Juan B. Climent interviews Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, who leaves no doubt about his position regarding the figures of Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Mexican art. Lozano talks about the need to vindicate the native figure stemming from reclaiming the essence of that national individual. In other words, he speaks of a need to remove the mask of impenetrability so often worn by the indigenous, and to this end he proposes eliminating the tragedy and the drama and instead exploring their joy and pain, because the native peoples in Mexico are in general an introverted community who do not easily reveal these aspects of themselves. The painter also defines his concept of the artist: someone who translates the age he lives in, because the matter of being an artist is not a question of medium but of content in the visual art’s production. Climent mentions that Rodríguez Lozano approaches a community and creates a portrait of its people not from the perspective of pictorial nationalism or even conventional or touristic indigenism but from the very environment in which they live, grasping their essence without deforming it. At the same time he proudly recalls a compliment extended by José Clemente Orozco who called him: “Painter, rebel against the stealing of idols,” which makes him very happy because Rodríguez Lozano is not a painter who allies himself with the state-sanctioned art production as, in his view, many others do.Rodríguez Lozano expresses how unhappy he is about the fact that two painters have dominated everything. He insists that artists should focus on painting and not dedicate themselves to politics or attempt to solve the problems of a nation, and argues that the value of a given work of art lies in its human qualities. The article concludes with a series of well-known quotes by Rodríguez Lozano defining his visual work and general professional activity. Moreover, the author lavishes Rodríguez Lozano’s work with praise and compares it to that of the Three Greats, and says that his œuvre may be defined by the word “diaphanous.” Climent describes and analyzes some of Rodríguez Lozano’s works from the perspective of color, theme, and composition, and then later discusses some of the painter’s trips around the world: his long periods in Europe, the United States, South America and even Africa, which allowed him to get to know and learn about different aesthetic forms. It is for this reason, in fact, that he calls Rodríguez Lozano the painter of “silence and tragedy.” Also mentioned are his friendships with Picasso, Georges Braque, and many other great European artists and philosophers, such as José Ortega y Gasset.

With this article, Juan B. Climent immerses himself in one of the issues that began to gather tremendous force during the 1940s, as a second generation of painters began to question the first generation of muralists. This is precisely what Manuel Rodríguez Lozano (1896–1971) began to do, turning a critical eye to the widespread veneration of David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) and Diego Rivera (1886–1957), primarily. By doing so Rodríguez Lozano was rubbing salt in the wound, so to speak, in the debate about the most fundamental concepts of Mexican art; the questionable existence of a Mexican School of painting based on the creation of murals; the aesthetic of “being followed” with the goal of universalizing certain idiosyncratic visual approaches; and finally the topic of avoiding the incorporation of Europeanized patterns. All of these matters hovered in the air among the painters of this period because they had had to work very hard to achieve recognition and a place within the canon of Mexican art given that muralism seemed to encompass everything. Anyone who did not ascribe to and participate in it was left out of the official Mexican spheres of patronage. It was against that culture that Rodríguez Lozano seems to have aimed his complaints and accusations in this interview, because at that point in time—in the latter half of the 20th century— the muralists’ influence and their effect on Mexican art had begun to change considerably. New artistic forms and appreciations had already begun to take hold and have a visible effect on art in Mexico.