Do you want to see how famous Mexican painter Diego Rivera taught himself cubism? Or, want to see up-close the textural impasto used by Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco in one of his easel paintings? Currently on exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park is a collection of artworks that were important in forming the visual identity of 20^th-century mexicanidad (Mexicanness). The collection is traveling from the Museo Collection Blaisten at the Centro Cultural Universitario, which is located on the Tlateloco campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City.

As a university study collection, the Blaisten Collection is a great repository where one can see the broad evolution of painting that formed the artistic identity of the Mexico we know today. The collection was assembled by Andrés Blaisten and now is permanently housed in its own museum on the UNAM campus. The 80 paintings on display at the museum in Balboa Park are from a diverse range of artists—from internationally famous and lesser-known Mexican artists to student artists who took part in the Open-Air Painting Schools set up in the 1920s under President Álvaro Obregón Salido—the first stable periodafter the long political turmoil following the Mexican Revolution. The exhibition was organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, The San Diego Museum of Art, and the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in conjunction with the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco.

The exhibition presents 20^th-century art featuring the cross current of influences from avant-garde Europe and America to the influences of Mexico’s indigenous history. Today’s mexicanidad style evolves from a fusion of symbolism, cubism, surrealism, social realism, and the images from Pre-Columbian and everyday Mexico; although, the most common influence in many of the paintings on display seems to emanate from the legacy of Picasso and his many different styles.

A prime example of Picasso’s influence is Diego Rivera’s “San Martin Bridge” (1913). Painted on an early sojourn to Spain when he was 27-years old, Rivera’s cubist painting of the bridge outside Toledo recreates the evolutionary process of interpreting Paul Cézanne ideas that Picasso and Georges Braque used to inspire their own early cubist experiments. Rivera’s cubist experiment even uses Cézanne’s viridian and ochre palette of hues that one also finds in Picasso and Braque’s earliest cubist attempts.

Another cubist inspired work, albeit more aesthetic, is “The Poetess” (1917) by Ángel Zárraga. The silhouette of a woman sits behind a layer of books, pen, and paper. The painting’s subtle tonal blue hues combined with mauves, red, and white seems inspired by another cubist artist, Juan Gris, remembered as the more aesthetic of the early cubists.

The most upsetting work in the exhibition is a surrealist work by Raúl Anguino entitled “Pink Woman and Gray Circus Performer” (1941), which seems inspired by Picasso’s Rose Period works that featured performers and acrobats from the Cirque Medrano. Anguino’s disturbing canvas features an awkwardly rendered female circus performer standing on one foot atop the groin of a back-bending acrobat. A bleak looking, simian-proportioned clown wearing a harlequin shirt watches from the right side of the painting. The female performer’s pose and the visual weight of the clown creates a disquieting rightward imbalance to the entire composition that makes the whole artwork seem about to tip over in its frame. Painted in sickly rose hues, Anguino’s painting evokes more viewer anxiety than any other work in the exhibition.

Most of the artworks in the exhibit seem indebted in one way or another to other artists: from European’s Paul Gauguin, Giorgio De Chirico, Matisse, and Picasso; American’s Thomas Hart Benton and Paul Cadmus; or Mexican’s Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and José Clemente Orozco. Even the exhibition’s catalog essays repeatedly mention that many of the individual artworks by lesser-known artists are indebted, influenced, or similar to other more famous artists.

Several artworks do have a unique, stylistic identity of mexicanidad. One such painting is “Market” (ca. 1938) by Alfonso Xavier Peña. The work depicts a marketplace composed with a good visual rhythm and painted with a colorful palette slightly muted to evoke a hot, dry atmosphere. The scene reflects a dignified, yet now lost to history, everyday of Mexican village life.

Another unique painting is “Self Portrait” (1941) by an alumnus of the Open-Air Painting School, Feliciano Peña. The three-quarter profile portrait is direct in subject, sense of color, and contemplative mood that will influence the stylistic characteristics of many contemporary painters of Mexican descent today.

One fascinating painting is “Allegory of Mexico” (ca. 1947) by José Clemente Orozco. The painting features a jaguar, serpent and the eagle that have defeated a Spanish bull. The canvas’s surface is painted with pyroxylin enamel and has a heavy, textural (impastoed) surface. While the imagery is cliché, viewing the magnificent paint handling is a great pleasure.

Basically, this exhibition is a collection of formative works by 20^th-century Mexican artists. There are a few mature works by famous artists but most of the individual paintings on display were made by artists prior to or outside the styles by which we know them in art history books.

The show can best be appreciated as a whole grouping, without expecting to view several seminal artworks by famous artists. Essentially, a visitor will be viewing the complicated, messy birth pains of Mexico’s rich contemporary artistic legacy when viewing “Mexican Modern Painting from the Andrés Blaisten Collection.”