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- Title
Paul Westheim in Mexico: a Cosmopolitan Man Contemplating the Heavens.
- Authors
Chametzky, Peter
- Abstract
The German-Jewish-Mexican art critic Paul Westheim is remembered as one of Weimar's most influential supporters of modern art, especially as editor of Das Kunstblatt from 1917 to 1933. In exile in Paris from 1933 to 1940, Westheim also produced an extensive and trenchant body of contemporary criticism and satire of Nazi art theory and policies. This article references those activities but focuses on a third and less well-known aspect of Westheim's career: his work in Mexico from 1941 until his death in 1963, when he established himself as a leading authority in Mexican art, both ancient and modern. Factors enabling and inflecting his Mexican work included: his already other position as a German-Jewish intellectual, his studies with Heinrich Wölfflin and of Wilhelm Worringer and German Expressionism, his left-liberal political and aesthetic outlook, and his place in, and out of, the largely Communist German exile community in Mexico. Through the construction of a positive image of cosmopolitan Modernism, as distinct from its negative anti-Semitic stereotype, Westheim's thought exercised great influence on Octavio Paz and became an ingredient within 'the other Mexico'.
- Subjects
MEXICO; WESTHEIM, Paul; ART critics; MODERN art; NATIONAL socialism &; art; ART theory
- Publication
Oxford Art Journal, 2001, Vol 24, Issue 1, p23
- ISSN
0142-6540
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/oxartj/24.1.23