MEXICO CITY, MEXICO.- The Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City opens today the exhibition “The Risk of the Abstract: Mexican Modernism and the Art of Gunther Gerzso” featuring 120 of the best works of this artist. In 1996 Gunther Gerzso began to talk with the researchers of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art about a large exhibition of his work. The project began to take form in 1999, but the artist was not able to see it because he died in April 2000.
Today, the Museo de Arte Moderno opens a retrospective exhibition of this artist with more than 40 works that have never been seen before.
Gunther Gerzso was born June 17, 1915, in Mexico City. His father, Oscar Gerzso, was a Hungarian-born business man who migrated to Mexico in the 1890’s. His mother, Dore Wendland, a German born in Berlin, was a singer and a pianist.
In 1927 Gerzso was sent to Lugano, Switzerland to live with his uncle, an art dealer, art collector, and art historian. It was during this period that Gerzso received his only artistic training. He attended various schools in Switzerland while living on his uncle’s extensive estate, surrounded by outstanding works of art, ancient to modern. While in Europe he met Nando Tamberlani, an Italian stage designer and friend his uncle’s, whose friendship influenced Gerzso to become a set designer.
The Great Depression forced his uncle to sell his estate and art collection so Gerzso returned to Mexico in 1931. He lived with his mother and sister and attended the German school. During this period, his artistic interests were expressed in drawings for theater sets and costumes, although without any hope of seeing them executed. After graduating in 1934, he met Fernando Wagner, actor, producer, and director, who used Gerzso’s designs for the productions directed by him of works by such authors as Molière, Lope de Vega, and Shakespeare. Encouraged by Arch Lauterer, a former set designer for the Cleveland Playhouse and at that time professor at Bennington College, Vermont, Gerzso moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1935 to study at the Cleveland Playhouse. Assisted greatly by the technical director of the Playhouse, Sol Comberg, Gerzso soon became staff set designer and designed about fifty-six plays during the next four years.
In 1940, encouraged by a painter friend, Bernard Pfriem, Gerzso started his avocation as a self-taught painter. His growing interest in painting led him to decide to return to Mexico in 1941 and devote himself full-time to that activity. Financial problems the following year forced him to accept an offer from the Mexican film producer Francisco de P. Cabrera to design sets for the film version of the Mexican novel Santa. During the next twenty years Gerzso designed sets for about 250 films for Mexican, French, and American film companies. He worked for many directors, including among others Luis Buñuel, John Ford and Yves Allegret. He continued painting as a hobby.
His work in the 1940’s reflected the influence of a surrealist group who were refugees in Mexico: Benjamin Péret, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Wolfgang Paalen. Travel in Mexico while filming awakened his awareness of the beauty and variety of Mexican landscape and his interest in pre-Columbian art. In 1959 Gerzso traveled to Greece, returned, and painted Recuerdo de Grecia , which was the first of the thirty-six paintings of his Greek period. By 1962 pre-Columbian influences reappeared in his paintings. His retirement from film set design in 1962 allowed him to return to painting full-time.
