The editorial categories are research topics that have guided researchers during the recovery phase and continue to be the impetus behind the Documents Project’s digital archive and the Critical Documents book series. Developed by the project’s Editorial Board, each of the teams analyzed this framework and adapted it to their local contexts in developing their research objectives and work plans during the Recovery Phase. Learn more on the Editorial Framework page.
Hide
This is a two-part article, in which the writer José Juan Tablada takes us on a delightful, well-informed, and instructive tour of the animalist works of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Jews, and Persians. Perhaps due to the influence of positivism, the official Mexican doctrine in force at that time, Tablada’s perspective is evolutionary and hierarchical. For example, he believes Egyptian art to be superior to the Chaldean-Assyrian equivalent. The industrial arts are what truly excite the modern interest of this writer, who takes great pleasure in mentioning the watercolors and gouaches of the great Persian masters.
Other than Japanism and Monsterism, Animalism was one of the only modernist themes to gain much traction among the great Hispanic-American writers, and was embraced in particular by those in the French art milieu and Baudelairian camp. José Juan Tablada (1871-1945) considered it a form of prism through which to perceive both applied arts and art in general?initially in cultures such as the ones discussed in these articles and, subsequently, in the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico. In terms of the art of his time, it was a recurring theme in the modernist ideas that Tablada would express in Revista Moderna [Modern Magazine], where he worked in tandem with Julio Ruelas (1870-1907).