Juan Cruz Reyes

In the late 1940s, when Juan Cruz Reyes created a proposal for a Monument to the Flag to be erected in Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, he had ample experience in the field of official public sculpture. He worked with Ignacio Asúnsolo on the Monument to Obregón in San Angel (1932), and in the late 1930s he collaborated with Guillermo Ruiz on other works, including the massive Morelos that rises above the island town of Janitzio. Like those done in the same period by Federico Canessi and Ernesto Tamariz, these public sculptures shared an academic neo-classicism that had changed little since the late 19th century. Despite the fact that both Cruz Reyes and Ruiz were involved with the more radical Escuela Libre de Escultura y Talla Directa in Mexico City, and would also have been familiar with the work of Rodin, Brancusi and even Isamu Noguchi, they achieved success by designing sculptural programs that were easily legible to both government bureaucrats and the working class. For the Monument to the Flag, Cruz Reyes proposed a simple image consisting of a stocky (i.e. healthy) woman leaning left but looking with confidence to the right. She holds a billowing banner whose folds parallel those of her long skirt. In form and costume, as well as in her role as a powerful female embodying national strength, she is little different from the women that flank the entrance to the Obregón monument or the mothers atop the Monument to the Revolution, or for that matter, from the vaguely indigenous women in so many contemporary paintings and murals. The horizontal thrust of Cruz Reyes’s model differs from a vertical maquette by Federico Canessi for the same monument, where a slightly more slender woman raises the flag high in her left hand while cupping the other to her mouth, in an undefined patriotic cry. It should be no surprise that Canessi’s more aggressive and masculine allegory was the one finally installed in 1951.