The Fusion of Two Cultures
Jorge González Camarena (1908 to 1980) · 1963
Two warriors fall towards each other in mid air, an eagle knight of the Aztecs and a Spanish conquistador in steel armour. Their lances have pierced one another and their bodies, one dark and one pale, are locked together as they die. Out of that embrace, the painter tells us, Mexico was born. Behind them the sky is split between the feathered colours of the indigenous world and the cold metallic greys of Europe, and the ground below is strewn with fragments of both civilisations.
Jorge González Camarena belonged to the generation after the founding muralists and was fascinated by geometry and by the symbolism of races and cultures. Look at how the two figures are built from the same angular planes so that they mirror each other, and how the eagle helmet of the Mexica warrior and the plumed steel helmet of the Spaniard rhyme across the picture. The weapons are painted with archaeological care: the obsidian bladed macuahuitl on one side, the Toledo steel on the other. The picture is deliberately balanced so that neither side wins.
The panel was painted in 1963 for the first gallery of the museum, which deals with the encounter of the two worlds, and it sets the tone for everything that follows. For decades it was one of the most reproduced images in Mexican schoolbooks, and many visitors recognise it before they know the artist's name. González Camarena went on to paint an even larger version of the theme at the University of Concepción in Chile. Standing in front of it, notice that the artist gives the indigenous warrior the higher position, a quiet statement about whose land this was.
Did You Know? The same artist designed the earliest Mexican banknotes with indigenous motifs and painted the mural in the Palace of Fine Arts titled Liberation.
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