Art: Boston Surprise

In 1912 a roly-poly picture framer named Boris Mirski came to Boston from Lithuania. Ever since, while framing New England portraits and brown landscapes for the residents of staid Beacon Hill, he made modern art—a much less salable commodity in Boston—his side line. This week, in a redbrick, 78-year-old Back Bay mansion, right next door to the stuffy Guild of Boston Artists on swank Newbury Street, he opened an art gallery with an exhibition of 53 paintings by a Guatemalan Indian, Carlos Mérida.

Mérida maintains that many of the wiggly goblins and squat blobs which appear in paintings like Time Has Stratified Eternity are derived from ancient Mayan and Tarascan art forms. To 20th-Century eyes they look more like something seen through a microscope. Though they seem easy, Mérida gets his striking half-old, half-new effects after painstaking study; the raw, vivid colors are invariably surprising, and the figures, however grotesque, seem very much alive. Some of the paintings were the result of a visit to Texas. “The land there is as flat as a sea,” says Mérida. “The sky eats men and houses alike. It is the most beautiful thing you can imagine.”

When Mérida was ten years old, he decided to be a musician. For six years he worked hard at piano, musical theory and composition, but an ear infection made him too deaf to go on with it. At 17, he went to Paris to study art and slavishly imitated his teachers, Van Dongen and Modigliani. Back home he discovered and concentrated on Guatemalan folk themes, spearheading the racial art movement which revolutionized Latin American painting. Later he went abstract, tried to paint a kind of visual music which would be empty of pictorial meaning, but beautifully composed and rich in color harmonies. In 1937 Mérida got tired of pure abstractionism, and began combining it with vaguely recognizable shapes. Some critics now think The Big Three of Latin American art (Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros) is really a foursome.