Murillo

1942 · ref. 106949 — México D.F: Ediciones "La Reacción 1942. Hardcover. Tape repairs to spine and front wrap; pages toned and tender. About good thus. Octavo in offwhite wraps printed in blue pink & red; 151 pages b&w illus; 21 cm. In Spanish. Very scarce Apparently a second volume does not exist. Antisemitic pro-Axis tract from the Mexican landscape painter and volcanologist Gerardo Murillo 1875–1964 the most notorious item in his political writing. The text first ran in three installments in the magazine La Reacción in 1942 under the direction of Aquiles Elorduy a founder and leading figure of the Partido Acción Nacional PAN National Action Party. It borrows the methods of Nazi ethnology including talk of a “Hebrew physiognomy” to cast Jews as a single communist and financial conspiracy spanning both countries. The tract caps a run of wartime polemics. Earlier his magazine Timón 1940 had been confiscated by the Secretaría de Gobernación Interior Ministry for publishing Nazi propaganda and attacking the Allies and “Jewish wealth.” In 1941 came the pamphlet A los pueblos de América calling for the hemisphere’s defense against Roosevelt’s policy. Scholars now read even his fiction of the period alongside his support for fascism. The tract sits uneasily beside his standing as teacher of Orozco Rivera and Siqueiros and as painter of the volcanoes. A primary document of Mexican fascism and of the antisemitic current in the wartime Latin American right.The dark side of one of Mexico's most original and celebrated painters. Ediciones "La Reacción hardcover