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LATIN
AMERICAN RESOURCE CENTER The Mexican Muralist Movement
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Latin American avant-gardes of
the 1920s-40s The avant-garde movement was predominantly an urban phenomenon that coincided with the rise of indigenismo, a movement dedicated to the contemporary plight of Indians and to a sense of national pride in an ancient legacy that helped define cultural identities for artists as well as for the general public. Workers and Indians were the main subjects in the arts of the 1930s and 1940s in most countries, while in Mexico these depictions started in the 1920s. Artists from all countries were responding to nineteenth century idealized/romanticized depictions of a lost legacy by attempting to portray issues that pertained to contemporary indigenous populations. In the Caribbean and in Brazil, African-descended populations were also depicted. In both literature and the arts, the avant-garde took two directions: an ideological one that focused on issues of national identity (Mexico and Cuba) and an aesthetic and cosmopolitan one with an international orientation (Argentina and Brazil). Mexico City, c. 1920s-40s The Mexican Mural Movement (1920s-40s) José Vasconcelos was Mexico’s Minister of Education under Obregón and was largely responsible for awarding the mural commissions. Vasconcelos had a universalist philosophy and wanted to create a “publicly visible art program as a complement to his new centralized national education policy” (Barnitz, 45). Early murals were not necessarily political, rather they were allegories of Mexico’s cultural history. These early murals also reflected Vasconcelos’s idea that a new cosmic race would result from the other races found in Latin America. The government’s main goal was similar to the sixteenth century friars who aimed to educate a broad and largely illiterate population. It was decided that the murals would be painted on the vast, undecorated walls of Mexico’s governmental edifices. Like the Aztecs and Mayans of earlier eras, who painted on the walls of their temples and tombs, the Mexican muralists left their public buildings awash with color. Reminiscent of their Mesoamerican predecessors, they took native subjects as their inspiration. Instead of creating portraits of Spanish aristocrats, they glorified the everyday lives of the contemporary Amerindian population and Mexican peasants tilling the soil. The artists faced two major challenges: introducing a new public monumental art requiring special technical skills and creating an effective visual language for propaganda purposes. Synthesis of pre-Conquest art
and European art Interest in Pre-Conquest art and
Mexican content: The Mexican Modernist School abandoned the detached art of Europe and in favor of bold New World imagery full of color and human activity. Each of the artists went on to individualize their own styles but definite similarities remains. All three were involved in creating a new system of visual conceptualization of the Mexican character. Their similar stylistic approaches resulted in powerful imagery whose force could only be paired with the monumental quality of the mural. All three artists were socialists with differing degrees of Communist loyalty. They painted for the public and planned their murals accordingly.
[SHOW: Photo of Diego Rivera in the Garden of the Blue House, c. 1943] (92-0342) The most recognized artist of the three was Diego Rivera. After studying at Mexico’s prestigious Academy de San Carlos, Rivera had his first exhibition in 1907, which resulted in a scholarship that took him to Europe. After spending time in Madrid and Paris, he went back to Mexico in the fall of 1910. In July of the following year he returned to Paris. There, between 1912 and 1917, he was affiliated with the cubist school, considered at the time as the ultimate in avant-garde artistic expression. Upon his return to Mexico from Europe, he was thrown into the torment of revolution and painted his first important mural in 1922. Rivera uses sensual forms, rich colors, and clear lines to move his public audience. In his own words, “For the first time in the history of art, Mexican mural painting made the masses the heroes of monumental art…When a hero appears among the people, it is clearly as part of the people and as one of them.” SOURCE?? His mastery is evident not only in the manner in which he incorporated his experiences in Mexico, Spain, and Europe into a school of thought but also in the draftsmanship and organizational skills necessary to accomplish his goals. Connection between art and politics.
In February 1938 Rivera and French Surrealist poet André Breton, another Trotsky admirer, signed a manifesto calling for creation of an International Federation of Revolutionary Writers and Artists to resist Stalinist cultural domination in the arts.Equally revolutionary was Rivera’s position as the leader of a group that raided Mexico’s gubernatorial palace to reaffirm the nonexistence of God. The group included figures as Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, the muralists José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and artists Gerardo Murillo ("Dr. Atl") and Juan O'Gorman. It was a virtual Who's Who of Mexico's intellectual leftist elite. Ministry of Education Murals, Mexico City (1924-28) [SHOW: Ministry of Education (general view)] (92-2676) Rivera’s murals at the Ministry of Education cover three floors of two adjacent patios, two courtyards and a stairwell. Rivera’s optimistic depictions and exotic color in this mural cycle supported the nationalistic objectives of the government. This four-year project incorporated many contemporary Amerindian themes, and it eventually encompassed 124 frescoes that extended three stories high and two city blocks long. Such prodigious output, along with the predominance of native elements, had a profound effect on the Mexican art scene. The main themes of these murals include: Leaving the Mine [SHOW: Ministry of Education (Courtyard of Labor), detail of Leaving the Mine] (92-2677) This detail, called “Leaving the Mine,” shows a Christ-like miner with outstretched arms being frisked as he emerges from the pit. The “Court of Fiestas” celebrates Mexican resources, Mexican folklore, popular religious and secular festivals.
In "Day of the Dead in the City"
Rivera identified with the celebrants by including himself and his wife,
Lupe Marín, in the crowd. [SHOW: Ministry of Education (Courtyard of Fiestas, 3rd floor), Wall Street Banquet (92-2672) and Night of the Rich] (QQ-3597) In “Wall Street Banquet” we see J.D.
Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and J.P. Morgan among the diners. In “Night
of the Rich” we see their Mexican counterparts. Both contrast with “Night
of the Poor,” which shows a group of Mexicans sleeping in the street
huddled together for warmth. Rivera also pained scenes depicting the Agrarian revolution itself, including “The Arsenal” (or Distribution of Arms), which shows his then-student Frida Kahlo distributing arms to a band of revolutionaries. [SHOW: Ministry of Education (Courtyard of Fiestas, south wall), The Arsenal] (QQ-3229) Rivera in the United States When in 1933 Nelson Rockefeller decided he wanted a mural for the new RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, New York, he commissioned Diego Rivera (after receiving refusals from Picasso and Matisse). For this mural, Rivera wanted to convey the idea that socialism is the only rational answer to the problems confronting society. Thumbing his nose at the Western world’s primary proponent of free enterprise, Rivera chose to depict the modern worker at a symbolic junction of science, industry, capitalism, and socialism in a work provisionally entitled “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.” Among several influential world personalities portrayed in the fresco—including Edsel Ford, Jean Harlow, and Charlie Chaplin—Rivera included a figure of Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin. When he steadfastly refused Rockefeller’s demand to remove Lenin’s portrait, Rockefeller had the entire fresco chiseled off the wall. Rivera later reproduced the mural in its entirety on an interior wall of the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where it can still be seen today, with only a slight change in title to "Man, Controller of the Universe". [SHOW: Rivera, Mural at Palacio de Bellas
Artes in Mexico City] – Man
at the Crossroads of the Universe, 1934 Full view (92-1505)
[SHOW: Orozco
Self-Portrait, 1946] (92-898) The importance of the mural is conveyed in many of his writings, including the following:
Preparatory School ‘Escuela Nacional
Preparatoria’ Murals (1923-1926) [SHOW: Orozco, La
trinchera, 1926, Colegio de San Ildefonso] [SHOW: Orozco, Christ
Destroying His Cross, 1932-4, Dartmouth College, NH] (QQ-3232) [SHOW: The
Working Class] and [Cortes
and Malinche] and [Absorption
of the Indian] (from Colegio de San Ildefonso, NPS, 1926) [SHOW: Juárez
and the Reform, mural at the palace of Chapultepec, 1948] (92-1679) These three murals, “Juárez and the Reform,” “Raising of Lazrus,” and “Hospicio Cabañas Fresco” convey the idea that rising up from the ashes and the bloodshed there is always the possibility of hope. Orozco’s strong socialist views surface repeatedly in his frescoes with their sense of immediacy and emotion. His projects are timely, created within the context of the moment. As an artist, Orozco was acutely aware of the potentiality of the time in which he lived. Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros, were similar in the two-dimensionally of their work and in the preference for the fresco technique. However, Orozco showed little of the optimism apparent in Rivera and Siqueiro’s murals. “Both Rivera and Siqueiros …concerned themselves with the celebration of humanity’s struggle to achieve freedom and dignity. But Orozco was captivated and absorbed by what he saw as the stark reality of human existence, of man’s apparent inability to realize his most noble aspirations or to live with others in freedom and liberty.” (Barnitz, p. 142). Also, while Orozco was not as actively involved with socialism and communism as Rivera and Siqueiros, he was intensely religious and felt a nearly overwhelming concern for humanity and responded to that responsibility through his frescoes. III. DAVID ALFARO SIQUEIROS (1896-1974) David Alfaro Siqueiros participated in Mexico’s revolution of 1910. After the victory, he acted repeatedly and frequently on behalf of the Communist party. He was so entwined with the politics of his times that there were years when Siqueiros abandoned his artwork in favor of working or fighting for his political beliefs. [SHOW: Siqueiros Self-Portrait, 1943] (92-449) Like Diego Rivera, Siqueiros traveled extensively through Europe, where he studied fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance murals and European modernist art, Italian futurism in particular. He outlined some of his preferences in his 1921 essay “Three Appeals for a Modern Direction to the New Generation of American Painters and Sculptors,” dedicated to a “North, Central, and South American Vanguard,” and to “Mexican cinematographer.” Here, he denounced Spanish symbolism and called not only for a new dynamic art but also for the incorporation of modern techniques in art. He was especially taken with what he called “our marvelous dynamic age” and with the technological advances of the day (machinery, cities and skyscrapers etc.). Parallel to this desire to incorporate modern visual idioms, Siqueiros sought to create an art that was also inherently national. Siqueiros was the first of the three muralists to express a militant position in his art when he painted “Entierro de un obrero” (Burial of a Worker) in 1924. [SHOW: Siqueiros, Peasant Mother, 1929] and [Proletarian Mother, 1930] Both “Peasant Mother”and “Proletarian Mother” address social injustice and sacrifice. In both cases the dire situation of mothers who have been left widowed by the revolution and who must now care for their young on their own. Siqueiros created notable murals, often more of a team project than the apprenticed pieces of his compatriots, such as the cycle at Bellas Artes (1945) and the frescos at the Hall of the Revolutionaries in Mexico City’s Natural History Museum (1957-65). His legacy lies in how he was able to fuse the ideas of the Mexican Revolution into an art form that was both meaningful and politically compromised. Bellas Artes (1945) [SHOW: Siqueiros, Death of Cuahtemoc (part 1) (part 2) ] at the hand of the Spaniards details [SHOW: Siqueiros, Cuahtemoc Revived] Readings: Barnitz, Jacqueline. Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Rochfort, Desmond. Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993. Suggested Websites:
Special thanks to the Newcomb Art Department for their use of the slides presented in this lecture and to Marie Gaztambide for the development of this lecture. This article was edited by Brian Knighten and Liz Jones. |
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Latin
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