Wineskins (Odres)

During and following the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), art entered politics, and the handicrafts of indigenous peoples were celebrated as expressions of a new national culture and identity. Manuel Alvarez Bravo, who embraced nativist iconography from a distinctly modernist vantage beginning in the later 1920s, flourished in this Mexican renaissance. He fostered relationships with Mexican muralists as well as with European and American artists who traveled to Mexico, including such figures as Surrealist leader André Breton and photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Edward Weston. Julien Levy exhibited this print and other photographs by Bravo alongside works by Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans in the 1935 show Documentary and Anti-Graphic Photographs. In his press release for the show, Levy explained “anti-graphic” as something that defies or eschews generally accepted criteria for good photography and remains “in many ways the more dynamic, startling, and inimitable” on that account. Bravo’s image of Mexican goatskin vessels—a traditional means of transporting wine—suggests an intoxicating ambiguity between inanimate and animal creations in the spirit of the Surrealist movement.