Embracing Mexico's picturesque side

The winter saw Melanie Smith's coolly detached vision of Mexico City at MIT's List Visual Arts Center, and next fall the Institute of Contemporary Art will present a survey of the work of Damián Ortega, one of Mexico's leading contemporary artists.

But sandwiched between these two offerings, the Museum of Fine Arts is offering two Mexican-themed exhibitions, a strong fix for those hankering for the sights and styles of our southern neighbor.

The first, called "Viva Mexico! Edward Weston and His Contemporaries," will focus on three years in the career of one of America's great pioneers of modernist photography. Mexico comes into it because it was there that Edward Weston became truly modern. Before then, he had been working primarily in the artfully blurred manner known as Pictorialism.

The show will also include work by Tina Modotti, who began an affair with Weston in the early 1920s. Modotti, a spirited and beautiful woman from a politically active family in Italy, took up photography under his tutelage. In the wake of her husband's death in 1923, she and Weston and his son from an earlier marriage traveled to Mexico. (Work by the son, Brett Weston, as well as America's Paul Strand and Mexico's great photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo - currently the subject of a survey show at the Robert Lehman Art Center - will also be featured.)

Modotti could be as austere and abstract - and quite as good - as Weston when she wanted. But as she moved out from under his mentorship, her concerns became increasingly political. Mexico's 10-year revolution had ended three years before, and the new national ideology was "development." This enforced creed provoked a nostalgia for Mexico's agrarian, prerevolutionary past, which, in the arts, took the form of a movement called Mexicanidad. Weston and Modotti were swept up in these political and aesthetic currents as soon as they arrived, but they responded quite differently.

The MFA's second show (both are selected from the museum's own collection or from holdings on long-term loan) is called "Vida y Drama: Modern Mexican Prints." It focuses on a similar era, this time the 1920s to the 1950s, when Mexican printmaking was enjoying a lively period, with big names like David Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco producing bold, modern, socially conscious art intended for large audiences.

The 27 prints in the show will be divided into three sections. The first will focus on prints made between 1926 and 1933 by Rufino Tamaya and the three great Mexican muralists, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco. The second will present work from the '30s and '40s by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People's Graphic Workshop) as well as two 1957 works by Alberto Beltrán, both called "Vida y Drama" (hence the show's title). And the third will treat us to a few scattered self-portraits and nudes.

Twenty-seven works, all from the collection, sounds a little thin - not the kind of hearty fare one expects from the MFA. But with Mexico's tourism industry evidently on its knees, it's all for a good cause.

May 30-Nov. 2. Museum of Fine Arts. 617-267-9300, www.mfa.org

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com.