Dallas Does Abraham Ángel, a Mexican Modernist Lost Too Soon

He’s better than Kahlo, and what’s happening to the Dallas Museum’s expansion?

A braham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction is the new, sweet, and sad exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art (the DMA). I’d never heard of Ángel (1905–1924), a young, gay, Mexican artist who, as far as we know, painted only 25 or so works before “brutal reality destroyed him,” as his mentor and lover, artist Manuel Rodríguez Lozano said. He died at 20, either by suicide or from an accidental drug overdose. I’d never heard of Rodríguez Lozano (1896–1971), either, but I was at the museum, had already reviewed its anchor exhibition when it was at the National Gallery, and Ángel was near the front door.

Not knowing an artist isn’t a barrier for me. With Ángel and Rodríguez Lozano, it’s a chance to learn as well to find Mexican modernists who are better artists than Frida Kahlo, a bustling mediocrity and gender-bending satyr. I’m a bloodhound driven by multiple scents. Kahlo is famous and vain, while shtick-free artists such Ángel and Rodríguez Lozano are not.

It’s hard to do an exhibition that’s both compact and sumptuous, both poignant and spirited, but the DMA does it. It’s mostly chronological, in a big, long, rectangular gallery divided by a substantial freestanding wall toward the end. Following an introduction to Ángel are landscapes and portraits by the artist and his close friends. Behind the freestanding wall is a space on his last works, death, and legacy, effectively his afterlife.

Living in Mexico City, the precocious Ángel first studied art with Adolfo Best Maugard (1891–1964), who worked for the federal government in developing a nationwide drawing course for schoolchildren. In his course, and in teaching Ángel, he combined seven basic design elements — the spiral, the circle, the half-circle, the S-shape, the zigzag, the wavy line, and the straight line. Mere competency in these could make for compelling art. Best Maugard was inspired and informed by Mexican folk art and what he knew about Mayan design.

A distinctly Mexican art rather than a derivative, Eurocentric one was the goal of Best Maugard and culture critics of his era. Unlike Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, or José Clemente Orozco, he didn’t focus on politics or propaganda, and neither did Ángel, whose early Conception and Butterfly are good stabs at getting the forms right and finding a message. Thick, black lines make form, volume, and decoration. His messages are whimsical as well as cryptic. They aren’t political. Ángel is an artist who doesn’t wear meaning on his sleeve.

We’re not sure how Ángel met Rodríguez Lozano. Ángel was probably 17, so nine years younger than Rodríguez Lozano. At 17, a man, still part boy, can look at a 26-year-old as a geezer or, more likely, suavity’s supreme flower. Ángel came from — at best — a middle-class family while Rodríguez Lozano’s background was affluent — he’d spent much of the Mexican civil war in Spain, traveled to Paris to learn about French avant-garde art, and was married but separated. No matter. The two men connected and shacked up. Rodríguez Lozano’s wife was filed under old business.

The exhibition, and this is its only defect, shoehorns queer culture in Ángel’s art, dropping “queer” here and there in labels and defining it in the catalogue — and in a backhand way — as “non-normative ideas about sex, friendship, and families” and “an ideology that combined aesthetic creativity with a profoundly inventive attitude toward relationships.” These quotes are from “Bloomsbury in Queer Subculture,” a 2014 essay by Christopher Reed.

Whatever. I’m there for the art, and Bloomsbury’s not Mexico City. Ángel and queer culture, as a theme, is a tangent and a distraction. For one thing, we don’t know enough. For another, it conjures meanings that, in Ángel’s beguiling landscapes or portraits of women, just aren’t there. It suffices to say that Ángel is gay, he’s living with an older artist who’s probably his Henry Higgins, and both of these are in the mix. Introducing queer ideology muddies the waters.

Ángel’s portraits of women show us that he’s after the modern Mexicana while experimenting with composition. He paints a double portrait, one woman looking at us, the other in profile. He experiments with different framing devices, an archway here, a frank, in-your-face pose there. They’re potent. He’s a savant. He paints portraits of people he knows, which is no surprise. He’s a teenager. Paying clients aren’t filling his studio.

Mexican muralists thought that portrait painting was bourgeois, but what Ángel offered — intimacy, texture, faces, and contemporary fashion — are values that a muralist like Rivera didn’t. He painted landscapes that unite the country’s dry mountain landscape with buildings in towns. Tepito, loaned by the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, is one of four Mexico City scenes we know he painted in 1923 — the only one to be located. It’s charming. As Best Maugard taught him, it draws from folk art.

The exhibition space is inviting enough so visitors can comfortably move back and forth from Ángel’s self-portraits and his portrait of Rodríguez Lozano to his landscapes and portraits of women. A long S-shaped wooden bench — a tribute to Best Maugard — is in the middle of the gallery.

In Ángel’s 1922 portrait of Rodríguez Lozano, he depicts not a toff fresh from Europe, and not a haut-bourgeois older man. Judging from photos of Rodríguez Lozano, he might have been both. He depicts him in profile, with a bushy beard, a casual shirt, and thick, wavy hair with not a drop of pomade. It’s Rodríguez Lozano with a romantic, outdoorsy, frat-boy look. Ángel’s self-portrait from 1923, used for the front of the catalogue, presents a flirty, skeptical hothouse flower, a man who could be, still, a bit of a boy. Rodríguez Lozano’s portrait is smaller and simpler.

The first portrait is where Ángel happened to be as an artist in 1922, but it’s also his Rodríguez Lozano. A year later, Ángel is ready for the bigger, splashier portrait of himself. “I’ve grown,” he seems to say, “and here’s me, with ideas of my own.” His shoulders are broad, but he still has a baby face. He smiles, as Mona Lisa smiles, suggestively, with a perfect touch of mystery.

Rodríguez Lozano’s Portrait of Salvador Novo, from 1924, is in the exhibition. It’s superb. The subject is suave and casual, sitting in a robe by a window overlooking a posh city street. Does it blow poor, soon-to-be-dead Ángel’s work out of the Gulf of Mexico? That’s the risk.

No, I decided. It doesn’t. My sense is that it shows us where Ángel himself was heading. At 19, he was close, art-wise, to going mano-a-mano with his lover, also his creator. Ángel’s Portrait of Cristina Crespo, from 1924, has star power, and the star is both the subject and the artist. The same year, he painted a portrait of Hugo Tilghman, The Tennis Player.

Ángel met Tilghman, also an artist, when they both studied with Best Maugard. In the picture, the brawny Tilghman looks like a Mayan Arrow Shirt Man. In the background, he plays tennis with himself. In trying two registers and one time slot, Ángel shows imagination. As a portrait, it’s a success.

As a colorist, Ángel is exceptional. He uses lots of orange, purple, green, and blue, chromatically exaggerated and sometimes arbitrary. In Tropical Landscape, from 1922, the sky’s green. In Landscape (The Little Mule), from 1923, the mule is not only blue but positively teal.

Ángel died, we think after Rodríguez Lozano dumped him for another artist, also a man, and possibly from a cocaine overdose. I Kill Myself for a Traitorous Woman, one of his last paintings, is bizarre and in the last section. No one knows who the woman is — her face is in the night-scene clouds — or the storyline. A devastated Rodríguez Lozano painted a self-portrait a few weeks later, looking appropriately distraught. His later life was messy, not disastrously so, and he became the keeper of Ángel’s flame. I suspect he felt guilty over Ángel’s fate as well as responsible for it.

Ángel’s last painting is a small, nude self-portrait in which he depicts himself running along a path toward a rising sun. A scroll wrapped around his arm reads “Keep Going.” More inscrutability that we’ll never understand, and that’s fine. For me, and I think for most visitors, the art and story make an impressive, revelatory exhibition. I’m not sure the catalogue reveals anything new. Ángel studies are extensive. For Americans, though, he, his work, and his times are news.

There’s a small section in this last space on teen mental health. I read that “22% of US high school students seriously consider attempting suicide.” This sounds like a lot to me, but I’m no authority. Given how addictive and demonic social media is, and how ignorant, gullible, and fatuous the young are encouraged to be, who knows? “Help is available if you or someone you know needs support,” a label reads next to flyers listing mental-health resources. Such are our times, alas.

Dying very young were, along with Ángel, artists including Francesca Woodman, Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Gerstl, Pierino da Vinci — Leonardo’s brilliant nephew — and Jeanne Hébuterne, Modigliani’s mistress and a wonderful artist in her own right. At 21, she threw herself from a window the day after Modigliani died. Plagues and war also killed artists before their time, but artists are combustible. Drugs, suicide, and dissipation happen, too.

Was Ángel a genius? Bernini sculpted Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius when he was 21, and Michelangelo did Madonna of the Stairs at 16. My hunch is he would have spent a spell in Paris and returned to Mexico City as a society portraitist. It’s sad we have so little on which to judge him.

On a related front, last year I wrote about the DMA’s then-nascent building plan. At $175 million, it seemed unnecessary, and talk about discordant. In these times, with childhood education devastated by Covid-hysteria-fueled school lockdowns, spending $175 million on a fancy museum enhancement seems an abuse of philanthropy as well as an ego trip.

The DMA project has since advanced with the selection of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, a Madrid firm. They — and, I assume, the museum board and director — propose “a radical transformation to speak to new audiences and improve accessibility while sustainably preserving” the old Edward Larrabee–designed building. “Radical transformation” is another term for that road to Hell, paved with good intentions.

“Art at the center, equity and community at the core” is the museum’s new calling card. I understand “art at the center,” but what does “equity and community” mean, as a product of architecture? It’s squishy marketing-speak, so porous that it could mean nothing, or it could be dangerous. What the hell are they going to do with that $175 million?

We don’t really know. Now that the museum has selected an architecture firm it likes, and the Nieto Sobejano is cutting-edge but experienced, the board, museum staff, and architect will develop a plan. This seems backward to me, but I’m from an academic-museum background. A museum that’s part of a school almost always has its needs specifically set. Otherwise, it and the school invite lots of folderol, which costs money.

The DMA just cut its staff by 8 percent. This is a warning sign. Should a museum chopping its budget jump into a big expansion, which will increase its budget? To be continued, as they used to say, as the world turns.