Mexico City in Juan O'Gorman's Imagination

Abstract

This essay offers a new interpretation of Juan O'Gorman's Paisaje de la Ciudad de México (1949), which won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior that year. Since then, the painting has been hailed as a positive representation of Mexico City that seems to support the policies of the government of Miguel Alemán. Undertaking a careful icono-graphic analysis of the painting, and situating it in relation to the artist's other works, including his extensive writing on architecture, I argue that the painting is a critique of the ideological shifts and the developmentalist policies underway in the 1940s. O'Gorman is also hailed as the founding father of architectural modernism in Mexico, but his criticism of the style and its politics has not been brought to bear on his pictorial production. In 1936, O'Gorman abandoned architecture and turned to painting. His pessimistic images have been categorized as Surrealist, but have yet to be examined contextually. This essay recontextualizes Paisaje de la Ciudad de México, considering its sources, ranging from Diego Rivera to Ambrogio Lorenzetti. It then reflects on O'Gorman's engagement with the ideological shifts of the 1940s and with the modernization of the urban environment.