El club de Mickey [Mickey's Club] Print

This painting is a tongue-in-cheek rib-poking of a central figure in the history of modernist art promotion in Guadalajara, the civil engineer Miguel Aldana Mijares, who began to paint as an avocation in the late 1960s and soon thereafter founded what was known as the CAM (the Spanish acronym for the Modern Art Center), an exhibition space where he and a small group of his friends and colleagues (many of whom were part of the "Country Club" elite of Guadalajara's high society) held court and exhibited their abstract paintings. Decades later, Mr. Aldana eventually moved his art exhibition operations into the former indoor tennis courts of his personal home in a wealthy and exclusive residential area of the city. Especially in the last years of his life, he was prone to arranging homages to himself, something which often happened with startling frequency. One of the Guadalajara's more sycophantic artists --who works principally as a private dealer and auctioneer-- and who has always gone the extra mile to kowtow to anyone with any power and wealth, is seen painting his "homage" to Mr. Aldana Mijares (whose nickname was Mickey), on the left. This constitutes nearly objective reporting, since the scene is drawn from the artist's homage to Mr. Aldana Mijares, which, unbelievable but true, consisted simply of a very large multi-panel painting with the words "Homage to Miguel Aldana Mijares" repeated endlessly across the surface. The teutonic two-headed eagle seen in the decorative banner on the wall is a reference to the symbol of the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (UAG), of which Mr. Aldana Mijares was a graduate. That university, Mexico's first private one, was founded in 1935 as the result of a schism among the professors at the state-run Universidad de Guadalajara, an extremist Catholic faction of which seceded to form the UAG (in protest over the federal government's imposition of what they called a "socialist" educational system and curriculum). The resulting UAG had a very strong anti-communist ideological component, which was associated with the extremist rightwing political action shock group known as the "tecos" (short for "tecolotes," the reference is to a kind of owl, an animal that was adopted as mascot because it is assocated with the Minerva, the mythological matron saint of Guadalajara --there is a famous and rather hideous sculpture of her in a major traffic circle in the western part of the city--, and, according to some writers, because the animal is always vigilant and hunts at night, much like the political shock group of the UAG). The Tecos were in fact always vigilant, to assure that UAG students were kept in check and not becoming involved with cultural expressions considered degenerate or leftist in nature. The group was openly antisemitic and neo-fascist in nature, which, at the time it was formed (in the pre-WWII era) was not neo-fascist but frankly pro-Franco and pro-Hitler. Mr. Aldana Mijares attended the UAG during this early, very ideologically charged period of its existence. (The UAG has a medical school that attracts many US and other foreign students, and it is financially dependent on the income from tutition paid by such students as a major source of its funding; hence, the gringo students are kept in the dark about the more dramatic and ideological aspects of the school and its leadership...) Mr. Aldana, who went on to become one of the principal homebuilders in Guadalajara, hired at least one Jewish engineer to work for him, and was praised by that man as a fine boss. So there is no evidence that he necessarily shared any of the ideological positions of his alma mater's head honchos, though he was part of the same socioeconomic and cultural circle in which they moved. Just as the artists of the so-called "Ruptura" of the early 1970s sought to break with the strictures of the Mexican School of social realist muralism that had come to dominate the art scene in Mexico (Mr. Aldana was a marginal figure associated with the "Ruptura" movement, having invited the main artists to have a group show in his exhibition space in Guadalajara, in which he included his own work), Mr. Aldana's CAM group was the target of subsequent rebellion by a later generation of Guadalajara-based artists (in the 1980s) who had been marginalized from participating in the CAM exhibitions because of class-based or generational differences. (Some of the children of CAM artists eventually came to constitute another generation of "artists" in Guadalajara, some of whom were friends with the newer "Young Turks" and must have smoothed the rough edges out between them and the CAM members...) The image of the abstract painting (behind the head of the indigenous woman servant) is a partial reproduction of one of Mr. Aldana's own abstract paintings. The floor tiles are an abstraction formed by combining Roman crosses with swastika forms. They are meant to emphasize the combined interests of the UAG Tecos, rightwing antisemitic neofascism and fundamentalist Catholic extremism: they are of the ilk that believe, for example, that the Vatican was taken over by the Jews during the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, when liberalizing tendencies like saying the Mass in local languages rather than Latin were instituted by the church. Steve Bannon is apparently part of this movement, and has expressed his support of German Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis' idea of dedicating part of her castle to serve as a training camp for priests who share their orientation toward that same extremist Catholic militancy. That heiress was scheduled to be honored at the 2019 annual fundraising gala by the New York City museum El Museo del Barrio, whose current executive director, Guadalajara native Patrick Charpenel, apparently thought such ideological peculiarities were right in step with what wealthy donors to art museums are all about. Mr. Charpenel's family is from the same elite Guadalajara social class as Mr. Aldana (in fact, one of Mr. Aldana's children was a companion of Mr. Charpenel when they both took private art classes and exhibited together under the auspices of their teacher, Ramiro Torreblanca, in the early 1980s).

Print:Giclee on Fine Art Paper

Size:10 W x 10 H x 0.1 D in

Size with Frame:15.25 W x 15.25 H x 1.2 D in

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