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Clara Porset in Mid Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Politics of Designing, Producing, and Consuming Revolutionary Nationalist Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2018

Randal Sheppard*
Affiliation:
Leiden University, History and International Studies Leiden, The Netherlandsrandal.c.sheppard@gmail.com

Extract

In 2006, Mexico City's Museo Franz Meyer held an exhibition titled Creating a Modern Mexico, celebrating the furniture designs of Clara Porset y Dumas. This exhibition and a growing literature on her work by design historians during the first decades of the twenty-first century have helped establish Porset as the highest-profile pioneer of industrial and interior design in twentieth-century Mexico.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2018 

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References

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25. This tolerance, if not closeness, to the left marked a significant shift from the repression of (particularly) the Communist left by the Mexican state during the preceding Maximato (1930-34). Carr, Barry, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 4748Google Scholar; Gilly, Adolfo, El cardenismo, una utopía mexicana (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2001), 322323Google Scholar.

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36. Porset to Frank, May 10, 1937, and Porset to Frank, July 28, 1937, University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center, Waldo Frank Papers, Box 22, Folder 1262.

37. During the LEAR's January 1938 conference, for example, architects Álvaro Aburto, Ricardo Rivas, Luis Cuevas Barrena and Raúl Cacho supported a functionalist embrace of new technologies and materials in architecture, particularly in a country with such pressing social needs as Mexico. There was no room to get carried away with “sentimentalist” concerns with aesthetics to the detriment of technical considerations, nor to waste public money on superfluous decoration. Salguero, Ramón Vargas, “Las reivindicaciones históricas en el funcionalismo socialista,” in Apuntes para la historia y crítica de la arquitectura mexicana del siglo XX: 1900–1980, Escudero, Alexandrina, ed., Vol. 1 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1982), 108Google Scholar.

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44. Porset to Frank, February 16, 1939, University of Pennsylvania, Kislak Center, Waldo Frank Papers, box 22, folder 1262.

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69. Porset's experiences on this trip are described in an exchange of letters with Guerrero, which is held at the Porset archive. Clara Porset to Xavier Guerrero, June to August 1955, UNAM, Facultad de Arquitectura, Centro de Investigaciónes de Diseño Industrial, Archivo Clara Porset.

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73. This “University City” provided the most spectacular collective display of postrevolutionary Mexican plastic integration, featuring buildings by architects such as Pani and O'Gorman and incorporating exterior murals and sculptures by many of Mexico's most important artists, such as Rivera, Siqueiros and O'Gorman. de Anda Alanís, Enrique X., Hazaña y memoria: la Ciudad Universitaria del Pedregal (Mexico City: UNAM, 2013)Google Scholar; Celia Ester Arredondo Zambrano, “Modernity in Mexico: The Case of the Ciudad Universitaria,” in Modernity and the Architecture of Mexico, Burian, ed., 91–106.

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79. A pioneer of the postrevolutionary aesthetic reorientation of Mexican culture, Dr Atl (Gerardo Murillo), indeed decried contemporary efforts to evolve popular arts into modern forms in the 1921exhibition's expanded catalogue. López, Crafting Mexico, 92.

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83. Eric Zolov, “Discovering a Land ‘Mysterious and Obvious’: The Renarrativizing of Postrevolutionary Mexico,” in Fragments of a Golden Age, Joseph et al., eds., 234–235.

84. Mary Roche, “Furniture Depicts Different Mexico,” New York Times, February, 4, 1947, 29.

85. Mary Roche, “Furniture Depicts Different Mexico,” 29.

86. Mary Roche, “Furniture Depicts Different Mexico,” 29.

87. During the early 1950s, California-based architectural critic Esther McCoy did attempt without success to distribute Porset's furniture in California. “Mexicana Overlooked by the Tourists,” Interiors 106:4 (November 1946): 90–93; Roche, “Furniture Depicts Different Mexico,” 29; Porset and McCoy, “Chairs by Clara Porset,” 34–35; Esther McCoy, “You'll Sit Low in Mexico!” Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, October 19, 1952, 10; Clara Porset, “Art in Industry,” Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, October 19, 1952, 15; Esther McCoy, “Clara Porset's Proving Ground,” Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, January 24, 1954, 19; “Office Interiors by Clara Porset,” Arts & Architecture 71:5 (May 1954): 25.

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98. Ballent, “La publicidad de los ámbitos de la vida privada,” 58.

99. For example, in the early 1960s, the Mexican government's Endowment for the Development of Arts and Crafts did encourage the participation of artisans from towns such as Olinalá, Guerrero, and Uruapán, Michoacán, in the Feria del Hogar, where they could make contact with urban wholesalers, consumers, collectors, and exporters. López, Crafting Mexico, 186–187; Piétri-Lévy, Anne-Lise, L'Objet dénaturé. Art populaire, fonction sociale et orientation comerciale (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1991), 193Google Scholar.

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109. De Anda Alanís, Vivienda colectiva, 291.

110. Porset, “Diseño viviente.”

111. Porset, “Diseño viviente.”

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133. Her first major task in 1960 was designing furniture for the Ciudad Escolar Camilo Cienfuegos, built for 5,000 students in the Sierra Maestra. Salinas Flores, “Xavier Guerrero,” 163.

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