Roberto Montenegro’s painting invokes Mexico’s historical legacy of violence with elements that seem to reference both the conquest and its revolutionary wars, as well as Agonía by Alfonso Michel (Blaisten collection) which composition takes the eerie milieu of the itinerant circus for its mise en scene. Completed in 1949 and similar in size, the two pictures seem almost like a pair. The two artists knew each other well and by the mid-1940s both were painting introspective, surrealistic, easel paintings In Desesperación a brown horse occupies a theatrical tableau of sorts, indicated by the blue curtain draped to the right. An array of colonial-style architectural forms loom in the distance. Under a central arch stands a foreboding calavera. Sickle in hand, he merely waits from a safe distance as the agonized horse exerts itself in the final throes of death. In the foreground, a pile of pumpkin, squash and melons evokes Mexico’s agricultural heritage as well as mirroring the array of skulls under the horse’s belly, stacked in the manner of the tzompantli, or skull racks of pre-Conquest Mexico. The undulating landscape seems to erupt in a seismic spasm that threatens to swallow the entire scene. Does this juxtaposition of foodstuffs and skulls connote a kind of vanitas? It seems that the image expresses not just the passing of a single life, but the end of an epoch. In the context of 1940s postwar anxiety, felt across the Americas, Europe and Asia, this blending of still life convention with grand epic seems to convey a sense of biting irony, expressed all the more so by the struggling horse, whose front legs locked in one last death throe express his futile effort to raise his hindquarters, to shake the figure of death from his back...

Vide Adriana Zavala, Arte moderno de México. Colección Andrés Blaisten. Mexico, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005.