Alfonso Michel

In 1953, Inés Amor gave Alfonso Michel his second one-man show at the Galería de Arte Mexicano. His new work, less delicate than the pictures he had exhibited in 1945, earned him greater critical attention. Michel presented several large paintings done in a studio he had rented in the former Hospital de Betlemitas in Mexico City’s colonial downtown. The Net [La red], The Storm [Tempestad] (private collection) and Maternity [Maternidad] (INBA/Casa de la Cultura de Colima) all feature monumental nude or semi-nude figures placed horizontally in a landscape, recalling certain grand academic compositions of the 19th century, such as Felipe Gutiérrez’s Huntress of the Andes (1891; Museo Nacional de Arte), to cite just one local example. In The Net, a naked woman lies facing the viewer, her arms raised to cover her face. She is bound up in a fishing net, whose irregular grid roughly follows the contours of her dark red body. She lies on a beach at quite some distance from the water’s edge; a shell, a ruined wooden boat, a leaning pole and other debris appear on the sand. Beyond, geometric forms representing cliffs, or perhaps a breakwater [rompeolas], give way to a stormy sky, where bolts of lighting create a pattern like that of the net itself. The location is vague, but may recall the beaches of Tecomán or Manzanillo in Michel’s home state of Colima. Scholars have noted the formal influence of Picasso, Braque and especially Rufino Tamayo on Michel’s work. The horizontal format, think paint, and defeated spirit of The Net also resemble David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Accident in the Mine [Accidente en la mina] (1931; Museo Nacional de Arte), though Michel shows no proletarian comrades arriving to save the day. His tragic image of life by the sea reveals a connection, direct or coincidental, with the work of U.S. artists Winslow Homer and Marsden Hartley, whose paintings of the sailors and fishermen of the rugged North Atlantic coast Michel may have seen while traveling in the United States.