Freelance curator Alfonso Morales was poking around a warehouse on the grounds of Mexico City’s giant printing company Galas de Mexico a couple years ago when he made the find of a lifetime. Morales had been talking to Cesareo Moreno of Chicago’s Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum about mounting an exhibit on calendar art and was hoping the warehouse would yield a few pieces he could use. What he found was more than 200 paintings, including the originals of images he knew nearly as well as his own face–paintings that are national icons but had never been displayed.
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“A year after our initial discussion he called us back and said, ‘You’ll never guess what I stumbled on,’” says Moreno, the museum’s director of visual arts. The neglected warehouse turned out to be a treasury of calendar art from the 1930s through the 1970s, years when chromo art calendars were a major advertising medium, a vehicle for national pride, and a fixture in nearly every home, business, and school. Chicagoans are getting the first look at the cache in a dazzling show, “La Patria Portatil: 100 Years of Mexican Chromo Art Calendars,” on view at the museum now and due to open in Mexico next year. The show includes 66 oil paintings, 70 vintage calendars, and 40 photographs.
The calendars had a standard three-part format: the dates, with saints’ days marked, appeared in the lower portion; the advertiser’s information sat in the middle; and the chromo, or image, ran at the top. Themes were religious and mythical, historic and patriotic, domestic and decorative. All were idealized and romantic, pictures of a lush land overflowing with fruit and flowers, peopled with droves of beautiful women (most cut from the same movie-star mold) and handsome, noble men. Many were influenced by American advertising art and illustration of the same period, including some Vargas-inspired pinups, but most were carried to another level by the cultural spirit behind their commercialism. Moreno says the calendars worked like the stained-glass windows of medieval churches, using images to tell an important story. For advertisers, they were billboards that hung in customers’ houses for a year at a time, but for the people, they were “Mexicanidad–symbols of where we came from and who we are now,” he says. Often included among the few possessions people brought with them to the States, they were “a way of bringing our homeland with us and putting it up in our new home.” For any viewer these images are a feast for the eyes; for the people who grew up with them, they are that and much more.
