Page 140 - Libro Max Cetto

The Story of a Book. Modern Architecture in Mexico Cristina López Uribe and Salvador Lizárraga Sánchez

As he explained in his preface, Arte antiguo de México [Ancient Art of Mexico] was
dedicated to his master, Wilhelm Worringer. Not only does he dedicate it to him, but
states that “his fundamental work, Formprobleme der Gotik [The Essence of the Gothic
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Style], has been for me model, judgment and encouragement.” This means that one of the
most important –and least researched– studies of pre-Columbian art in Mexico is based on
European interpretive models used to explain Gothic architecture. But Worringer’s funda-
mental analytical tools were first embodied in his well-known 1908 book Abstraktion und
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Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie. It is worth describing them, even if superficially,
since they underlie Cetto’s critical thinking throughout Modern Architecture in Mexico and
in some of his later texts.
In Abstraktion und Einfühlung [Abstraction and Empathy], Worringer proposes an art
history based on two opposed conceptions and positions regarding the world that express
the development of peoples. The first, abstraction, occurs when a society finds the world
around it chaotic and incomprehensible, while empathy occurs when a society relies on
its natural surroundings because it understands them and naturally unites with them. In
Modern Architecture in Mexico, Max Cetto directly applies these ideas when discussing the
architecture of Teotihuacán:

The grandeur of the design at Teotihuacán lies in its harmony with the aridity and
gauntness of the highland valley of Mexico. On the other hand, every architectural
means has been exploited to dissociate the building from nature, to keep it distinct
from the landscape, to prevent it from being submerged in its amorphous, menacing
chaos, and, instead, to counterpose an intellectual order. It is for this reason rather than
out of technical considerations that the pyramid displays broad terraces such as are not
to be seen in the surrounding mountains. 50

In Arte antiguo de México, Westheim refers to the pyramids –particularly Teotihuacán’s
Pyramid of the Sun– in a very similar way:

Faced with a nature that seemed chaotic, blind, formless and incomprehensible, it must
have seemed a miracle to be able to face the threatening darkness with a human and
spiritual order, crystallized in elementary forms, a clear and monumental world. […]
Reality (also the association with reality) is profane, not sacred. 51

These two passages relate directly to the theory of Wilhelm Worringer who, referring to
so-called primitive peoples, writes that “their most energetic desire was to pluck the object
from their outside world ... from its natural nexus, from the infinite mutation to which every
being is subject, to purify it of all that is vital dependence on it, that is to say arbitrariness...”
Along with all German art historians of the late nineteenth century, Worringer tried to el-
evate the art of his nation –Gothic– to the same level as that of the Mediterranean countries.
The categories and aesthetic views that had been constructed since the Renaissance exclud-
ed anything that strayed from the classical Western model, that is, from Greek and Roman
art. The countries of northern Europe had to build interpretive models that made art history

48 Wilhelm Worringer. Formprobleme der Gotik (Munich: Piper, 1911). Spanish edition: La esencia del estilo gótico (Buenos
Aires: Nueva Visión, 1973).
49 Wilhelm Worringer. Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stylpsychologie (München: R. Piper & Co. 1908).
Spanish edition: Abstracción y naturaleza (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953).
50 Max Cetto, Modern Architecture in Mexico. 12.
51 Paul Westheim, Arte antiguo de México, 109. Free translation into English by the translator. The text in Spanish reads as
follows: “Encontrándose ante una naturaleza que les parecía caótica, ciega, informe e incomprensible, debía impresionarles
como un milagro el poder enfrentar a las tinieblas amenazantes un orden humano y espiritual, cristalizado en formas el-
ementales, un mundo claro y monumental. […] La realidad (también la asociación con la realidad) es profana, no sagrada.”

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