Art review: Modern Mexican art at the Meadows Museum

By Scott Cantrell

Mexican art has a surprisingly low profile in the American state that shares a 1,200-mile border. Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts has made a point of exploring and showcasing Latin American art, but it continues to be underrepresented in Dallas-Fort Worth museums. Even American connoisseurs of 20th-century art are unlikely to recognize names of Mexican artists beyond Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and maybe José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo.

A warm welcome, then, to the exhibition of 20th-century Mexican painting that opened Sunday at the Meadows Museum. Assembled by collector Andrés Blaisten, only in recent years displayed in Mexico City, it’s wildly uneven. But it reveals political, social and aesthetic movements that influenced modern Mexican painting....