Diego Rivera, “Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard”, 1913, Oil on Canvas, 1615 x 2275 cm, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City
Born in 1891, Adolfo Best Maugard came of age as Mexico was emerging for a period of dictatorial rule. He was part of a generation of Mexican artists and writers who sought inspiration in both Mexico’s pre-Columbian past and the European avant-gardes in order to fashion a new national identity. Many of Maugard’s contemporaries – Rivera, Miguel Covarrubias, Rufino Tamayo, José Vasconcelos – have themselves become part of the fabric of Mexican cultural identity, whereas Best Maugard’s work remains decidedly less celebrated.
Best Maugard’s most well-known work is the 1926 “A Method for Creative Design”. In it, the author provides a series of lessons on how to draw utilising instinctive methods and simple forms. Far from being a dry, didactic text, the book is full of imaginative and creative designs through which the student “will dream his work out of his own imagination, and his work will be the only one of its kind on earth.”
Best Maugard’s designs bear the influence of both classical and pre-Columbian art, and indeed he was fascinated by the art of indigenous Mexicans, seeing in it shared structures, which he referred to as ‘archetypes’, upon which the artistic will of the individual could impose its own creativity. Best Maugard’s pedagogical methods became influential in the Mexican education system, but his ideas were also important for his more illustrious peers – in its synthesis of the classical, the pre-Columbian and the avant-garde,
Diego Rivera was living in Paris at the same time as Best Maugard, who had been in Europe since 1912 for the purpose of making copies of Mexican archeological artifacts that were on exhibition in European museums. In 1913, Rivera met Maugard and executed his metaphoricall “Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard”. The static, elongated, elegantly dressed protagonist is portrayed in the foreground, standing on a red-railed balcony that distances him from, and raises him above the urban scene in modern Paris of the time.
A modern train, factories whose chimneys billow forth clouds of smoke, Cubist-styled urban buildings, and a spinning wheel of fortune are shown in the scene. The wheel of fortune is reminiscent of the one built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, and symbolizes technological progress. Rivera succeeded in connecting these two spaces, depicted in different styles, by using perspective to provide a visual link between the protagonist’s forefinger and the center of the wheel of fortune, suggesting that man, from a higher plane and acting as a demiurge, an artisan-like figure, directs and promotes progress.
The “Portrait of Adolfo Best Maugard”, (also known as ‘Young Man on the Balcony’), was shown at the Paris Salon des Indépendents in 1913. The painting was made known to the Mexican public through a photograph in the ‘El Universal Ilustrado’ magazine, on the 24th of May, 1918. This painting has formed part of the MUNAL collection since 1983.