Latent Critiques: Archibald Motley Jr., Mexico, and Surrealism

Between 1953 – 1959, Archibald Motley Jr. took several trips to visit his nephew Willard Motley, who had permanently taken up residence in Mexico in the late 1940s. During these trips, Archibald produced several paintings of the Mexican landscape: works like Guanajunto, Mexico (1957) and San Miguel de Allende (1953). These paintings depicted the beauty of the countryside and the lives of those who lived there. Based on such works, scholars who have addressed Motley’s time in Mexico have argued that the paintings he produced there, like the rest of the works in his oeuvre, were unadulterated observations of everyday life. However, one painting from his time abroad casts doubt on the received wisdom of Motley’s purported realism. After Fiesta, Remorse Siesta (1959 - 1960) departs greatly from the other works that Motley created in Mexico. Its illogical subject matter, intense, dream-like color palette, disjunctions of scale, and inconsistent lighting challenge scholars’ categorization of Motley as a realist and suggest a more complex and critical artistic practice. In this thesis, I argue that, in After Fiesta, Remorse Siesta, Motley consciously employed Surrealist tactics to defamiliarize popular representations of Mexico and invite viewers to consider the politics of tourism and its impact on the region. In so doing, Motley exposed the gap between the touristic image of Mexico sold to the American public and the consequences of that false image on the working-class Mexican population. Moreover, I argue that this painting is not as anomalous as it may seem. Instead, I position the work as a pivotal moment in Motley’s growing engagement with Surrealism, which paralleled and reveals his explicit interest in commenting on systemic oppression.