Beaujolais Nouveau celebration at the Berlin
By Terence O’Connor

The Berlin Bar celebrates the arrival of Beaujolais Nouveau in November. The official release date on the third Thursday of November is cause for celebration in France and around the world. Cases of the new wine are shipped everywhere as people rush to be among the first to enjoy the harvest. 

According to legend, it was something of a cult wine in the French bistros, bars and cafes surrounding Beaujolais and Lyons, produced by the local growers and delivered in barrels. In the sixties, Nouveau was bottled and marketed outside of France for the first time, and the rest is marketing history.

The grapes are first fermented inside the skins, so the resulting wine is fresh, fruity, and very low in tannins. It tastes different every year and is a lot like kicked-up grape juice.

Beaujolais Nouveau is not a wine to sniff, swirl and contemplate; it’s a wine to pour and party with. Wine snobs won’t come within 50 feet of it. You have the pleasure of performing all sorts of wine sacrilege on it. Drink it on the rocks, out of a plastic cup, with a straw, straight out of the bottle if you want.

Nouveau’s release is perfectly timed for Americans, as it is appropriate for Thanksgiving dinner. At one week old, it is just bright and fresh enough to go with turkey, and it has the versatility to complement nearly all the trimmings—particularly the cranberry sauce.

Wine always reminds me of Paris. And Paris always brings to mind one of the finest and least-known museums in the world, located in the Bois de Boulogne. The Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires is an ethnological museum that traces a distinct portion of the history of human endeavor in what is now France from its beginnings, before painters depicted their game animals and shamans on the walls of the Lascaux caves, to the present. The museum follows the exertions of the common people as they have followed their disparate occupations since mankind first began to populate the country.

The first floor of the museum is a series of dioramas showing the workshops where people plied their trades,from cheesemakers to carpenters, armorers or artists. The rest of the museum is replete with examples of their work and the tools they used in creating it, within every historical period.

The museum is the intellectual offspring of a unique school of French historical thought, the Annales School that arose in the early twentieth century in reaction to the terribly British and very Victorian “Great Man Theory.” As the name implies, the Great Man Theory held that history languishes, quiescent, waiting for the appearance of exceptional men, like Moses or Mohammad, Alexander or Charlemagne, Archimedes or Newton, to appear in order to spur it on and change its course.

The Annales School believed otherwise. They believed that the energy and force that drives the vast torrent of human history is contained in and channeled by the everyday social and economic interactions of common people. These forces were to be found primarily in their work and marketplaces and the social rules and festivities that grew up around them. 

The defining work of the school is a three-part history of the emergence of capitalism called Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, by Fernand Braudel, the leader of the movement and a titan in both historiography and the social sciences. The core tenet of these scholars is summed up in the title of the first volume, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible. As for great men, they did come bobbing to the surface now and then, but simply as a result of the normal roilings of these great, broad and deep currents. 

Within these rapids and meanderings, the eddies and whirls of nature’s metaphorical river marked the cycles of human labors. Plantings, harvestings, storing, rains and freezes, summer’s heat and winter’s cold were indicated with the equinoxes, solstices and the Cross Quarter days. These were not normal days. They were culled out as something special, days for sacrifice, ritual or celebration. 

Artists, in the employ of priests, politicians or the political and economic elite were tasked with the labor of reinforcing the uniqueness of these annual events. The Berlin’s owners have wisely commissioned Peter Leventhal to create the appropriate festoons or decorative chains for this annual Beaujolais bacchanal.

As far as the calendar goes, this event is neither fish nor fowl. It doesn’t celebrate the harvest, which is long past, nor the rebirth of light which will not happen for another month or so, when we celebrate Christmas and Chanukah. What it does do is act as a foil for a later and much larger festival. Tasting this young wine not only makes final a long period of labor that started this past spring, but also allows us a glimpse of what is to come next spring when mature Beaujolais will find its way to tables around the world. In a sense it is the New Year come early. 

So, when you drop by the Berlin to have a taste of this year’s offering, look past the marketing gimmicks like the races to Paris that were invented to help cash flow and the fact that the wine is young and raw. Rather, simply sip this year’s produce from the fields of Beaujolais and find in it your own lineage and toast your peasant forebears who celebrated days like this for millennia. Mimic our Mexican hosts who feasted with their ancestors just two weeks ago on the Day of the Dead. And, most importantly, celebrate yourself and the fact that you are alive.

By the way, next time you find yourself in Paris, stop by that excellent and neglected museum in the Bois de Boulogne. Or, better yet, pick up one of Leventhal’s festoons and start a museum of your own.

Terence O’Connor is a resident of San Miguel. Unfortunately for him, an old brain injury precludes him from tasting this year’s Nouveau.

Galería Pérgola features Mexican Modern Masters
By Donald Sibley

Art Opening Mexican Modern Masters Fri, Nov 23, 7–9pm Galería Pérgola Inside the Instituto Allende Ancha de San Antonio 20

Galería Pérgola is proud to present the second annual Mexican Modern Masters, an exhibition featuring works by some of the most acclaimed Mexican artists of the twentieth century. Comprised of original works, engravings, lithographs, serigraphs and block prints, this exhibition contains many works created in the sixties, a period referred to as the Ruptura (Rupture) movement of Mexican art. The movement’s intellectual and stylistic founder, Carlos Orozco Romero, has a superb example of his work from the fifties featured in the exhibit. Several of the movement´s more eminent followers also are represented in the exhibition.

Mexico’s modern art was highly influenced by the Mexican Revolution and its famous muralist movement. The country’s Ministry of Education appointed Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco (who became famous as the Tres Grandes) to paint murals, mostly depicting heroic revolutionary deeds, on the walls of government offices in Mexico City. Realistic in style, the purpose of the murals was to enlighten and educate the illiterate masses. This mural renaissance sharply contrasted with European modernism, in vogue throughout the West at the time. The muralists believed in “art that serves people” as opposed to modernism’s mantra of “art for art’s sake.”

As Mexico became an industrialized nation in the mid-twentieth century, these two powerful yet opposing art philosophies began to collide. In Mexico, this brought about the Ruptura. In 1958, José Luis Cuevas published “La Cortina del Nopal,” condemning the Mexican muralist movement as “The Cactus Curtain” and advocating more artistic freedom.

 Many artists of the fifties and sixties were eager to join Cuevas in opposing the nationalistic, realist painting style popularized by the Tres Grandes. The movement promoted individual expression and figurative art reflecting the contemporary human condition.

Mexican Modern Masters focuses on this prolific period that marked a dramatic shift in artistic expression. Ironically, an important feature of the exhibition is a powerful series of lithographs by David Alfaro Siqueiros. Ever experimenting with styles, materials and techniques, Siqueiros in the thirties began to evolve toward abstraction, further solidifying his place in history as one of the most famous Mexican artists. Created in the penultimate year of Siqueiros’s life, the series was inspired by his mental musings while imprisoned for political reasons in the late sixties. Two editions were published. The one exhibited in our current show is a limited deluxe edition of only 70 on japan paper, which forcefully brings out the dynamic palette that Siqueiros used for this important and highly expressive work. 

Also included is an exquisite Rufino Tamayo color lithograph from his Mujeres series, printed in Paris in 1969. Other Mexican masters whose works are featured include Rodolfo Morales, Alfredo Zalce, Fanny Rabel, Pedro Coronel, Jose Luis Cuevas and Alfredo Zalce. Several of the artists featured in the exhibit were members of the prestigious Taller de Grafica Popular, founded in 1937, the most important printmaking organization in Mexico. Interestingly, one of the most famous artists of this school was Elizabeth Catlett, who was not Mexican but Afro-American. She spent 20 years in Mexico as a very active member of the TGP. One of her beautiful lithographs depicting indigenous Mexican women is featured in the exhibition. 

Galería Pérgola is pleased to honor the work of these outstanding masters and to bring attention to their historical significance in twentieth century art. The exhibition runs through December 27.