My parents migrated to Mexico in the mid-twenties. My father came from Lithuania and my mother from Ukraine, and they met here. They arrived penniless.
Clara Mendelejis worked as a cashier in a bakery and Chanel Nierman was an inspector in a bus line; some time later, he ended up starting a small jacket factory, which is what he did for the rest of his life.
Leonardo Nierman Mendelejis, the only child of the couple, was born in Mexico City on November 1st 1932. He started taking private violin lessons as a child and attended the Music Conservatory for a brief period. He was sure that music was his fate; for a long time painting did not move him.
When I studied high school in San Ildefonso, I used to see the murals of Diego and Orozco, and I confess they didn’t excite me. But I do remember that I used to get angry especially when looking at a mural by Orozco, where someone had scratched with a nail on what seemed like a crow, exposing the plaster beneath, and wrote under the bird “el ave chucho.” It made me mad because if that may be allowed in a cheap bar, it is intolerable in a university.
In 1951, the student Leonardo Nierman received his high school diploma in the area of physical-mathematical sciences. He would continue higher studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Nevertheless, he kept seeing himself as a future professional violinist, he even gave some reitals in such renowned spaces as the Palace of Fine Arts’ Manuel M. Ponce Auditorium.
But on one of those occasions…. It was technology that killed me (I have found whom to blame). A man came to me and candidly asked if I wanted him to record the concert I was going to give. “Yes, Man, sure,” I said, and after the concert he gave me the tape; I went with my friends to celebrate my triumph, and when I got home I decided to extend the pleasure of success by listening o part of that tape. What I heard was somewhat baffling. At first, I thought the man’s machine was surely out of order. Later I made another serious mistake: I looked among my records for the same piece I had played — the Spanish Symphony by Edouard Lalo, an RCA Victor recording, interrupted by Yehudi Menuhin – and the devastating comparison came. The only thing I came up with was to open the violin case, loosen the pegs to relieve the tension from the strings, and kiss it good-bye; I said: “Good Night, dear violin.” And never again.
Leonardo’s mourning lasted about three days and three nights. With the final farewell, he had the feeling of having wasted almost twenty years, and that it had been a huge mistake. But time helped him discover that perhaps the most important thing he had done in his life was to have had that closeness with music, which was much more intimate than the one that comes merely from listening to records or attending concerts.
My contact with music gave me a certain harmonic point of view on life, and it may have helped me to see painting in a different way. Music and painting are very mush alike — both have tonalities, rhythms, high-intensity areas and resting areas.
In spite of his ironic statements (what I used to do to music is impossible to describe) , Nierman knows he is permanently linked to music. Artist such as Bach, Debussy, Mahler or Stravinsky touch upon certain electric wiring within my world, from which come the sound cords that in turn cause color cords in my soul. But it was not until after I left music that I started to feel color. It was like a consolation prize.
Self-expelled from the oneiric concert, without premeditation, Leonardo Nierman walked toward another side of his sensory and creative tempo. One day, strolling down San Juan de Letran (as the street was then called), he chanced upon a shop that dealt in stuff for artist. He was just looking, but left with everything necessary to start painting.
I think painting is one of those activities that always begins as a hobby, always: as far as I know, no one has become a brain surgeon through prior practice as an amateur: it would be dangerous, wouldn’t it?
Around 1958, Leonardo continued his studies at the Accounting School of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in business administration, a profession he never practiced because he had already taken another road, parallel to that of his college commitments: that of the visual arts. On his own, he studied the psychology of color and the form of static and moving bodies — a subject taught at the Institute for Design, conceived as the New Bauhaus, founded in 1973 by Molohy-Nagy in Chicago. He also became a frequent visitor to museums, and of course he acquired the taste for, and the discipline of, painting.
I painted in my parents’ home, in my bedroom. Of course, I painted in small format. Although he never thought he would become a painter, painting took over him little by little because, as he puts it well: Man thinks he is the ship’s captain. That’s not true. Man is a passenger in row 27; man goes where the airline wants.
From an early age, this man called Leonardo Nierman Mendelejis had a sealed ticket to board the ship of art. He started painting without allowing the academic style to contaminate him (I knew from intuition that sometimes, what one learns from an instructor, one pays for with individuality) , so with his creative impulse he shaped that which he fancied modern art was.
His pictorial enthusiasm was already such that when he was still a college student he thought of asking the school’s principal, Guilfrido Castillo Miranda, to let him paint a mural on a huge surface that divided the big hall of the auditorium.
His reply was truly nice: “Well, then, you make the project, I present it to the right people, and if they authorize it and you pay for it, then you paint it.”
Leonardo keeps only some photographs of this work, painted in 1956 — which marked the beginning of his painting career — since some years later the wall was taken down. However, another valuable record of this mural remains: the artist’s own memory.
It was a very big mural, more or less 13 by 65 feet, on a beautiful wall, because it was a kind of floating wall, as if it were a huge frame resting on small metallic feet.
I threw myself into trying to invent how a mural should be painted (I never painted anything bigger in my life). I then went to see Maestro Siqueiros, to get some tips from him. He received me cordially, and gave me excellent advice; he told me of someone who could mix the colors for me so that they would be more resistant to the sun’s oxidation, a very talented Mexican engineer who invented acrylic colors, and who never got credit or recognition or anything, named Julio Gonzalez Parrodi. He gave me some advice and mixed the colors.
The mural’s theme was somewhat surrealistic. I called it Enigma Crystal. It was a lonely landscape, desert like, with two sculpted figures: a kind of strange dancer and a man in a farther plane; there were floating rocks and metallic spheres. I painted this before the famous Sputnik came to light, so then people joked that I surely had had secret information.
I think that trying to solve a painting of such dimensions caused me a sort of emotional, intellectual tempest. It already was a challenge for me. It seems to me that it was what marked my fate. Later I saw clearly that what I wanted was to keep painting, until hunger would make me change my mind. But in fact hunger itself never intended to do that. Those who did were some relatives, not his parents. And then there was a coincidence: Raquel Tibol invited Leonardo to have an exhibition in the Jewish Sport Center. I accepted with pleasure, but also I promised myself: if I do not sell any painting I will quit as I did with music. Obviously, and fortunately, he did not. What happened then is an anecdote that Leonardo tells now with much tenderness towards the friends who took part in it.
It was a Saturday. Wolf Ruvinsky, my friend and brother-in-law, was going on an outing through Mexico City with an American couple he had just met in Acapulco: Carmen and David Kreeger. By chance they passed near the exhibition. Wolf didn’t know anything about it, so when he noticed the poster announcing my show he told the Kreegers that the artist was his friend and relative. They saw the artwork, and Mr. Kreeger bought two paintings, the only ones that were sold during the exhibition.
The Kreeger’s acquisition not only exempted Nierman from his promise, but the couple also showed the artist’s work to Bernice and Manuel Baker, the owners of the IFA Gallery in Washington. The Bakers were interested in Leonardo’s work, and he sent a dozen paintings to them. From then on, beginning in 1959, IFA Galleries exhibited Nierman’s work, opening doors for him internationally.
This is how everything started. Now — with multiple exhibitions in Mexico and abroad, with paintings, sculptures, tapestries and stained glass in many international collections, and having received important prizes — Leonardo Nierman still maintains an enviable spirit, full of humor, perhaps because he keeps working with emotion, without trying to persuade the world of his work’s merit. Vanity’s traps are limitless. I think we all must try to make our lives the best we can, and that’s it. I’ve managed to survive doing something I deeply like: that is already a big success, and since I long not for a yacht, nor to own my own airplane, nor for any other such stupid thing, I am thus at peace and content. I once said that in life one must choose: either one lives as a rich man, or one dies as a rich man, but it is impossible to have both at once.
* Maria Luisa Valdivia Dounce
Recreation, in the manner of a profile, of Regina Martinez’s
interview with Leonardo Nierman in April 2002.
| Home |
| Biography |
| Paintings |
| Sculptures |
| Tapestry |
| Associates |
| Exhibits |
| Contact |