Jorge Alberto Manrique: The Transgressor (1936-2016)

Abstract

Jorge Alberto Manrique’s passage through the world of Latin American Art History draws parallels between his Historicist thought and the analysis of artistic environment. The interest of this tribute is to approach the life of a man, who sought to answer the question: How is it that an historian and an art historian are formed? Structured in a chronological manner this text familiarizes us first with Manrique before his encounters with thinkers such as Edmundo O’Gorman, Francisco de la Maza and Justino Fernández. What were his early references, who his first teachers, and, coming from historicism, how did he define his position are some of the questions answered. The dialectic opposition between History and Art History, aperture and tradition, Mannerism and Baroque, as well as Manrique’s view of that which is Mexican, forged within a generation in transit, are the result of a crisis in which the triumph of one is permeated by the other, similar to “a wounded object on which traces have been left.” This Hegelian rigor—the dialectic philosophical turn—fundamented his professional life. Thus this rendering, which tells of Manrique’s lines of research, seeks to pay homage to one of Mexico’s most important historians and art critics, whom alongside other activities, propelled the aperture of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (UNAM) to an international context.