Pivotal for how Mexican art developed in the early 20th century, Dr. Atl is a fascinating and enthrallingly complex character. Seductive, intriguing, and inspiring. Radical. Controversial. Problematic. He contains so many multitudes that for most people it’s impossible to get fully, comfortably onboard.
Dr. Atl is one of the most curious personalities born to the modern New World — his story is the most picturesque of all the painters, impossible to recount in fewer than several volumes.
His birth name was Gerardo Murillo Coronado and he came from a wealthy Guadalajara family. Granted a travel scholarship by president Porfirio Díaz, he visited Europe in the late 19th century. There he picked up — in addition to knowledge about European art history — ideas about socialism and anarcho-syndicalism. He also developed thoughts about monumental public art, which he took back to Mexico, eager to put them into practice.
He took his nom de guerre — Dr. Atl — in 1902 to honor his Mexican national identity (although according to one source it was because he disliked the Spanish artist Bartolome Murillo and since his name was also Murillo he had to change his name). Atl is Nahuatl for “water.” But, as Rebecca West writes in Survivors in Mexico the word atl is sometimes also translated as sperm, urine, brain-stuff, cranium, head, and war. I have also seen one place a claim that it could refer to chocolate. That a word like this can mean all those things, writes West, “suggests that conversation in Nahuatl must be a risky game.”
In 1910 the Mexican government organized an art exhibition which, in accordance with then Mexican president Porfirio Díaz’s fixation on European culture, highlighted contemporary Spanish painters. In response to this, Dr. Atl organized an exhibition of nationalist, indigenous Mexican art. The exhibition expressed an artistic counter-philosophy to the realism coming out of Academy of San Carlos — the first arts academy established in America in 1783 — and instead promoted an art inspired by modernism, art which was spiritual and symbolist.
Following the start of the Mexican revolution, and some years of unrest at the art academy, Dr. Atl became its director in 1913. He declared that art should be closely connected to the social and political revolution, and urged his students to pursue this course. In order to break away from what he saw as the Academy’s asocial character he said the school needed to leave its academicism behind and instead should function as “a workshop geared for production like any industrial workshop of today, or like all workshops of all epochs when art flowered vigorously.” This idea of art production as a collective effort was at this time central to Dr. Atl, and also drove his initiative to create a Mexican muralism movement. Within his circle of influence at this time were future big names in the muralism movement like Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Dr. Atl, with rifle and cartridge belt, would be off to Vera Cruz [sic] to visit Obregon on the field of battle and collect money for our whole establishment; all the while conducting a ferocious political controversy with the engineer Felix P. Palavicini, and resolving a thousand problems and still having time left over in which to write editorials, and books, and even poems, without once neglecting his magnificent collection of butterflies.
He later abandoned this left wing radicalism and activism and during the course of World War II strongly expressed antisemitic views and sympathies for fascism. Eventually he chose to instead give himself up to his love for volcanoes.
He was a volcano fanatic. So much so that circumstances around his thorough research caused him to lose one of his legs. In his younger years he had studied Vesuvius, Etna, and Stromboli in Italy, under the guidance of volcanologists Perret and Friedlaender. Back in Mexico he studied Popocatepetl and Parícutin, on which he published two scientific monographs.
“Pyramid”
Dr. Atl. c. 1921-1923. From the album Dr. Atl. The Katunes Photo byPhiladelphia Museum of Art
“Erupting Volcano”
Dr. Atl. c. 1921-1923. From the album Dr. Atl. The Katunes Photo byPhiladelphia Museum of ArtHe also published a six volume historical work on Mexican churches, and a two-volume monograph on folk art in Mexico. He did a great deal to argue the place of traditional Mexican crafts in modern Mexico and help secure resources for traditional artists.
Los artes populares en México son importantes […] porque sus manifestaciones puramente intelectuales están impregnadas, — como la música — de una profunda melancolía — o como la poesía religiosa — de un suave misticismo, y son ambas poderosamente subjetivas.
Dr. Atl made his own art medium, an encaustic made (I believe) of wax, pigment, resins, and gasoline, which he called Atl-Color. Orozco wrote about it in his autobiography:
Ya por entonces había inventado Atl sus colores secos a la resina, que se trabajaban como el pastel, pero sin tener la fragilidad de éste. La idea era, según nos decía, tener colores que lo mismo sirvieran, para pintar sobre un papel o sobre tela, que sobre una roca del Popocatépetl; lo mismo en pequeño que en grande y sobre cualquier material, así fuera metálico, al interior o a la intemperie. Unos colores así serían ciertamente cosa demaravilla y los que ya usaba, si no eran todavía perfectos, representaban un paso considerable hacia el fin deseado.
Sources:
- Atl, Dr. Las artes populares en México México: Editorial Cultura, 1922.
- Charlot, Jean. An artist on art: collected essays of Jean Charlot. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1972.
- Crausaz, Winston. “Dr. Atl: Pioneer Mexican Volcanologist”. In Geologists and ideas: a history of North American geology. Boulder, Colo.: Geological Society of America, 1985.
- Cullell, Jon Martín. “Los volcanes de color del Dr. Atl: la reinvención de un fascista.” El País, Apr 19, 2019.
- Cumberland, Charles E. “‘Dr. Atl’ and Venustiano Carranza.” In The Americas 13(3), 1957.
- Flores, Tatiana. Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30–30! New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
- Helm, MacKinley. 1941. Mexican painters: Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and other artists of the social realist school. New York: Dover Publications, 1989.
- Lerner, Jesse. “The Artist as Volcano: The seismic imagination of Dr. Atl.” In Cabinet, Spring 2005.
- Lynch, J. B. “Orozco’s House of Tears.” Journal of Inter-American Studies, 3(3), 1961.
- Molina, Alonso de. Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana. Mexico: Casa de Antonio de Spinosa, 1571.
- Orozco, Jose Clemente. An autobiography. Translated by Robert C. Stephenson. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1962.
- ———. Autobiografía. México: Ediciones Occidente. 1945
- Rachum, I. “Intellectuals and the Emergence of the Latin American Political Right, 1917-1936.” In Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y Del Caribe / European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 54, 1993.
- Rochfort, Desmond. Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993.
- Time Magazine. “Artists: The Volcanic Volcanist.” August 28, 1964.
- West, Rebecca, and Bernard Schweizer. Survivors in Mexico. New Haven, Conn: Yale, 2003.