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Karen Cordero Reiman

The BesT Maugard drawing MeThod: a CoMMon ground for Modern MexiCanisT aesTheTiCs

he Best Maugard method of teaching drawing proposed a “recipe” for the creation of decorative images endowed with a Mexican national character. Formulated by the artist Adolfo Best Maugard (1891–1964) (fig. 1), this method enjoyed

extensive support from the state as one facet of the far-reaching cultural and educational program implemented by President Álvaro Obregón’s minister of public education, José Vasconcelos, from 1921 to 1924. The Best Maugard method was installed as part of the public school curriculum in the Federal District and surrounding area: each year a group of about two hundred teachers assigned to the newly created Drawing and Handicrafts Section of the Ministry of Public Education instructed approximately forty thousand students in primary and industrial schools and teachers’ colleges on the basis of this method.1 The drawings produced by the students were exhibited both in Mexico and abroad during these years as an example of the revolutionary nationalist art education system of Mexico. In late 1923 the Ministry published Método de dibujo: tradición, resurgimiento y evolución del arte mexicano (Drawing Method: Tradition, Resurgence, and Evolution of Mexican Art), a manual written by Best Maugard and illustrated by his disciple Miguel Covarrubias, explaining the method and its aesthetic basis, in an edition of fifteen thousand copies (fig. 2).

In spite of the huge importance accorded to the Best Maugard method during the years of its introduction in Mexico, its tenure as part of the

Karen Cordero Reiman is distinguished professor in art history at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. She has written widely on modern and contemporary Mexican art, including “Appropriation, Invention, and Irony: Tamayo’s Early Period, 1920–37,” in Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted (2007); and “Prometheus Unraveled: Readings of and from the Body: Orozco’s Pomona College Mural (1930),” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–1934 (2002). In addition, she has curated numerous exhibitions as well as the groundbreaking reinstallation of modern art at the Museo Nacional de Arte.fig. 1

Adolfo Best Maugard, Autorretrato, oil on cardboard, 841⁄4 x 475⁄8 in. (214 x 121 cm), 1923. Museo Nacional de Arte, Conaculta, INBA.

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official curriculum lasted little more than two years, like the larger cultural project of Vasconcelos, himself. By late 1923, when Best Maugard’s manual was rolling off the press, Vasconcelos’s group of supporters was already disintegrating, the minister was soon to renounce his post, and Best Maugard’s method was about to be transformed in accordance with changes in political and aesthetic priorities. In early 1924, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano replaced Best Maugard as titular head of the Drawing and Handicrafts Section and instituted radical changes in the original method. By January 1925, when Juan Olaguibel replaced Rodríguez Lozano, the Best Maugard method was officially suppressed in favor of a didactic method based more closely on drawing from nature.

Notwithstanding its apparently ephemeral character, the Best Maugard method played a key role in the introduction of modernist aesthetics in Mexico and in the formation of

leading members of a generation of post-Revolutionary painters. It introduced a proposal for the definition of mexicanidad (Mexicanness) based on principles of formal abstraction and synthesis that constituted an alternative to the rhetorical, didactic, and primarily figurative art that was later defined as the “Mexican School.” In addition, it helped popularize a new conception of the material culture of the rural sector and introduced it as a formal model (as opposed to a subject) of contemporary painting. Finally, as an educational proposal, Best Maugard’s method transcended Mexican national boundaries. While in virtual exile in the United States during the mid-1920s, Best Maugard introduced a variant of his didactic method in the Boston area, where it received a very positive reception, and in 1926 he published a version of his manual in English, which has been re-issued on many occasions.2 Related proposals also existed in other nations, such as Elena Izcue’s 1927 proposal for Peruvian schools, suggesting that Best Maugard’s method was not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a pervasive trend in art education that sought to promote the expression of national essence through abstract, formal components that were discursively related to indigenous traditions.3

The method proposes a visual vocabulary and grammar as the basis for the creation of a national art, drawing on elements supposedly culled from pre-Hispanic art and its remnants, which, Best Maugard argued,

fig. 3 (opposite top)Illustration of three of the seven basic elements of Mexican art (spiral, circle, half circle), from Adolfo Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 28–29.

fig. 4 (opposite bottom) Illustration of four of the seven basic elements of Mexican art (S motif, curved line, zig-zag line, straight line), from Adolfo Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 30–31.

fig. 2Cover of Adolfo Best Maugard, Método de dibujo: tradición, resurgimiento y evolución del arte mexicano (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1923).

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determined the characteristics of Mexican popular art in combination with European and Asian elements. The book posits seven primary elements in the primitive art of all nations—the spiral, the circle, the half circle, the S motif, the curved line, the zig-zag line, and the straight line—which are transformed and combined in a distinctive manner by each race or nation, in accordance with the particular characteristics of its society and environment (figs. 3, 4).4 These basic forms, following Best Maugard’s theory, originate from symbolic representations of deities. His method, significantly, is concerned only with their aesthetic, formal qualities, not with their symbolic content. In the case of Mexico, Best Maugard identified the distinctive characteristics of the combinations of the seven basic elements in static and dynamic series: grecas and petatillos (figs. 5, 6). The lines that compose these forms neither cross nor intertwine in these combinations, producing—according to the author—the extraordinary sense of harmony in indigenous Mexican art. In his introduction to the Método de dibujo, Best Maugard argued that, from the Spanish conquest on, the basic elements and formal characteristics of Mexican indigenous art gradually became integrated with elements of the art of Spain and other nations, principally China, which sustained important commercial links with

fig. 5 (opposite top)Illustration of combinations of the basic elements of Mexican art in grecas, from Adolfo Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 48–49.

fig. 6 (opposite bottom) Illustration of combinations of the basic elements of Mexican art in petatillos, from Adolfo Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 38–39.

fig. 7Examples of how to form objects using the basic elements of Mexican art, from Adolfo Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 80–81.

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Mexico.5 Viceregal art and popular art were the fruits of this gradual stylistic fusion.6 For this reason, he identified popular art as the principal existing vehicle for the “genuinely Mexican” spirit and used it as a source for the national art that his method aimed to promote. He illustrated how the seven basic elements posited by his theory are combined in popular art to create stylized representations of natural and man-made objects related to everyday life (fig. 7).

The didactic methodology proposed by Best Maugard is not based, however, on formulaic combinations of this basic visual vocabulary, as one might expect from the systematic character of his proposals. He identified art as a human necessity, “pure intuitive emotion,” that emerges in the child, as it has always emerged in human beings, on the basis of a desire to express “universal harmony. . . the beauty present in the universe, which they conceive as ideal.” 7 The ostensible aim of Best Maugard’s method, then, is a return of the child to an innocent state, equivalent to that of primitive man. In this condition, and through contact with national tradition synthesized in the visual vocabulary presented by his or her teacher, the child will initiate—in an educational context—the same trajectory of artistic evolution that Mexican art has taken over centuries:

All the child’s education and previously acquired knowledge, alien to our idiosincrasy and our artistic tradition, will be substituted little by little until he is capable of producing an art which is genuinely our own. . . . Our objective is that the individual put into play his whole personality; the help he is given is. . . in the form of suggestions that help him to generate his own ideas and ideas sparked by the genuinely indigenous primary elements and their characteristic combinations, as well as the elements resulting from later exotic influences, all of which will create the conditions for him to produce his own personal art using the same elements that his remote ancestors had available. Our orientation should then serve to direct the individual, through appropriate suggestions, so that he can find his own path, . . . to make him capable of feeling, of conceiving, of creating, in order that he have confidence in himself and dare to express himself with complete naturalness and sincerity.8

The application of Best Maugard’s method, through a series of exercises carried out by the students, followed a recommended order that began with the reproduction of the seven basic elements and their combinations; proceeded to their application in the representation of various natural and man-made objects (such as flowers, birds, trees, rocks, mountains, jugs, curtains, houses), including several significant cultural symbols, such as churches, the national seal, and flags; and concluded with the depiction of the human figure. The method also involved an evolution in media and

technique, from line drawings, first with pencil and then with watercolor, pen, and crayon, moving only later to the use of areas of solid color and the creation of volume through drawing, shading with watercolor, modeling with clay, and construction with straws. The stages described by Best Maugard in the published method also suggest a cognitive development from the mastery of basic techniques and motifs of representation, illustrated by the teacher, to drawing from memory or from nature.9 Rufino Tamayo, who worked as a teacher of primary school students using Best Maugard’s method, recalled that the teachers drew the elements and motifs on the chalkboard as models for the students.10 Best Maugard’s manual also recommends that the teachers use “fantastic stories” to appeal to the students’ imaginations and inspire their creative generation of motifs, while referring them to elements based on national tradition and its contemporary evolution.11

From our contemporary perspective, Best Maugard’s method seems to embody a fundamental contradiction, as it is founded, on the one hand, on faith in the natural creativity of the child and, on the other, on a scientistic formulation of pre-established visual components. If we examine his aesthetic proposal in the context of the philosophy and politics of Mexico during the second decade of the twentieth century, however, we can comprehend more clearly its genesis and development, and its widespread acceptance at the time.

The conceptual roots of both Best Maugard’s method and Vasconcelos’s larger cultural program lie in the final years of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (who ruled from 1876 to 1910), when the philosophical and political hegemony of positivist philosophy was crumbling. Best Maugard developed his method between 1910 and 1920, a period marked not only by the political turbulence of the Revolution but also by a lack of a consensus on key philosophic questions concerning the nature of culture and civilization and the relationship of these concepts to social policies, and his method incorporated elements derived from diverse intellectual and aesthetic perspectives.

Best Maugard’s life circumstances during the years he was conceiving his method exposed him to a wide range of milieus and influences. Born in Mexico City in 1891, he traveled with his family to the United States and then Europe in 1900.12 He was back in Mexico by 1909, and exhibited several landscape paintings in a 1910 exhibition at the National School of Fine Arts.13 The next year he assisted the German anthropologist Franz Boas in documenting Mexican archaeological collections, before leaving again in 1912 on commission from the government to make reproductions and facsimiles of Mexican archaeological objects in Europe.14 In Paris he met up with his Mexican colleagues Roberto Montenegro and Diego

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Rivera, and he traveled periodically to Spain with Rivera and his wife, Angelina Beloff. He returned to Mexico in 1915 and became part of a circle of artists, writers, and musicians, including the poet José Juan Tablada and the musician Ignacio Fernández Esperón (known as Tata Nacho), who were concerned with the creation of a new national art on the basis of popular or folkloric culture.15 He began to put these ideas into practice in 1917 and 1918 working at public technical and craft schools. After a stay in New York in 1919 and 1920, he returned to Mexico and joined the group around Vasconcelos. And in 1921 he traveled to Tehuantepec, Oaxaca with Vasconcelos and a group of artists and intellectuals on a pilgrimage that is often associated by scholars with the official “rediscovery” of Mexico’s regional cultural heritage and the consolidation of the policy that would characterize Vasconcelos’s tenure as minister of education.

Best Maugard’s attempt to uncover universal laws of artistic development that could be applied to the teaching of drawing clearly reflects the influence of positivism, the dominant philosophical outlook in Mexico during the Porfirian regime. Using the natural sciences as a model, positivism seeks to uncover scientific laws applicable to all social phenomena and conceives the development of human society as an ascending progression from the savage or primitive state to that of civilization. The profound impact of positivist evolutionism in Best Maugard’s thought is evident in his assertion of the fundamental similarity of all primitive societies, the common origin of art, and the equivalence between the developmental process of the child and the evolutionary process of civilization.

Best Maugard’s method, however, also exhibited other influences, including critiques of positivist ideas that were launched from several quarters just before and during the decade of Revolution. Among these influences was the Ateneo de la Juventud (Atheneum of Youth), a civil association formed in 1909 whose members included Vasconcelos, Antonio Caso, Alfonso Reyes, and Pedro Henriquez Ureña (author of a postscript to the 1923 edition of Best Maugard’s manual). The Ateneo criticized the positivist emphasis on science and assigned renewed significance to metaphysics and the study of classical writings. Its members promoted the democratization of knowledge through public lecture programs and the foundation of the Universidad Popular, with the aim of expanding access to “civilizing culture.” Best Maugard’s method also advocated the Iberoamericanism of the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó, which challenged the hegemony of Anglo-Saxon culture and promoted Latin traditions as the basis for cultural development throughout Latin America. That Best Maugard and Vasconcelos shared these views surely facilitated the minister’s acceptance of the method.

Of particular note is the influence on Best Maugard of Boas, a professor at Columbia University in New York who was invited to the National University of Mexico in 1910. Boas’s research focused on refuting the concept of racial determinism; he argued that the belief in the innate inferiority of certain races was the product of ethnocentrism and social prejudice. The definition of certain characteristics as inferior, Boas observed, was simply the result of environmental and educational differences. He thus criticized the cultural hierarchies common in positivist thinking and introduced a relativist proposition: that cultural products must be understood as part of a total social context, rather than from ethnocentric or elitist perspectives. These two ideas would influence the cultural politics of Mexico decisively, particularly through their impact on the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, one of the principal Mexican disciples of Boas, and head of the Anthropology Department under Presidents Venustiano Carranza (1917–20) and Obregón (1920–24).

In 1911, Gamio introduced Boas to the young Best Maugard, who would serve as assistant to the German anthropologist in cataloguing the collection of the newly-established International School of American Anthropology and Ethnography. According to Best Maugard, he conceived his theory of the seven basic elements of ancient Mexican art through this experience, which entailed drawing more than two thousand ceramic objects selected by Boas. The following year, when he traveled to Europe for the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts, he had ample opportunity to compare the seven motifs he had derived from pre-conquest ceramics with ancient art of other cultures, and he expanded his theory to include all primitive art.16

The drawings that Best Maugard produced for Boas’s volume demonstrate his early interest in the detailed study of linear decoration, and confirm, in the objects rendered, the existence of the elements that he later identified as the primary components of primitive art (fig. 8). Nevertheless, his proposal in the Método de dibujo seems to obey a positivist concern with identifying universal patterns in all social phenomena,

fig. 8 (top)Adolfo Best Maugard, illustration from Álbum de colecciones arqueológicas (Seleccionadas y arregladas por Franz Boas) (Mexico City: Escuela Internacional de Arqueología y Etnología Americanas, 1911–12), plate 27.

fig. 9 (bottom) Pot from Tonalá, State of Jalisco, polished and polychromed ceramic, 131⁄4 x 12 5⁄8 in. (33.5 x 32 cm), ca. 1920. Museo Nacional de Arte, Conaculta, INBA. Colección de Arte Popular “Roberto Montenegro.”

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rather than reflecting the results of the kind of rigorous scientific study that, for Boas, led to the questioning of positivist suppositions. Similarly, the close association established by Best Maugard between contemporary popular art and pre-Hispanic art, as well as his identification of certain stylized decorations as universal elements of Mexican folk art, do not seem to be the result of a careful study of the entire Republic; rather, he seems to have limited his sources to the ceramics and lacquer-work of Michoacán, Jalisco, and Guerrero (fig. 9). Finally, his decontextualization of art from its function and significance in its specific cultural milieu confirms his deviation from Boas’s methodology.

There were further influences, as well. Best Maugard’s view of popular art as a “synthetic expression of the soul of a people” and “the traditional expression of the race” has its roots in the work of nineteenth-century

fig. 10Adolfo Best Maugard, San Ángel. Iglesia de San Jacinto, oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, 173⁄8 x 205⁄8 in. (44.2 x 52.5 cm), 1911. Colección Francisco García Palomino.

European folklorists, with whom he would have been familiar from his education on the continent between 1900 and 1908.17 Like European romantic nationalists, he invoked “the people” and “the race” in an abstract and rhetorical manner, celebrating the values of purity, ingenuity, and sincerity, both in primitive and popular art and in the cultures that produced them. The paintings produced by Best Maugard between 1909 and 1910, images of the volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl in heightened coloristic schemes and broad gestural brushstrokes, and nostalgic scenes of colonial architecture, suggest romantic and symbolist influence in the recreation of environments emblematic of local identity and history (fig. 10). His appreciation of popular art and his association of such art with the values of children’s drawings were reinforced by his stay in Europe from 1912 to 1915, precisely the years when the artistic avant-garde there was discovering the aesthetic qualities and immediacy of expression in primitive, folk, and children’s art. During this time, Best Maugard likely came to know the group of Russian neo-primitivists residing in Paris with whom his friend Rivera had a close relationship.18 A few years earlier, these Russian painters had begun to draw formal and iconographic inspiration for their work from Russian folk art and icons, and the Salon d’Automne of 1913 included an exhibition entitled “Russian Popular Art in Images, Toys, and Breads” that was an enormous success among the avant-garde.19

Best Maugard’s insistence in the introduction to his manual that “one must be expressionist, not impressionist” and the value he accorded to the “pure intuitive emotion” manifest in primitive art suggest also the influence of German expressionism.20 His call for the synthetic reduction of form in order to reveal emotional essence and his recognition of the ability of children to respond emotively and graphically to objects and phenomena correspond closely to the ideas expressed by Vassily Kandinsky in his text “On the Problem of Form,” published in Munich in 1912.21

What allowed Best Maugard to combine elements of so many different and even contradictory philosophical visions was the need to produce a national art, not only within the academy, as nineteenth-century criticism had demanded, but also on a grassroots level, as part of a federalized educational program. In the second half of the Revolutionary decade, many Mexican intellectuals—provoked by debates about culture and by the political crisis of the time—sensed the urgency of formulating a new cultural politics, one that would contribute to the legitimation of the federal government. In 1916, Gamio outlined in his book Forjando Patria (Pro-Nacionalismo) (Forging the Fatherland: Pro-Nationalism) a modified definition of national culture based primarily on Boas’s relativist ideas.

Gamio considered that the unification of the population required “the fusion of races, the convergence and fusion of cultural manifestations, linguistic

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unification, and economic equilibrium of social forces.”22 In order to achieve the ideal of a “powerful Fatherland and a coherent and clearly defined nationhood,” he posited a process of cultural and racial mestizaje (miscegenation) of the European and indigenous parts of Mexico’s population, orchestrated at a federal level: “In order to incorporate the Indian we do not propose to ‘Europeanize’ him all at once; rather, let us ‘Indianize’ ourselves a little in order to present him our civilization diluted with his, so that he will not find it to be exotic, cruel, bitter, and incomprehensible.”23

Gamio underlined the need for intellectuals to know and understand indigenous cultures, so that aspects of these cultures might be combined with those of other ethnic groups in order to create a truly national—mestizo—culture. He asserted that the Anthropology Department would conduct studies of the distinct ethnic groups of Mexico and determine “the appropriate means to facilitate their normal evolutionary development.”24

Art was one of the aspects of indigenous culture most valued by Gamio. He identified two existing prototypes of national art in the post-conquest period: the “indigenous artistic industries” in which European aesthetics had influenced those of pre-Hispanic origin; and those cases of sixteenth-century architecture where pre-conquest elements were integrated into an essentially European conception. In order to continue to foment the creation of a national art, Gamio argued, it would be necessary to “systematize the artistic production of the Indian and middle-class individuals,” who would have to become familiar with each other’s art and its antecedents, so that they would eventually come to share the same artistic criteria. Only then, Gamio declared, “we will be culturally redeemed, and will have a national art, which is one of the key elements of nationalism.” Nevertheless, he added, this process of aesthetic fusion must be initiated by the middle class, “because at the present time it has much greater possibilities to educate itself than the Indian [class].”25

Gamio took up Boas’s ideas that environment and education are more important than heritage in the determination of the social and cultural characteristics of ethnic groups and that each culture must be studied as an integral whole. Nevertheless, when he put these ideas at the service of political nationalism and a program of acculturation oriented toward racial and cultural homogenization, Gamio deformed Boas’s relativist conception, which is based on a respect for cultural difference, by subjecting it once again to an ethnocentric vision of indigenous culture.

Gamio’s ideas seem to have had a strong impact on Best Maugard upon his return from Europe in 1915, allowing him to connect his theory regarding primitive art, his aesthetic appreciation of folk art, and the association of folk art with national spirit, and to incorporate all these elements in his

fig. 11Anonymous student of the School of Industrial Arts “Corregidora de Querétaro,” untitled, tempera on paper, 193⁄4 x 123⁄4 in. (50 x 32.5 cm), 1918. Private collection.

“recipe” for a new national art. Best Maugard’s conception of colonial art and folk art as products of cultural mestizaje, as well as his consequent identification of them with the ideal of a “national art,” is a direct reflection of Gamio’s theory. In addition, Best Maugard’s method seems to fulfill Gamio’s mandate to systematize artistic production according to his model of cultural mestizaje.

With these conceptions in mind, Best Maugard began to work on the production of an art with “national” characteristics, both as part of an educational project and in his own painting. As might be expected, the practical application of his theoretical concepts took diverse forms as their execution progressed, and also held different social implications as the political context for his experiment evolved.

In 1918, after an incipient effort in the previous year, Best Maugard received his first formal opportunity to apply his method for teaching drawing in the School of Industrial Arts “La Corregidora de Querétaro.”26 In a 1922

interview he recounted that his students achieved “excellent results:” “On newsprint, with ordinary charcoal, they drew admirable grecas, and since they had within them the national sentiment implanted by these elements, produced forthwith ingenous but very worthy works of art.”27

In spite of Best Maugard’s retrospective judgment, the radical divergence in style in the surviving work by his students from this period suggests that his method had not yet taken on a systematic form in 1918. One group of works consists of line drawings on newsprint, in which the page is filled to its limit with plants, animals, insects, lacquer-work chests, and vases that do not overlap and are decorated with motifs composed of Best Maugard’s seven basic elements. Another group, however, is executed with meticulous naiveté, but without an apparent relationship to his standardized visual vocabulary (fig. 11).

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In this same year, when the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova arrived in Mexico on a world tour, Best Maugard took advantage of his conviction—developed during his time in Paris—that Russian and Mexican folk art bore strong similarities. He suggested that Pavlova include a ballet “Mexican in character” in her repertory. With the financial support of Jaime Martínez del Río, music by Manuel Castro Padilla based on folkloric themes, and scenery and costumes by Best Maugard, Fantasía Mexicana premiered in March 1919 with such success that Pavlova extended her programmed stay in Mexico for another month. She continued to perform the ballet, with equal acclaim, during her tour through Latin America, the United States, and Europe.

The subject of the ballet, a simple love story between a charro and a china (stereotypical symbols of Mexican national culture and gender roles), unfolded against a backdrop decorated with amplified motifs from Uruapan lacquer-work: an enormous bouquet of flowers, with its curves reiterated on either side by a stylized bird.28 The Mexican press applauded the extraordinary refinement of the combination of Pavlova’s ballet and Best Maugard’s popular art, commenting approvingly on the “ennoblement” and “redemption” of the popular, and the absence of vulgarity:

Undoubtedly, Ana Pavlowa and her collaborators in this interesting dance piece. . . have contributed definitively to the ennoblement of typical dance through the appropriate and graceful stylization of the choreography. . . . The principal movements, I repeat, have been stylized, redeemed. Madame

fig. 13 (left)Adolfo Best Maugard, Tehuana, gouache on cardboard, 191⁄2 x 135⁄8 in. (49.5 x 34.7 cm), 1919. Colección Francisco García Palomino.

fig. 14 (right)Adolfo Best Maugard, Blue Dancer, tempera on cardboard, 193⁄8 x 143⁄8 in. (49.3 x 37.5 cm), 1919. Museo de Arte Moderno del Estado de México, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, Toluca.

fig. 12Adolfo Best Maugard in the Knoedler Gallery in New York during his exhibition “Paintings Mexican in Character” in 1919, with the paintings (from left to right) China Poblana, Portrait of My Sister, Blue Dancer, and Tehuana. From Otilio Villaseñor, “Lo que dice Best Maugard en Estados Unidos,” El Universal Ilustrado, April 1925, 82. Hemeroteca Nacional, Mexico City. Photograph courtesy of Curare, A. C.

Pavlowa uses the point step that has never been seen in our popular dances; but she uses it without losing the local character of our dance.29

This same refinement, which made the subjects and motifs of folk art acceptable to the taste of high society, is evident in the paintings Best Maugard produced during these years, primarily in New York, where he lived between 1919 and 1920. They were exhibited in two individual shows during that time, at the Knoedler Gallery in New York in December 1919 and at the Arts Club of Chicago in January 1920 (fig.12). These paintings combine the three elements that Best Maugard later identified in his manual as having contributed to a national art of Mexico: industrial or “popular” arts, European art, and Asian art. He combined these elements in a very deliberate manner, dominated by the linear refinement of art nouveau, and more reminiscent of turn-of-the-century eclecticism than of an integral aesthetic proposal (fig. 13). In The Blue Dancer, for example, the format of the arch, the simple, flat composition, and the Tehuana dress of the dancer are derived from Mexican popular culture (fig. 14).30 The calligraphic treatment of the woman’s body and the fireworks, superimposed on a black background, evokes the aesthetic qualities of Japanese art (surely reflecting the influence of Best Maugard’s close friend José Juan Tablada, the Mexican poet and japoniste who lived in New York). The dominant elements in the composition, however—the sinuous lines found in the woman’s body and the pyrotechnic display—clearly display art nouveau’s decorative elegance. As in Fantasía Mexicana, the

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European aesthetic treats the Mexican elements as picturesque exotic motifs. Best Maugard’s application of his style of these years with equal facility to cosmopolitan subjects, as in the case of another painting, The Broadway Girl, confirms its essentially international character. The conception of “Mexican character” that he presented to the U.S. public in these works is a folkloric eclecticism designed for consumption by an international elite.

It is not surprising that a member of the Mexican aristocracy would be interested in presenting a picturesque, decorative, non-threatening vision of his country’s “popular essence” at a time of heightened political tension between the United States and Mexico thanks to the anti-foreign rhetoric propounded by the post-Revolutionary government. A New York Times review of Best Maugard’s exhibition at Knoedler captures this deliberately depoliticized mexicanidad:

The present moment is perhaps not the most appropriate for introducing paintings “Mexican in character” to the New York public, but Adolfo Best Maugard has taken his Mexican inspiration from the innocent popular art which never has anything to do with politics and international relations. He likes the language it offers and uses it in a sincere manner for his own purposes.31

With hindsight it is clear that “innocent popular art” had, indeed, a great deal to do with politics and international relations: both internal and external politics have consistently determined the uses for and ways of presenting popular art in post-Revolutionary Mexico. With the assumption of the presidency by Obregón in late 1920, a new federal policy with a populist and nationalist bent was established; within it popular art played a key symbolic role.

Obregón’s politics responded to the needs of a nation fragmented by both war and the systematic repression of peasant and labor movements during the presidency of Carranza. Obregón initiated a program of social and cultural reform aimed at the reconciliation and integration of the principal factions and social groups that had participated in the armed struggle. One of the top concerns of the regime was to mark the end of the violent stage of the Mexican Revolution and initiate an era of national reconstruction and stabilization.

Education played a key role in this plan, as is reflected in the support for Vasconcelos’s project with twenty percent of the national budget. Vasconcelos, in his attempt to democratize education, instituted federal control of this area and set forth an extensive program including a wide-ranging literacy campaign, public libraries, and publications, together with open air festivals and the promotion of public art. With the

fig. 15Views of the Noche Mexicana organized by Adolfo Best Maugard on September 16, 1921. From Jerónimo Coignard, “El Valor Efectivo del Ballet Mexicano,” El Universal Ilustrado, October 1921, 32. Hemeroteca Nacional, Mexico City. Photograph courtesy of Curare, A. C.

institutionalization of Vasconcelos’s program, as Francisco Reyes Palma has observed, “the school became the symbol of the peaceable revolution that was to contribute to the erasure of the memory of the years of armed struggle and cement the stability of the country.”32 Best Maugard’s method was a perfect vehicle for this aim, coinciding with the projected creation and propagation of new symbols and traditions that could be identified both with the popular classes and the post-Revolutionary state.

The events commemorating the Centennial of the Consummation of Independence in September 1921—the first large public display of the aesthetic and political stance proposed by the Obregón regime—included not only an extensive exhibition, “Las artes populares en México,” and the inauguration of murals based on motifs from popular art in the former church of San Pedro and San Pablo, but also a “Noche Mexicana” organized by Best Maugard in Chapultepec Park. The “Noche Mexicana” featured a stage set based on popular art, music from folkloric themes, fireworks, and the presentation of a Ballet Mexicano derived from regional dances (fig. 15). The form and content of the “Noche Mexicana” were similar to that of other events that Best Maugard had organized both in Mexico and in the United States, but here the fact that popular art was

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fig. 16 (top)Dolores Serrano, untitled (work as student of the Best Maugard method), ink on cardboard, 221⁄2 x 28 in. (57 x 71 cm), 1922. Private collection.

fig. 17 (bottom)J. M. Anaya, untitled (work as student of the Best Maugard method), watercolor on paper, 141⁄2 x 181⁄2 in. (36.8 x 47 cm), 1922. Private collection.

embraced by the state and promoted on a grand scale transformed it into a hallowed symbol of the nation.

It is not surprising, then, that in these years Best Maugard’s personal work drew more directly on the formal models of Mexican popular art, as is evident in a portrait of a woman and his self-portrait of 1923 (fig. 1). As the legitimation of the aesthetic value of popular art by the state took hold in middle- and upper-class consciousness, it was no longer necessary for Best Maugard to combine it with other elements in order to make it socially acceptable.

It is worth emphasizing, however, that this legitimation of popular art as a national symbol in the post-Revolutionary period never corresponded to an interest in a revitalization of the traditional rural lifestyle that was the context for peasant artisanry. On the contrary, as Best Maugard himself indicated in a lecture in San Francisco in 1922, it was part of a program of acculturation along the lines set out by Gamio.33 The aesthetic aspects of artisanal production would be identified, promoted, and converted into national symbols, while the production process of these artifacts would be “perfected” on the basis of modern technical expertise.

The Drawing and Handicrafts Section, formed for the specific purpose of teaching the Best Maugard method, was a vehicle for propagating the aesthetic and symbolic characteristics of popular art among the population in general, as well as a means of generating new visual models. Vasconcelos, perhaps inspired—as in much of his work—by the model of sixteenth-century mendicant friars and the policies of his Soviet counterpart, Anatoly Lunacharsky, believed that the creation of a national art that would transform the aesthetic conceptions of middle- and upper-class Mexicans would have to go beyond the production of monumental works to permeate the design of everyday objects, the decoration of public and private spaces, and visual education on the basic and secondary levels.

The work produced between 1921 and 1923 by the students of the Movimiento Pro-Arte Mexicano (Movement for Mexican Art), as Best Maugard’s method was known, display a highly decorative aesthetic, based on motifs and subject matter drawn from popular art (figs. 16–18). These works lack references to the quotidian aspects of the life of the “people” or to their presence as a political force in the still-too-recent armed struggle. The most frequently represented subjects include baskets of flowers, fountains, plants, animals, and religious imagery. The majority of works use linear drawing, and in many a decorative border delimits the pictorial space, making an analogy to the physical format of traditionally decorated craft objects, such as chests or plates. This same aesthetic conception is reflected in the early mural decorations by Roberto Montenegro and Gabriel Fernández

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fig. 18A. Albarrán, untitled (work as student of the Best Maugard method), tempera on cardboard, 26 x 19 in. (66 x 48.3), ca. 1922. Private collection.

Ledesma in the former church of San Pedro and San Pablo; and a similar decorative and symbolic reference to indigenous and popular culture is suggested in the program announced by Vasconcelos for the new edifice destined to house the Ministry of Public Education, with paintings by Rivera, stained glass by Roberto Montenegro, and drawings by Best Maugard.34

Nevertheless, in the more than eight hundred drawings by students and teachers that were preserved in Best Maugard’s personal archive, there are many stylistic and expressive variations, which probably correspond to the personal interpretations of the method by different teachers (figs. 19–21). (The greater part of the period during which the method was practiced preceded its literary codification; Best Maugard’s book was published shortly before he left the Drawing and Handicrafts Section.) Daniel Cosío Villegas, in a 1923 article, observed that some of Best Maugard’s collaborators followed his procedure more exactly, while others took advantage of the opportunity to expound their own viewpoints (he mentions Rodríguez Lozano and Abraham Ángel in the latter category).35 One can imagine that the teachers, as well as some students, applied their own experiences with art and art education to the Best Maugard method and produced something new out of the contact between its prescriptions and their own aesthetic preconceptions and visions of national art.

The changes introduced in art education, both in style and subject matter, when Rodríguez Lozano assumed the post of head of the Drawing and Handicrafts Section constitute such a significant transformation in relation to Best Maugard’s original proposal that they should not be considered mere “modifications” of the method, although texts about the period treat them as such. One has only to compare the work produced by Ángel (1905–1924) under the tutelage of the two different directors in order to appreciate the radical difference between Best Maugard’s and Rodríguez Lozano’s ideas (figs. 22, 23). Both directors took the visual characteristics of popular art as their starting point for the creation of a “truly Mexican art.” But, while Best derived a standardized vocabulary and a set of compositional rules from popular art, Rodríguez Lozano modeled his proposal on what he perceived as the emotional essence of popular painting: he based his aesthetic vision on popular narrative ex-votos (votive paintings on tin created to thank a particular saint for saving the donor or his family from a calamity), rather than on the decorative lacquer-work and ceramics that had inspired Best Maugard.36 Instead of reproducing the surface motifs and formal characteristics of his model, he sought to emulate the attitude of the popular painter toward the subject and the act of painting. The subject matter explored by Rodríguez Lozano and his students was drawn from daily life. The results are narrative scenes filtered through an aesthetic attitude, rather than decorative compositions based on a pre-established definition of a national aesthetic.

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fig. 19 (above)Bertha del Río, untitled (work as student of the Best Maugard method),watercolor on paper, 191⁄8 x 261⁄8 in. (48.5 x 66.5 cm), ca. 1922. Colección Cristina Tovar de Osio.

fig. 20 (opposite)Guillermo Toussaint, untitled (work as student of the Best Maugard method), ink, watercolor, and pencil on paper, 13 x 10 in. (33 x 25.4 cm), ca. 1922. Private collection.

This change in stylistic emphasis in the Drawing and Handicrafts Section under Rodríguez Lozano not only corresponded to his personal conviction regarding the relationship between popular visual culture and national art, but also reflected general changes in the political ambience and the aesthetic proposals supported by the state toward the end of the Obregón regime. The alliance between Vasconcelos and Obregón weakened during 1923, as a result of differences regarding the subject of presidential succession and Vasconcelos’s conflicts with various individuals and groups, including artists who demanded a more politically pragmatic aesthetic policy. Vasconcelos’s team began to disintegrate by the summer of 1923, and the minister resigned in early 1924. In July 1923, Best Maugard traveled to California to participate in a congress on drawing methods; no documentation of his return is available until 1925, suggesting that—like Vasconcelos—he organized a prolonged absence at a time of political transition.

Although Rodríguez Lozano is not directly associated with any of the political factions of the time, his modifications in the realm of art education correspond to a general tendency toward a less idealist aesthetic stance, and toward subject matter related to social realities. The work of the Drawing and Handicrafts Section under Rodríguez Lozano, both in subject matter and style, came closer to that of the Open Air Art Schools,

fig. 22 (opposite top)Abraham Ángel, Mariposa, watercolor, ink, and gold leaf on paper, 25 3⁄4 x 23 3⁄4 in. (64 x 60 cm), 1922. Museo de Arte Moderno del Estado de México, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, Toluca.

fig. 23 (opposite bottom)Abraham Ángel, Me mato por una mujer traidora, tempera on paper, 113⁄4 x 173⁄4 in. (30 x 45 cm), 1924. Museo de Arte Moderno del Estado de México, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, Toluca.

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fig. 21 (above)Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, untitled (work as student of the Best Maugard method), tempera and pastel on paper, 14 x 19 3⁄4 in. (35.5 x 48.5 cm), ca. 1922. Private collection.

which, from 1925 on, were the recipients of strong support from the Ministry of Public Education (for examples, see figs. 24, 27, and 31). The two movements shared at this time a more narrative—though not necessarily naturalistic—focus, and an expressive freedom in the use of color, composition, and brushstroke, unfettered by academic convention. The report on art education in the Ministry of Education Bulletin of July 1925, presented by Juan Olaguibel (the head of the Drawing and Handicrafts Section who replaced Rodríguez Lozano), refers to the transformation of the didactic program under his predecessor as having gone beyond Best Maugard’s proposals, and announces the complete suppression of the Best Maugard method, in favor of a system based on drawing from nature.37

Nevertheless, the style promoted by Best Maugard persisted, up to a point, in the artistic production of the following years, particularly in theatrical scenery and book illustration. Its most important impact, however, is the diverse visual initiatives it spawned through the group of artists who worked as teachers of this method between 1921 and 1924. Many of these artists became key figures in the development and/or critical valorization of aesthetic proposals based on principles of formal abstraction and

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synthesis, which took on diverse forms in their work from the 1920s onward. They include Rodríguez Lozano, Ángel, and Covarrubias, along with Rufino Tamayo, Agustín Lazo, Julio Castellanos, and Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, among others. Their production suggests the compelling force of the new aesthetic strategies that the Best Maugard method introduced and the presence of a dialogue—more complex and fruitful than has usually been recognized—between the teacher’s apparently formulaic proposals and his disciples’

interpretation of his postulates. Best Maugard’s method facilitated the transition of a number of the young artists who worked as its teachers from a style linked to post-impressionism to plainly avant-garde production based on principles of formal and coloristic abstraction and synthesis.

The common experience as teachers of the Best Maugard method seems to have opened a variety of artistic paths for Tamayo, Lazo, Covarrubias, and Ángel, but each explored new possibilities in the conception of pictorial construction as an autonomous “poetic” composition, rather than one based on mimetic representation. At the same time, their experience with the method seems to have provoked a more abstract use of line and color, reinforcing the place of drawing in the production and communication of a conceptual universe, which tends to reflect an intimate perception of objects, scenes, and individuals. In the case of Tamayo (1899–1991), the construction of a conceptual composition on the basis of formal evocations and the symbolic use of separate, saturated areas of color constituted a clear departure from his earlier representations of local landscape and vernacular architecture in a post-impressionist style. The contact with Best Maugard’s method seems to have suggested to him completely different principles of composition, and the possibility of combining form and color to create an autonomous poetic composition without abandoning the use of figurative elements (figs. 24, 25). In his metaphysical compositions from the late 1920s and early 1930s, the palette is more subdued, the iconography is more tied to

fig. 25 (above)Rufino Tamayo, untitled, gouache on paper, 71⁄8 x 113⁄8 in. (18 x 29 cm), 1921. Private collection. © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/ México/2009. Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, A. C.

fig. 24 (opposite) Rufino Tamayo, untitled, tempera on cardboard, 13 x 103⁄8 in. (33 x 25.5 cm), 1924. Museo de Arte Moderno del Estado de México, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, Toluca. © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/ México/2009. Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, A. C.

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fig. 26Rufino Tamayo, Los fumadores, oil on canvas, 191⁄2 x 255⁄8 in. (49.5 x 65 cm), 1931. Museo Nacional de Arte, Conaculta, INBA. © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/ México/2009. Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, A. C.

middle-class urban interiors, and the apparent mass of the objects acquires a new importance (fig. 26). But the shallow compositions, the clear predominance of conceptual over ocular concerns, and the liberty with which he combined objects in a symbolic and poetic mode to evoke a state of mind all show the influence of the Best Maugard method.

Ángel’s passionate involvement in a world of pagan fantasy and psychological space—in which he gave free reign to the vivid, saturated palette of colors employed in Best Maugard’s lacquer-work models—seems to have provided him with the basis for the creation of a type of “Mexican fauvism,” which was truncated by his untimely death in 1924 (fig. 27). The stylization of trees, hills, and clouds—consonant with the principles that Best Maugard propounded—is extended to the faces and hands of the inhabitants of provincial Mexico in his work of this period, continuing the use of visual stereotypes while creating his own personal visual repertory, which unifies the portraits painted in his final year. Here the non-academic spatial construction and the free use of color become protagonists in the definition of a personal style, which reiterates the formulaic principle of Best Maugard’s method, while parting from its homogenizing impulse.

fig. 27Abraham Ángel, La mulita, oil on cardboard, 291⁄2 x 597⁄8 in. (75 x 152 cm), 1923. Museo de Arte Moderno, Conaculta, INBA. Photograph by Francisco Kochen.

In the work of Covarrubias (1904–1957), the focus on linear synthesis and the representation of the most characteristic views of each subject—recommended by Best Maugard—acquire a virtuoso quality (fig. 28). In early examples of his caricature, the presence of the seven basic elements is still evident (fig. 29), while in later works an ample range of international references comes into play in response to the broader, more cosmopolitan audience for which he worked.

Finally, while the early work produced by Lazo (1896–1971) under the tutelage of Best Maugard (fig. 30) does not suggest a particularly creative interaction with the method’s proposals, the freer, more conceptual use of space and color in his production of 1924 and after reveals a fundamental impact of the liberation from naturalistic representation (fig. 31). The poetic and metaphysical potential that this liberation unleashes is particularly potent in its ability to “unbalance” traditional perspectival expectations (fig. 32).

For these artists, the apparently formulaic character of Best Maugard’s method facilitated a rupture with preexisting habits of perception and creation, and helped cultivate and unleash new, non-naturalistic aesthetic programs. By breaking with the academic tradition of art education and

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fig. 28 (opposite top)Miguel Covarrubias, untitled, gouache on paper, 4 x 10 in. (10 x 24 cm), 1920. Colección Francisco García Palomino.

fig. 29 (opposite bottom)Miguel Covarrubias, caricature of Adolfo Best Maugard, from Azulejos 1, no. 5 (January 1922), 6.

emphasizing expression as its ultimate objective, his method opened spaces for creative and imaginative reinvention. In the final section of the lesson regarding the human figure in the 1923 manual, for example, after carefully describing the steps involved in the “correct” rendition of the body, Best Maugard noted:

The position of the figure responds to no norm other than that of the harmony of the full composition, whether or not it is floating in the air. . . . The figure should be initially conceived in perfect quietude, and then you can begin to introduce movement in all of its parts and in the composition as a whole, so that the complete figure achieves the expression that you desire.38

We can well imagine that the oral component of the method countered the detailed specificity of its instructions with an appeal to passion and personal commitment to the artistic process, and therefore encouraged subjective interpretations and transformations of the method by its practitioners.

The consequences of the Best Maugard method, then, arose from the dynamic interaction between Best Maugard’s instructions and the aesthetic trajectories of the young artists who taught it. As is the case with Vasconcelos’s larger educational project, it had far-reaching implications for Mexico’s art and visual culture that outlasted its immediate impact.

Best Maugard himself continued to be a colorful figure in Mexico’s artistic and intellectual milieu upon his return to Mexico in the mid-1920s, but he distanced himself for some time from the field of painting, making only sporadic contributions to graphic and theatre design, and to educational projects in mental institutions and hospitals. In the 1930s he turned to

fig. 30 (above)Agustín Lazo Adalid, untitled, gouache on paper, 87⁄8 x 21 in. (22.5 x 53.5 cm), 1921. Colección Francisco García Palomino.

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fig. 31Agustín Lazo Adalid, Lazando yeguas, watercolor on paper, 113⁄4 x 167⁄8 in. (30 x 43 cm), 1924. Museo de Arte Moderno del Estado de México, Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura, Toluca.

fig. 32 (opposite)Agustín Lazo Adalid, Niños con jaula, oil on canvas, 49 1⁄8 x 39 1⁄8 in. (124.5 x 99.5 cm), ca. 1943. Museo Nacional de Arte, Conaculta, INBA.

filmmaking, assisting Sergei Eisenstein on ¡Qué Viva México! (1931), and directing two of his own films as well.39 In the ensuing years he continued to develop his theories regarding the seven basic elements of all decorative arts—now conceived as diverse projections of a helix. His later work took a more philosophical direction, incorporating elements of physics, biology, mathematics, and psychology treatises that argue for the possibility of representation of a universal order, in which energy becomes existence.40 Only in 1950 did he return to painting, producing a series of portrait faces that are very different from his work of the 1920s.

Best Maugard’s esoteric theories seem to have had a limited circulation and reception, and his drawing method—which for him was only the beginning of a more complex interdisciplinary trajectory—fell into disuse and even ridicule during his lifetime. Curiously, the method has had a comeback in recent years, despite the radical changes in Mexico’s social and cultural context. Currently it is used as a component of art education activities in museums and schools (for example, in the National Museum of Art in Mexico City, where Best Maugard’s 1923 self-portrait hangs), and—in computerized form—as the basis for training in graphic and industrial design in communities such as Santa Clara de Cobre, Michoacán, where the Adolfo Best Maugard Center for Creative, Technical, and Industrial Training is located.41 Best Maugard’s method continues to be conceived as a relevant configuration of Mexicanist aesthetics, despite the historically bounded context in which his vision was generated and signified, reflecting the persistence of early-twentieth-century visions of popular art in constructions of nationalism and in contemporary Mexican politics, if not in today’s artistic production.

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1. “Informe que rinde la Dirección de Dibujo y Trabajos Manuales sobre las labores llevadas a cabo durante el año de 1922,” Boletín de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, January 1923, 379.2. Adolfo Best Maugard, A Method for Creative Design (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926). 3. See Natalia Majluf, “El indigenismo en México y Perú: hacia una visión comparativa,” in Arte, historia e identidad en América: visiones comparativas. XVII Coloquio Internacional de Historia del Arte, Vol. II, eds. Gustavo Curiel, Renato González Mello, and Juana Gutiérrez Haces (Mexico City: UNAM–IIE, 1994), 623; and Cheryl R Ganz, Margaret Strobel, and Vicki L. Ruiz, Pots of Promise: Mexicans and Pottery at Hull-House, 1920–40 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004).4. The use of the term “primitive” by Best Maugard refers, in accordance with the usage of the time, to ancient art, but also carries the weight of his evolutionist vision of cultural development. When I use the term—much questioned today—I am referring to Best Maugard’s usage of this concept. 5. By “indigenous,” Best Maugard refers to pre-Hispanic art, but also alludes more generally to the discourse of the period on the “native” as associated with a national essence and particularly with the “popular.”6. “Popular art” here refers to those objects—useful and decorative—created without an artistic intention in the terms understood by the canon and educational system of the time.7. Adolfo Best Maugard, Método de dibujo: tradición, resurgimiento y evolución del arte mexicano (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1923), 2, 1.8. Ibid., 20, 25.9. Ibid., 118–24.10. Judith Alanís and Sofía Urrutia, Rufino Tamayo: una cronología 1899–1987 (Mexico City: INBA/Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1987), 13.11. Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 96.12. Information on Best Maugard’s life is scant, and at times the published details are erroneous or contradictory. The information here is pieced together from periodicals of the time, articles published by his close friends and colleagues, archival documents, and published sources based on archival research. In the 1980s, I carefully documented the parts of Best Maugard’s personal archive in possession of the Tovar family and Francisco García Palomino in Mexico City. A good part of the documentary and visual material consulted comes from these sources, as well as from other public archives.13. Fausto Ramírez et al., 1910: el arte en un año decisivo (Mexico City: MUNAL, 1991). 14. Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes, Caja 282, Expediente 20, Foja 3.15. Marco Velázquez and Mary Kay Vaughan, “Mestizaje and Musical Nationalism in Mexico,” paper prepared for Washington Area Symposium on the History of Latin America, University of Maryland, College Park, November 8, 2002, www.driskellcenter.umd.edu/programs/2002- 2003/conf/washla/papers/VaughanVelazquez.pdf, p. 21, consulted April 28, 2009.16. Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes, Caja 282, Expediente 20, Foja 3.17. Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 14.18. Ramón Favela, Diego Rivera: The Cubist Years (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 1984), 37.19. Ibid., 70.20. Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 2.21. Wassily Kandinsky, “On the Problem of Form,” in Theories of Modern Art, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 162–64, 166–67. Mireida Velázquez explores the common interest of Best Maugard, Kandinsky, and Mondrian in theosophical ideas, and argues the importance of the U.S. architect and theosophist Claude Bragdon for the philosophical underpinnings of Best Maugard’s method. See Mireida Velázquez Torres, “Nacionalismo y vanguardia en la obra de Adolfo Best Maugard (1910–1923)” (B.A. thesis in History, UNAM, February 2002), 50–71.22. Manuel Gamio, Forjando Patria (Pro-Nacionalismo) (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1916), 324.23. Ibid., 171–72.24. Ibid., 23.25. Ibid., 67.26. Documents in the Ministry of Public Education archive indicate that beginning in June 1917 Best Maugard nominally occupied several posts as a drawing teacher in arts and crafts and commercial schools, but in reality was charged with reorganizing the art education in these schools. His successor at Corregidora de Querétaro, Alicia Gariel, published a little-known

manual for the teaching of drawing in 1921, which, while lacking the nationalistic fervor of Best Maugard’s method, may well have been an inspiration for his 1923 manual. Alicia Gariel Vda. de Carrillo, Arte Decorativo: enseñanza del dibujo y la pintura decorativos (Mexico City: Departamento Universitario y de Bellas Artes/Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1921).27. Juan del Sena (pseudonym of José D. Frías), “Best Maugard y su sistema de enseñanza artística,” in El Universal Ilustrado, July 6, 1922.28. The charro and the china refer to figures of diverse historical and cultural lineage that were taken up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as stereotypical symbols of Mexican national culture, a tradition that was reinforced during the post-Revolutionary period. For more information on this subject see: Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Avatares del nacionalismo cultural. Cinco ensayos (Mexico City: CIDHEM/CIESAS, 2000); and Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Expresiones populares y estereotipos culturales en México.Siglos XIX y XX. Diez ensayos (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2007).29. Buffalmaco (pseudonym of Jesús Buenaventura González Flores), “La Fantasía Mexicana—Ballet de Mérito,” Pueblo, March 19, 1919.30. The works exhibited in the United States during this period were titled in English.31. “Painting Mexican in Character,” New York Times, December 4, 1919. 32. Francisco Reyes Palma, Historia social de la educación artística en México (Notas y documentos): la política cultural en la época de Vasconcelos (1920–1924) (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1981), 9.33. Adolfo Best Maugard, lecture on Mexico given at the radio station of the Examiner, San Francisco, California, December 1, 1922. Reproduced in facsimile edition of La Falange (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980). 34. José Vasconcelos, “Discurso pronunciado en el acto de inauguración del nuevo edificio de la Secretaría,” Boletín de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, September 1922, 8. 35. Daniel Cosío Villegas, “La pintura en México: segunda parte,” El Universal Ilustrado, July 20, 1923.36. See Karen Cordero Reiman, “La invención del arte popular y la construcción de la cultura visual moderna en México,” in Hacia otra historia del arte mexicano, Vol. 3 (Mexico City: CNCA/ Curare, 2003); and Karen Cordero Reiman, “Retablos, exvotos y pintura religiosa popular del siglo XIX: el coleccionismo en los Estados Unidos,” in México en el mundo de las colecciones de arte (Mexico City: Ed. Azabache, 1994).37. Juan Olaguibel, “Informe de la Sección de Dibujo y Trabajos Manuales,” Boletín de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, July 1925, 40. 38. Best Maugard, Método de dibujo, 88.39. These films were the documentary Humanidad (1934), a tribute to public welfare institutions, and La mancha de sangre (The Stain of Blood; 1937), a controversial vision of the Mexican underworld. The photographer Agustín Jiménez worked as cameraman on both.40. Adolfo Best Maugard, The new knowledge of the three principles of nature (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Científicas de la Exegesis de la Existencia, A.C., 1949); Adolfo Best Maugard, Intento preliminar de un ensayo sobre una teoría del orden universal. Posibilidades evolutivas del hombre y una nueva actitud, unpublished manuscript in the archive of Ing. Francisco García Palomino, 1958; Adolfo Best Maugard, “Teoría del proceso energía–existencia: su transición,” paper presented at the XII Congreso Internacional de Filosofía, September 1963.41. Rita Pomade, “From A Mexican Perspective—The Vision of Adolfo Best Maugard,” http://www.mexconnect.com/en/articles/1080-from-a-mexican-perspective-the-vision-of-adolfo- best-maugard, consulted April 30, 2009. A recent re-edition of the Método de dibujo by the Instituto Estatal de la Cultura de Guanajuato and Ediciones La Rana (Guanajuato, 2002) includes a CD produced by the Instituto Latinoamericano de Comunicación Educativa in 2001, with documentation on this adaptation of Best Maugard’s method for computer-based education by artist James Metcalf.