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Lot Essay
“The only thing Mathias was interested in was art, art, art,” recalled Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, the distinguished art historian and the artist’s second wife. “Religion was the other thing that mattered to him. He was a Protestant. At home we often had guests who were Protestant pastors, bishops—we were good friends with Bishop Méndez Arceo—, priests of various denominations, to discuss religion.”1 Goeritz had left Europe in 1949, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and in Mexico he persistently probed the meanings of art as prayer, channeling light—across gilded surfaces and through stained-glass windows—as an expression of mystical experience.
A series of spindly crucifixions, Saviors of Auschwitz, presaged the first of his iconic Messages, manifestations of modernist religious art wrought in perforated-metal and, later, gold-leaf monochrome. Begun in the late 1950s, the Messages explore relations of light, color, and (im)materiality that Goeritz had earlier developed in such major works as the Museo Experimental El Eco (1953) and Torres de Satélite (1957). The Messages similarly engage architectural questions of void, volume, and structure, transforming the space around them through the reflective brilliance of their surfaces and, ultimately, evoking pure aesthetic—and spiritual—emotion. Loosely associated with Mexico’s Ruptura generation, which rose in opposition to the Muralists in the 1950s, Goeritz belonged to an international avant-garde, and his monochrome abstraction engaged contemporary currents in Minimalism as well as the material provocations of Group ZERO and Yves Klein, among others.
Goeritz produced Messages through the end of his career, with variations in format and scale, but their origins date to the death from cancer of his first wife, Marianne, in 1958 and to the intentional, religious turn of his practice around the same time. The first works consisted of scrap metal sheets perforated and nailed to wooden supports recycled from local building sites and shantytowns; he referred to them as sudarios (shrouds), recalling the famous Shroud of Turin, as well as clavados (nailed things) and clouages (from the French “clou,” or nail). Titles cite a number of cautionary Old Testament passages, among them Proverbs 20:15: “There is gold, and a multitude of rubies: but the lips of knowledge are a precious jewel.” These early Messages were soon followed by the Metachromatic Messages, covered with gold leaf and without perforations, that sought meaning beyond monochrome through an experience of transcendence. A number of large-scale Messages were integrated within architectural settings, notably the triptych altarpiece (1965) at a convent of Capuchin nuns in Tlalpan designed by his friend and collaborator, Luis Barragán, and the mural Abstracto en dorado (1968), installed in Ricardo Legorreta’s Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City.
The Messages collectively constitute the kind of plastic prayer that Goeritz described in his manifesto, “L’art prière contre l’art merde” (1960), which repudiated the ephemeral, the crassly commercial, and the obscene in favor of the sacred. In a statement released for his solo show at Carstairs Gallery, in New York, in March 1962, he again censured the pretention and propaganda that he identified in much contemporary art, declaring, “Art has been violated and is dead. There is no longer any transcendental artistic problem. But there is a philosophical one. . . . Art is a service.” The burnished Metachromatic Messages, among them Message (Circle) and Message (Square), that he showed at Carstairs aspired to this greater altruism, their generosity of spirit echoed in the encomiastic Psalm 117 to which they were attached: “Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever. Praise the Lord!” Goeritz offered that “the items in this exhibition express nothing—or everything” and struck an optimistic note in conclusion: “They may serve to ornament the rooms of those who like them. On the other hand…they strive to serve as Messages of an effort to find a new morality, one which could eventually become the origin of a new art.”2
Goeritz instilled the potential of this new art as prayer across his Messages, their luminous gold surfaces an invitation to the sublime. The geometry of the present circle and square recall the moveable pieces—cylinders, cubes, monoliths—that he presented on a flat slab in the series, Do It Yourself, from the same period. Gleaming and truly iconic, in both an aesthetic and a religious sense, Goeritz’s Messages cultivate awareness of a spiritual presence, ritualizing our experience of viewing and, suggestively, bringing us closer to the divine.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
A series of spindly crucifixions, Saviors of Auschwitz, presaged the first of his iconic Messages, manifestations of modernist religious art wrought in perforated-metal and, later, gold-leaf monochrome. Begun in the late 1950s, the Messages explore relations of light, color, and (im)materiality that Goeritz had earlier developed in such major works as the Museo Experimental El Eco (1953) and Torres de Satélite (1957). The Messages similarly engage architectural questions of void, volume, and structure, transforming the space around them through the reflective brilliance of their surfaces and, ultimately, evoking pure aesthetic—and spiritual—emotion. Loosely associated with Mexico’s Ruptura generation, which rose in opposition to the Muralists in the 1950s, Goeritz belonged to an international avant-garde, and his monochrome abstraction engaged contemporary currents in Minimalism as well as the material provocations of Group ZERO and Yves Klein, among others.
Goeritz produced Messages through the end of his career, with variations in format and scale, but their origins date to the death from cancer of his first wife, Marianne, in 1958 and to the intentional, religious turn of his practice around the same time. The first works consisted of scrap metal sheets perforated and nailed to wooden supports recycled from local building sites and shantytowns; he referred to them as sudarios (shrouds), recalling the famous Shroud of Turin, as well as clavados (nailed things) and clouages (from the French “clou,” or nail). Titles cite a number of cautionary Old Testament passages, among them Proverbs 20:15: “There is gold, and a multitude of rubies: but the lips of knowledge are a precious jewel.” These early Messages were soon followed by the Metachromatic Messages, covered with gold leaf and without perforations, that sought meaning beyond monochrome through an experience of transcendence. A number of large-scale Messages were integrated within architectural settings, notably the triptych altarpiece (1965) at a convent of Capuchin nuns in Tlalpan designed by his friend and collaborator, Luis Barragán, and the mural Abstracto en dorado (1968), installed in Ricardo Legorreta’s Hotel Camino Real in Mexico City.
The Messages collectively constitute the kind of plastic prayer that Goeritz described in his manifesto, “L’art prière contre l’art merde” (1960), which repudiated the ephemeral, the crassly commercial, and the obscene in favor of the sacred. In a statement released for his solo show at Carstairs Gallery, in New York, in March 1962, he again censured the pretention and propaganda that he identified in much contemporary art, declaring, “Art has been violated and is dead. There is no longer any transcendental artistic problem. But there is a philosophical one. . . . Art is a service.” The burnished Metachromatic Messages, among them Message (Circle) and Message (Square), that he showed at Carstairs aspired to this greater altruism, their generosity of spirit echoed in the encomiastic Psalm 117 to which they were attached: “Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever. Praise the Lord!” Goeritz offered that “the items in this exhibition express nothing—or everything” and struck an optimistic note in conclusion: “They may serve to ornament the rooms of those who like them. On the other hand…they strive to serve as Messages of an effort to find a new morality, one which could eventually become the origin of a new art.”2
Goeritz instilled the potential of this new art as prayer across his Messages, their luminous gold surfaces an invitation to the sublime. The geometry of the present circle and square recall the moveable pieces—cylinders, cubes, monoliths—that he presented on a flat slab in the series, Do It Yourself, from the same period. Gleaming and truly iconic, in both an aesthetic and a religious sense, Goeritz’s Messages cultivate awareness of a spiritual presence, ritualizing our experience of viewing and, suggestively, bringing us closer to the divine.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park