Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1929-12-28
BY HUBERT w. KELLEY.


MAJ What are you doing, little boy
standing here in the cloister chill of
this ancient convent? You are the
color of the gloom; only your bright
dark eyes seem alive in this dead place
of gray stone and crumbling plaster.
Il am carving my soul, Senior. upon
this chest of cedar. See? This wood Is
not dead. I am bringing it to life with
my knife"
1t is an urchin speaking. Mexican
boy. 10 or IL years old, barefoot and
clad in ragged overalls. Three months
ago he learned that the government
maintained a public school of sculpture
and wood carving in a crumbling con-
vent in the swarming market place.
He had seen the beggars carve jumping
jacks: he had filled his hungry mind
with the ancient Aztec sculpture in the
building excavation Just off the Zocalo,
the heart of the city. He would like
the feel of a chisel or knife in his tiny
hand. And so he sought out this place
and was enrolled as student, TO come
and go as he wished.
They do not tell me what to carve
Senior. 1 choose strange fancies out of
the dark, or cut out the images of
church and my home, or. If 1 wish,
carve the animals there in the muddy
courtyard"
More than 400 years ago this great
edifice was reared by poems under the
lash of the Spanish whip. The ex-
terror walls of plaster are peeling and
crumbling
Step through the great portal and
you find yourself in the patio sur
rounded on four sides by Spanish
arcades, heavily ornamented with
images indistinct with CRIME. In the
midst of the spacious court are piles of
rude cages for animal models. Life and
the boys own soul are the only models
in this school of free expression
In one cage black bear pursues its
tail In another, two brilliant cocks
strut. There are badgers, monkeys.
doves, rabbits, rats and turkeys in those
cages. Near at hand five dogs are
leashed to pillar.
Is School Of Liberation.
In the whole school one cannot find
. classical model, the Greek athlete. the
Roman emperor, god or goddess. This
Is a school of liberation. a school of the
revolution. Boys from to l8 are ad-
mitted without fee. Their tools and
materials, wood, stone and metal, are
provided. Some of Mexicos best artists
are the instructors. Their chief business
is not to intrude their own personalities
upon the children. They instruct by
not instructing. They teach the use of
tools. the correct very bad technique by
. system Of suggestive questioning and
encourage the expression of individ-
uality.
we learn from the children" the
teachers say. They do things we can
not Go, so bound are we by tradition"
In the dank. gray cloisters dozens of
little boys and a few older ones, the
oldest a common laborer, play knife or
chiSel on wood or stone. A 7-year-old
yarnin is carving the school scene itself
upon the panel Of a huge door. He is
as diminutive beside it as the great
Diego Rivera is beside the 900 square
meter mural he is painting on the walls
OF the national palace.
Some of the boys cannot resist cary
ing the angelic harp players they have
seen on the doors of the Spanish
church. They carve out in peculiarly
original style the images from home,
school and the market place, the ia
miliar things of their lives. A few
unconsciouSly hew from gray granite
or colored volcanic stone the idols of
the Aztec ruins. One boy chisels a like
ness of Guillermo Ruiz, one of the in
Atructors, himself a sculptor of repute.
Ruiz is perpetually delighted. He laughs
enthusiastically, shakes his head and
clasps his hands over each original
creation of the child artists.
L can't believe it of them, even
when see what they have wrought, -
he exclaims
In strolls the important Gerado
Murillo, a slight, dapper man in a salt
and pepper suit, his great gray beard
covering his shirt front He has Aztec
lied his name to DR.. Att" or. in the
language of Montezuma, DR.. Water. the
fiuid one. The return to Aztec things
Is part OF the educational revolution
just as the return to ancient Gaelic
things is part of the revolution in Ire
land. DR.. Att interpreted Mexican
creative art in 1922, the beginning of
the educational revolution, in his two
volumes, Las Aries Populares en-
Mexico" He lives somewhere over a
grocery store
Finds Boys Work Amazing.
This distinguished Mexican art critic
talks excitedly about a small bows
turtle, embossed upon a little block of
wood. Amazing! incredulous!
over in corner of the court is a
large dome of crude masonry, the fur
mace for the metal castings, made from
clay models by boys whose hands six
months ago knew only how to pat out
tortillas. The national pancake.
Ihere are no hours in the school
The students work when and as long
as they like. 1t is required of them only
that they work. They may sell their
nnlshed work, but there is very little
market for creative Mexican art.
only few years ago the great Mex
lean artists. such as Rivera and GOTTA.
banded together in a syndicate to de-
msnd scale of wages similar to that
enforced by plaStArers and sign paint
ers.
Rivera himself, Mexico's greatest
artist, is painting the history Of Mex
leo upon the great walls of the Ma
tional palace-at 20 pesos a day So
q friend said in hts presence, and he
did not deny it. Ten dollars a day for
fine art. And why? Because, he said,
Il love the revolution and Mexico. This
Is my gesture" But that is another
story
Open-air painting schools are being
established by the government in many
parts of the federal district Art is
taught in many Of the rural schools.
Children just out of the cradle are
painting marketable pictures. 1t is
mat the MeXicanS particularly have an
understanding of color, form and per-
spective, or is it the method? Some
say one thing, some another Ruiz be-
heves the same method could be ap-
piled in the United States.
Turn the children loose" he saws.
Let them express themselves. Let
them depict the thing as they see it.
not as you see it. Do not say, This is
the way to draw that. This is the
picture. Now copy it. Give them free
dom to do as they wish, and the re-
suits will amaze"
Evidently it is not idle theory. Visit
the childrsn'S art exhibition in the I'M
finished National Theater, one of Diaz's
conceptions of grandeur. There are
water colors, pastels. crayons and
paintings in that collection worthy OF
hanging In the exhibition of the aver
age adult art class in the United States
They are renditions of the Mexfcau