NONFICTION - June 14, 1992

OUT OF THE VOLCANO: Portraits of Contemporary Mexican Artists by Margaret Sayers Peden (Smithsonian Institution Press: $60 cloth, $24.95 paper; 256 pp.) A handsome volume that captures the macabre, bittersweet reality of Mexico through the lives and work of 49 of its foremost artists (above, painter Manuel Alvarez Bravo), this book seems tailor-made for 1992. Taking novelist Alejo Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso as a point of departure, it argues for the existence of a specific Latin sensibility best exemplified, in Sayers Peden’s view, by that baroque and paradoxical place called Mexico. Whether or not one agrees, it is a well-executed project. With each portrait we enter an individual world, re-created through interviews, wry observations and examples of the artists’ work. The luminous photographs are almost always perfect complements to the provocative text. Together they create an ontological mirror of a culture that seems created in homage to death’s eternal mystery.