Alfonso Michel...A Painted Diary

 

Agonía (La Muerte del Circo) , 1949 
 Oleo / tela
56.5 x 65 cm 

 Alfonso Michel ...A Painted Dairy

by Federico Correa

The above painting...."Agonía (La Muerte del Circo)"....by Mexican painter Alfonso Michel is  strong and an extremely impassioned image. It jolted my aesthetic senses. It demanded consideration.  Here,  perhaps "Agonia" may refer to pain.  Rendered helpless , impotent and abandoned,  a  white horse with three severed  amputated  legs  writhes in pain..in agony....a vista for all to behold. Indeed the "circus" is dead.

 Not to long ago while browsing through  an art museum bookstore  in Zacatecas, Mexico, I came across a book about the life and work of  Mexican painter,  Alfonso Michel. Born in 1897,  Michel  lived and painted during Mexico's  great Muralista Movement.  I had no clue of the painter  or of his work.

Upon  leafing  through the book, I was  immediately taken by Michel's  painted  image. The   beauty  and content of his  work was transcendent and captivating.    I was reminded of James Joyce who  in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man spoke about "Aesthetic Arrest"...the aesthetic experience  that occurs when  art... the art object...stops and  holds the viewer in contemplation.    Joseph Campbell further elaborated on Joyce's perception: 
 "The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object....you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest."  Perhaps my initial attraction to the work   was the  lush and radiant   color, the tightly gathering of organic forms,   or plainly,  the combination of beauty .......the longing, the  suffering  that emanated from his  work.   

El Adiós  (ca. 1944) 
Oleo / tela
51.5 x 62.5 cm

On  closer contemplation, I found Michel's  painted  image  replete with    introspection and allegory.     Introspection is defined as the  "examination of one's own conscious thoughts  and feelings".  Allegory is  "a story in which the characters and events are symbols that stand for ideas about human life". Unlike the   muralistas  whose painted imagery concerned  with national identity and   the political, Michel instead dove inward...into the  self  as topic.   Self ...individuality...is  core to his work rather than  the thematic of social freedom that preoccupied the great muralistas.   His individuality ....his sense of being in his painted image is strong and   familiar.     It is here, perhaps,  where my  attraction to his painted image may lie.  I understand him...I know.  

El Eco del Mar  (ca. 1945) 
 Oleo / tela
68 x 66 cm

In brief,  Michel  painted in the style of the  neo- classical /cubist  of the 1930s. I believe  much of  his  late work encompassed introspection, nostalgia, sorrow  and pain. He studied the work of  other great Mexican painters such as María Izquierdo, Rufino Tamayo, Agustín Lazo and others.  He also admired the work of  Picasso, Braque and the meta-physical De Chirico. Tamayo praised Michel as one of the "best  painters" of Mexico. I agree.

 Alfonso Michel  is indeed one of the "best painters" of the world , and perhaps one of the least known...at least outside his home state of Colima where annual art festivals celebrate and   commemorate  the painter's  life and artistry. 



Final thought..... Michel did not  write a diary...he painted his diary. He died in 1957. 

La Red , 1953 
 Oleo / lino
69 x 132 cm

For more information on the life and work of  Alfonso Michel go to the Colección Andres Blaisten
and Alfonso Michel.


 Image source:   Museo Andrés Blaisten