A Wedding Gift For Charles Lindbergh Goes Up On The Wall, At Last
July 23, 20207:01 AM ET
SUSAN STAMBERG
Alfredo Ramos Martínez was regarded as a Father of Mexican Modernism, but his name is not widely known in the U.S. Above is Flores Mexicanas, a painting he worked on for 15 years.Dallas Museum of Art
I'm a little uncomfortable about this essay. Texas is surging with COVID-19, and I'm transfixed by a painting at the Dallas Museum of Art. But if, like me, you crave something beautiful right now, then perhaps this will help.
It's a painting wrapped in politics, romance and mystery. The Dallas Museum of Art (closed now, but with online offerings that exhibit its treasures) is making this picture the centerpiece of a show called "Flores Mexicanas: Women in Modern Mexican Art."
Alfredo Ramos Martínez is the artist. The work is monumental — 9 by 12 feet monumental. But that's not why it took him 15 years to paint it.
"It just sort of lingered in his studio for a long time," says curator Mark Castro. And things came up. Starting in 1915, Martínez worked on it on and off, during Mexico's Civil War, in between other paintings, and through the rise of a very different kind of Mexican art, made by Frida Kahlo and muralist Diego Rivera. For a while, Flores Mexicanas belonged to the most famous man of his day — Charles Lindbergh. For a much longer while, the painting disappeared. And now, just before the pandemic, almost a century after Martínez finished it, it was seen in public for just the second time, in Dallas. (No re-opening date yet.)
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