La revolución y el petroleo

Date: c. 1961

Medium: Cliché verre (engraved on film stock and printed photographically)

Dimensions (cm.): Information to be added

Alternate titles: Unknown

Published edition: Unknown

Contemporary publication: Unknown

References: Information to be added

Commentary:  In La revolución y el petróleo (The Revolution and Petroleum) Méndez portrayed Mexico’s first post-Revolutionary president, Francisco Madero, as the leader of the Mexican people. He divided the print into three parts. An over-sized Madero stands at a table in the center of the image, signing the document that restricted the rights of foreign oil investors. 

In this idealized image, Méndez employed a standard iconography associated with Soviet leaders, as in the 1929 painting of Lenin, Lenin on the Tribune, by Aleksandr Gerasimov, one of the better-known Soviet socialist realist painters, with the same forward thrust of the body, the masses, the flag, and Madero’s face. 

The iconic presentation, with its emblematic content and gestural conventions associate the politicians with depictions of saints and other mythic figures. Madero gestures with his body against the impersonal forces of capital and foreign investors, with the forces of reaction to the right of the president, and the revolutionary forces on his left. At the bottom left corner claw-like hands grasping a bag of gold coins thrusts forward from outside the frame. Four long rifles point at Madero, reminiscent of the weapons in Méndez’s print Fusilado. In the center foreground and right side of the print crowds of Mexican citizens from all social classes turn their faces and bodies toward Madero, who stands as their defender against the forces of capital, floating above the crowd in an imaginary space. 

As usual in Méndez’s prints, the masses here are remarkably individualized; Méndez delineated each tiny face in the foreground and many in the background with remarkable precision. In the film that it accompanied, the narrator explains that Madero was the first Mexican president to tax petroleum, at three centavos a barrel, and that he was assassinated because of this action. (Deborah Caplow)

Cataloging note: The method by which this image was printed is not fully understood. Although sometimes described as a linocut, Méndez actually created the image by scratching it on photographic film (perhaps a sheet of x-ray film) using a technique known by the French term cliché verre. The original film sheet, complete with hand-drawn corrections, is in the collection of the Museo del Estanquillo in Mexico City. Some impressions appear to have been printed photographically on light-sensitive paper directly from the film matrix; others appear to have been printed by a photomechanical process, perhaps by transfering the film image to a metal lithographic plate. Because the areas of light and dark in the impressions match those of the original film sheet, it would appear that  a reversal process (positive to positive) was used. The dimensions of the impressions vary slightly depending on the process by which they were printed.

Catalogue record number: 51