of formalism and abstraction.

In 1941, Gerzso and his wife moved permanently to Mexico City where he soon joined a group of European Surrealists that had taken refuge from World War II, including Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Alice Rahon, and Wolfgang Paalen. Mal de ojo, or the evil eye, is a concept prevalent in many cultures throughout time, and was of particular interest to the Surrealists. The constellation of dark, densely layered geometric shapes has the magnetic pull of a deep gaze.

- SBMA title card, 2013

Mal de ojo is an early work by Gunther Gerzso, identifiable by the constellation of small geometric shapes that floats against a background of larger planes and by the intensely worked surface of subtle color. With a complex composition of ambiguous spaces, the shifting planes evoke the trapezoidal and rectilinear forms of Maya and Aztec architecture, while the shimmering tones allude to Mexico’s abundant flora and fauna and the special quality of its light.

- SBMA Wall Text, 2000