Paz's prose on art is (close to one thousand pages in two complete volumes), it is rather pointless to study “Octavio Paz's art criticism” merely as an historical record of his opinions and tastes concerning the art of his time, or as essays written for special events or friends, or even as his theoretical development on the relationships between modernity, revolution, and poetry. An alternative is to assume that even those whom the division of labor calls “professional art critics” adopt the “function of critic” by exception: that is, only when they controversially define, for others and in the name of others, a relationship with works of art. In other words, when their judgments take that seemingly logical leap of aesthetic judgment, much like the logical leap of hegemony, erecting a bridge that makes the general pass for the particular, and filling the void at the center of the consensus.1
I begin under the assumption that one of the features of art criticism is that it is a strategic interpretation, and therefore, that it is politically significant in itself because it projects a consensus where there is none preestablished. Not only does art criticism express an individual opinion; it also intentionally intervenes in the politics of artistic representation by creating expectations and demands concerning the artwork – demands and expectations that end up constituting the artwork. This means moving against Paz's own claim that he wrote only to guide contemplation:
I do not postulate definitions: I risk approximations. … Criticism is not a translation even if that were the ideal: it is a guide. And the best criticism is something less: an invitation to carry out the only act that is truly worthwhile: seeing (1987, p. 354).
To understand the moment of criticism, therefore, we much first detect what the textual intervention aspires to or where, in defining criteria, it actually intervenes. On at least two occasions, Paz wrote praising the oeuvres of two artists, Rufino Tamayo and Marcel Duchamp, as if they provided pertinent answers to the dilemmas and contradictions of modern civilization. This expectation shapes his interpretation of their work, which he describes by postulating their specific historical use. In fact, as we shall see, Paz posited as models two artists as different as Tamayo and Duchamp in a kind of analogic method, in order to explore possible escapes from the dead end of enlightened disenchantment. Perhaps from this perspective, we can come to understand how Paz saw these two artists as complementary poles of the era's artistic production. Or, we might say, as if he saw the terrain of modern art as the space between the affirmation of Tamayo and the negation of Duchamp:
There are artists that transform criticism into an absolute and that, to a certain extent, make of negation a creation – a Mallarmé, a Duchamp. There are others who use criticism as a spring board to jump to other terrains, to other affirmations. … That is what I have called, within the modern tradition of rupture, the families of No and Yes. Tamayo belongs to the second (1983, p. 184).
7.1 The Ancient Modern (1950)
“… your dreams are too transparent, you need a tough philosophy.”
–Octavio Paz, A Poet c. 1959
Between 1949 and 1951, when he was close to 35 years of age, Octavio Paz wrote four essays that set the foundation for his life's work, establishing his viewpoints and later obsessions. First, he published El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude), the psychohistorical and symbolic‐political construction that hypnotized modern Mexicans by transcribing their traumas, masks, and cultural ghosts into a catalog of beings inhabiting the mythic substratum of the country (1950). It was followed by Paz's experimentation with automatic writing, ¿Aguila o sol? (Eagle or Sun?), which produced a hallucinatory glimpse into the psychosocial underworlds of visionary poetry, “a sort of mixture of Surrealism and concern for the pre‐Columbian world” (1944–1955, pp. 12D and 13D). With this work, Paz moved beyond the orbit of the Spanish lyrical tradition to immerse himself in an avant‐garde that fluctuated between the exoticism of antiquity and the historical crisis of the postwar, describing Iztapapalotl, the obsidian butterfly, mourning the end of sacrifices and directing his words toward a present where “each night is an eyelid that the thorns have not ceased to pierce” (1997, p. 183–184).
This inflection is critical: poetry set aside its otherworldliness to register a political transmutation. Paz wrote: “When history sleeps, it speaks in dreams,” pointing to “the benevolent cardboard stone face of the Chief, the fetish Conductor of the century” (1997, p. 193–194). More than a decade earlier, Paz had distanced himself from an aesthetics of social commitment. But it was not until he wrote an essay for the magazine Sur concerning the controversy between David Rousset and the French communist left over Russia's forced labor camps that Paz publicly asserted his “open” and definitive “rupture” with the Soviet dream. Starting with the title “Soviet concentration camps,” Paz identified Stalinism with Nazism. Getting straight to the point, he denounced the USSR as an incipient “aristocratic society” that owed its “ferocity” to the constant need for “fresh blood” for its purges and for the enormous financial projects that secured the power of the bureaucracy (1995, p. 92‐95).
It was in the context of these political, poetic, and spiritual readjustments, when the new intellectual scene of the Cold War was forming, that Octavio Paz wrote his first and definitive intervention into art criticism. “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana” (“Tamayo in Mexican Painting”) appeared on the front page of México en la Cultura, the famous cultural supplement of the newspaper Novedades, on 21 January 1951. Despite the heated tone of his words, however, this essay was in no way a literary outburst. Rather, it was a Cold War operation – a political demarcation in the midst of a hegemonic struggle between two world powers, written under the shadow of atomic destruction. Although Paz had behind him an important career in cultural journalism, up to this point he had journeyed into the territory of fine arts only sporadically, with a few brief (and hardly transcendent) articles here and there on the exhibitions of Juan Soriano, José María Velasco and Jesús Guerrero Galván. True, an article of his appeared in Novedades on 5 July 1943, sardonically titled “Arte tricolor” in which Paz criticized the nationalist obsession of Mexican art and literature, and pronounced himself in favor of an art that can assimilate “the universal tradition … no matter how rich its artistic past” (1999, pp. 363–364). Yet even this reproof was glib compared with the scandal involving Luis Cardoza y Aragón and his publication of La nube y el reloj (The Cloud and the Clock) in 1940, in which Cardoza condemned “the false values placed on art by social concessions and symbolism,” and described muralism as an expression of “the ideas of a political state and of the party that rules it: the National Revolutionary Party” (Cardoza y Aragón 2003, p. 51‐53). No, Paz's importance does not simply lie in marking a rupture with the hegemony of muralism for his contemporaries; rather, it lies in being the start of a new visual hegemony.
With “Tamayo en la pintura mexicana (Tamayo in Mexican Painting),” Paz entered the dangerous strategic game of shaking up the artistic appraisal of his time. In fact, his intervention coincided with – and contributed to – the first reorientation of the local artistic scene of the postwar period. In 1946, during the regime of President Miguel Alemán, the new Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature, INBAL), directed by Carlos Chávez, was founded. Starting with the ambitious entry Mexico sent to the 1950 Venice Biennial, Tamayo was catapulted to fame (not without some friction) by the museographer Fernando Gamboa, becoming one of the official representatives of Mexican culture. The Mexican state began to represent Tamayo “on par” (as Chávez wrote in a letter to the artist) with the work of the so‐called three greats – Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco. Reactions to this enthronement did not take long to appear.2 David Alfaro Siqueiros, from the assumed pedestal of having won the second prize of the Venice Biennial, felt obliged
