An exhibition highlights the golden age of Mexican printmaking. In the wake of a long revolution against dictatorship, Mexican artists vowed in the 1920s to create works that would instruct and enrich the masses. They even signed a manifesto proclaiming, "We repudiate so-called easel painting and every kind of art favored by ultra-intellectual circles." Out of this mood came the great murals of modern Mexico, especially the monumental works of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. But the mood also spawned a lesser-known burst of creativity — an enormous production of prints for 30 years. Unlike paintings that would likely be savored by rich families in their homes, the multiples of these woodcuts, linoleum cuts and lithographs could reach many people...

An exhibition of ancient Maya art points up the opulence and violence of the great Mesoamerican civilization. While most of Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, the Maya of Mexico and Central America flourished. Living off a bounty of corn, they devised an elaborate calendar, charted stars and planets and invented the most complex written language in the Americas. And at the peak of their civilization, from a.d. 600 to 850, the Maya built monumental cities and produced art—stone sculptures, painted ceramics, delicate figurines and jade jewelry and masks—of astonishing beauty and striking, revelatory detail. Recently, scholars studying these pre-Columbian artworks have gained new insights into the life of the ancient Maya kings and their retinues. Now, an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. of more than 130 Maya masterworks, many of them never before displayed in the United States, affirms the pomp and sophistication of Maya courtly life, from its royals’ fondness for mirror-gazing to its chilling brutality...

During the last years of the 20th century, scholars managed to break the code of the hieroglyphics of the ancient civilization of the Maya people. Perhaps 85% of the writing on Maya artwork and monuments can now be deciphered. The new knowledge has led to new understanding. A Maya exhibition, which just opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is one of the first gifts of the new scholarship. “Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya” places some of the finest pieces of Maya art into a coherent and focused story about the life of the kings and courts that ruled the splendid city-states in what is now Mexico and Central America during the height of Maya civilization from the years AD 600 to 800. Maya art has long been admired for its beauty and scenes of realistic action. “There is a poignancy about Maya art that reaches into your heart and soul,” says Kathleen Berrin of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a curator of the exhibition. “There is an elegance and beauty that appeals to Western taste.” The exhibition, which displays more than 130 pieces, includes some of the finest samples of this appeal...

[OPINION] Mexicans once had a unique system for picking a new president: A president ruled like a czar for six years and then personally picked his successor. The outgoing president, in fact, was the only voter who counted in Mexican elections. He was, as political cartoonist Eduardo del Rio once put it, "the Big Finger." As soon as the Big Finger pointed at someone, the happy target was anointed as the new president of Mexico. Succession was clear-cut. Yet, despite the monopoly enjoyed by the president, the air crackled with politicking. Influential Mexicans refused to sit back and wait for the Big Finger to point. Instead, they did all they could to push the Big Finger this way and that. Mexicans tried to persuade the president that their man was a dynamo and all his rivals ninnies or blackguards. The maneuvering metamorphosed into a comic cockpit, and I found myself right in the middle of it a quarter-century ago, when I was The Times correspondent in Mexico City...

Examines key aspects of political and economic relations between Mexico and the U.S. Emphasis on Mexican dependence on American support; Ways by which American culture, organization and products set the standards for Mexicans; Factors contributing to conflicts of interest between the two countries; Extent of Mexican dependence to the U.S.; Comparison of the political and economic conditions; Difficulties involved in relations between a powerful country and its weak neighbor.

Reports on Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez's reaction to Spain's Generalisimo Francisco Franco's execution of five revolutionaries in Spain in September 1975. Echeverria's description of the Spanish dictatorship; Call to the United Nations Security Council to expel Spain from the U.N.; Destruction of Echeverria's campaign to succeed Kurt Waldheim as Secretary General in 1976.

MEXICO CITY’S Palace of Fine Arts assigns one of its salons to modern art and another to Mexican art, but both, like all the others, exhibit the same kind of paintings. In tiers of galleries, this huge museum offers little but work by twentieth-century Mexicans. A first look is far from a dull experience. Eager for more, I marched from room to room, excited by a mural still in progress, by the stark perspective of Siqueiros, by the cluttered symbols of Rivera, by the bright colors and stunted figures of young artists, by the mystery of a powerful art spawned in a political revolution. Only later did doubt creep in. Where do young Mexicans go, I wondered, to find out about Botticelli or El Greco or Rembrandt or Degas or Picasso or de Kooning...?