The cover of this enticing publication features a seemingly simple painting by Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) in which two slices of watermelon are reduced to bold, red semicircles; like bright smiles greeting you at a restaurant door, they invite the reader to devour the chapters inside, each named for characteristic categories on a Mexican menu. This clever framing gestures nicely to the seductive entanglement of art and food in postrevolutionary Mexico, which is here explored and exposed by Lesley Wolff in Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art—a series of dynamic case studies bridging food studies, visual studies, and art history. She compellingly demonstrates, however, that this art-food juncture is not as digestible as it may first appear to the eye. Instead, the various ways that artists invoke food cultures in postrevolutionary Mexico were inflected with deeply charged social and political messaging. Like the watermelon itself, what Wolff describes as “the historical visuality of Mexican food” (2) is juicy but messy, enmeshed as it is in persistent colonial power structures.

Wolff identifies “the visuality of foodways” (4) as an imagined dynamic between food and art through which nationalism, race, class, and gender were negotiated, largely by Mexico City-based artists. Images of and about food, including its consumption and its process of creation/extraction, are treated as agents in the construction of Mexico’s official culture after the Revolution of 1910. She engages with studies in visual history that show how the practice of looking itself has been conditioned by political narratives and where contemporary scholars seeking silenced historical subjects dedicate themselves to unraveling the scopic regimes that control our understanding of the past and present. Taking this lens to the charged urban setting of Mexico’s postrevolutionary capital city, which was in the midst of dramatic modernization, Wolff argues that the visuality of foodways was key in the construction of modern Mexican citizenship and heritage—notions that her introduction and conclusion help to demonstrate persist to this day. Looking at an impressive array of source material, including photography, murals, magazines, advertisements, cookbooks, and tourist materials, she considers artists’ engagements with changing cookery, visualized and invisibilized labor, and the many physical locations of gustatory practices, such as markets, restaurants, taverns, and kitchens.

Three central chapters constitute the “meat” of the manuscript, each a discrete case study centered around a particular work of art and a foodstuff. These successive chapters move the reader forward in time, covering the decades from the 1920s to the 1950s. Wolff explains that the three case studies are methodologically linked as each demonstrates how the visuality of foodways functioned to produce a sense of urban Mexican heritage after the Revolution. Another thread can be seen in the way in which each example is entangled in one way or another with the intertwined revolutionary national ideals of indigenismo and mestizaje, which formed the fraught cultural basis of the modern state.

The first chapter on “Bebidas” (drinks) cuts to the core of national anxieties around Indigenous bodies and Mexican modernity through a reconsideration of Tina Modotti’s tightly composed photograph, Baby Nursing (ca.1926–27). This is a cleverly constructed chapter because, although the first intimate view of consumption we have here is of breast milk, Wolff’s actual gustatory locus is pulque, another liquid associated with native lifeways that was also viewed with suspicion and even disdain. Although I am not convinced that Modotti intended her photograph to be an expression of tensions with the consumption of pulque, it is a creative and compelling conceit. There is clearly fertile ground in the formal and conceptual parallels Wolff has drawn between the Nahua baby who ingests vital nutrients from her mother and the tlachiquero (maguey scraper) who suckles the monumental maguey. Both types of “antimodern bodies” (24), as Wolff calls them, were critical foils for the constitution of Mexico’s modern industry and postrevolutionary Mexicanidad.

A large-scale painting depicting The Creation of Mole (1946) by Carlos E. González is the case study at the heart of chapter two on “Guisos” (stews). The architectural context is significant here, because the work was commissioned in conjunction with a redesign of the famous Café de Tacuba, which became a theater for the performance of a romanticized colonial mestizaje. The probing analysis is especially strong for Wolff’s discussion of Indigenous labor and traditional cookware (for instance, the metate), both unsettled by rampant industrialization in the 1940s. One challenge here is to attribute some of the choices in the process to González’s own inclinations, given that the commission had to fit the restaurant’s overall renovation plan and that some of his work has the appearance of potboiler projects. Wolff highlights González’s prior cultural promotion of colonial miscegenation; however, one could instead showcase various examples of his work in which he advanced Indigenist ideals (for example, “Tlahuicole,” 1925; Mitos y leyendas de Teotihuacán, 1935). Therefore, rather than locating González’s credentials in celebrating colonialist mythohistories, I would suggest that it was his extensive work in theater and particularly set design that indeed positioned him as the ideal man for the restaurant’s restaging. Either way, it is refreshing to see a lesser-studied artist considered in this exciting analysis of the aesthetic development of one of the most classic locations for nationalist consumption in Mexico City.

The final, rich case study featured in the third chapter on “Frutas” (fruit) extends Wolff’s analysis of Mexican culinary interests and its lessons to a global sphere and to other art histories. It centers on one of Mexico’s most celebrated artists, Rufino Tamayo, whose moniker Señor Sandía (Mr. Watermelon) matched his embrace of the fruit that appears again and again in his compositions, including the one on the cover of this book. Another is the twenty-eight-foot wide painting Naturaleza muerta (Still Life, 1954), which in this chapter is linked to global and corporate interests because it was commissioned for the restaurant in the newest branch of the department store Sanborns that catered to middle-class Mexicans and a growing population of foreign tourists. Most significantly, Wolff connects the symbolism of the watermelon, whose slices frame the painting, to a deeper and broader history of enslaved Africans, labor, and nationalism in both Mexico and the United States. Here, the analysis bridges to other bold art historical studies of anti-Blackness and consumption in the US, including Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion (2012) and Shana Klein’s The Fruits of Empire (2020). Wolff sees the Zapotec Tamayo—who harbored his own youthful memories of fruit sellers in his native Oaxaca and undoubtedly was an observer of contemporary anxieties over street vendors in the capital city—as having harnessed the conflicted visualities of the watermelon. The reader is shown how its red, white, and green colors conjured a nationalist nostalgia for a fictive Indigenous past despite the fruit’s origins in and associations with Africa. Among other things, Wolff’s insights open the door to other ways that we might deconstruct the modern visuality of Mexican foodways, for instance, how and why so many other foreign fruits, such as bananas, pineapples, mangoes, and limes, came to be associated with an imagined Mexico.

In calling attention to some of the mutually reinforcing qualities of visual culture and foodways, as well as the utility of their sociopolitical union in consumer culture and an increasingly international art market, Culinary Palettes: The Visuality of Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art helps to forge exciting new paths for art historical inquiry across the Americas and beyond. Given that Mexican art and (decades later) Mexican cuisine each became globalized after the Revolution, their union seems inevitable, and this book will find a broad readership among connoisseurs of either and both. A recent study by the Philadelphia-based market research firm CivicScience reveals that Mexican food has replaced Italian food as the preferred cuisine of American people under fifty-five years old, a testament both to the powerful politics of Mexican cultural heritage and to immigration in the United States (“gen-z-is-all-about-mexican-cuisine-baby-boomers-prefer-italian,”2023). With Wolff’ excellent scholarly contribution, we are invited to recognize the tensions, anxieties, visualities, and ultimately the systems of power that gird Mexican foodways as well as related representational and daily social practices.