LAST102-02 SPRING 2003

REVISED

The Mexican Mural Movement

Readings: Barnitz

Source for background;

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Important Terms:

Avant Garde - vanguardia

indigenismo

Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa

Emiliano Zapata

Partido Revolucionario Nacional (PNR)

Alvaro Obregón (Presidency, 1920-24)

José Vasconcelos

Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974)

José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)

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Latin American Avant-gardes of the 1920s-40s

  • The Latin American avant-garde was a postwar phenomenon that flowered in the early 1920s.
  • Not a belated version of earlier European art and literature, as some have argued, but rather a continuation of tendencies that were interrupted in Europe by WWI.
  • Synthesized cubist and futurist elements with indigenous ideas on nationality
  • Overlapped chronologically with Modernismo, displacing it in the countries where it occurred.
  • Members of the Avant-Garde saw Modernismo as too romantic and not capable of expressing the ideas of a dynamic modern age.
  • The movement was predominantly an urban phenomenon.
  • Coincided with the rise of indigenismo – Movement that was directed to:

(1)the contemporary plight of Indians that writers had helped to identify and

(2)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 30s and 40s in most countries, while in Mexico these depictions started in the 20s -
  • In all countries, artists from all countries were responding to 19th 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, Afro-American 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

  • In Mexico, the Indian presence was acknowledged earlier than it was elsewhere.
  • But to be Mexican meant to be mestizo rather than Indian.
  • The Mexican revolution (1910-20) virtually paralyzed the country for ten years, and it was followed by a strong desire for change and modernity, imbued with a profound nationalism.
  • Mexico City in the 1920s stood on the threshold of a new era:
  • Although the country had won its independence from Spain in 1821, it became obvious by the early 1900s that the economic gap between rich and poor—and the social gap between the Spanish-descendant and Amerindian-descendant—had only increased following the departure of the Spanish.
  • Sparked by the populist escapades of colorful bandit-turned-revolutionary Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa andpeasant-hero Emiliano Zapata, Mexico endured a decade of civil war before the newly established Partido Revolucionario Nacional (PNR) began steering the nation in a new, socialist-inspired direction in 1920.
  • The capital swarmed with optimism as the PNR vowed to make mestizaje—the blending of Amerindian and European patrimonies—the impetus for national change.

The Mexican Mural Movement (1920s-40s)

  • Three Mexican artists- Rivera Diego, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros -Los tres grandes –have become strongly associated with mural painting and the sociopolitical art of that time.
  • From the outset, the Mexican Muralist movement was linked to the official requirements of the post-revolutionary government - Under the 1920-24 presidency of Alvaro Obregón, the government decided that public works of art could play an important role in restoring a nationhood tattered by civil war.
  • As part of an ambitious cultural plan, expatriate Mexican artists were summoned to return from abroad to collaborate in a program of mural decoration of public buildings.
  • Artists and the government believed that art had a social and ideological function.
  • José Vasconcelos (Mexico’s Minister of Education under Obregón) initially shaped the mural movement in that he was largely responsible for awarding the commissions.
  • He had a Hellenic-universalist philosophy to the extent that he 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’ idea that a new cosmic race would result from the other races found in Latin America.
  • The government’s main goal was didactic: to educate a broad and largely illiterate population.
  • Dealing with some of the same issues that the mendicant friars dealt with during the 16th century when they created murals to educate the indigenous masses.
  • Settled 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.
  • And like 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; in place of Franciscan friars fingering rosaries, they painted 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 European art:
  • The Mexican artists’ keen appreciation of the esthetic values of pre-Conquest art stemmed directly from their exposure to Modern European art, particularly Cézanne and Cubism, and their awareness of basic similarities between Modern European art and indigenous Mexican art, which originated with a European interest in ‘primitive’ art.
  • Also important in their decision to adopt the fresco as an artistic means, was their attraction to monumental art, particularly the murals of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque traditions.
  • Interest in Pre-Conquest art and Mexican content:
  • While the colonial art of Mexico and Latin America had from time to time, incorporated Indian decorative motifs—murals at Malinalco and Ixmiquilpan for instance—the overall design concepts, styles, and techniques employed were always Spanish.
  • A painted bodegón or pantry scene might contain corn and cacao instead of oranges and grapes yet it remained the patented European still life, muted in color and devoid of human presence.
  • 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.
  • 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.

I. Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

[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 having studied 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 sojourns in Madrid and Paris, he went back to Mexico in the fall of 1910, In July of the following year he again left for Paris.
  • There, between 1912 and 1917, he was affiliated with the cubist school, then considered 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.
  • He 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".

  • 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.
  • The painter was a lifelong militant atheist and revolutionary Marxist.
  • Events in the Soviet Union would create for him an intense ideological dilemma.
  • When Stalin gained the upper hand in the struggle against Trotsky, he banished him from Soviet territory in February 1929.
  • At the time, Rivera sided with Trotsky and persuaded Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to give Trotsky asylum in Mexico.
  • Trotsky lived in Rivera's magnificent residence in Coyoacán for two years.
  • In February 1938 Rivera and another Trotsky admirer, the French Surrealist poet André Breton, 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 … 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)
  • Cover three floors of two adjacent patios, two courtyards and a stairwell.
  • This four-year project went on to incorporate many other 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.
  • Rivera’s optimistic depictions and exotic color in this mural cycle accorded with the nationalistic objectives of the government
  • Main themes:
  • First floor: crafts, industries, and folklore of Mexico.
  • Court of Labor: mining, farming and the making of pottery.
  • In a number of these panels, Rivera adapted Mexican imagery to Renaissance models.
Leaving the Mine
[SHOW:Ministry of Education (Courtyard of Labor), detail of Leaving the Mine] (92-2677)
  • Christ-like miner with outstretched arms is frisked as he emerges from the pit.
  • Court of Fiestas: Celebration of Mexican resources, Mexican folklore, popular religious and secular festivals.
Day of the Dead in the City
[SHOW:Ministry of Education (Courtyard of Fiestas), detail of Day of the Dead] (92-2627)
  • Rivera identified with the celebrants by including himself and his wife, Lupe Marín, in the crowd.
  • On the third floor of the Court of Fiestas: ballads of the Agrarian Revolution, including verses of these popular songs. Some of the scenes satirize the ruling classes and the social disparities between the rich and poor.
Wall Street Banquet (1928) and Night of the Rich

[SHOW:Ministry of Education (Courtyard of Fiestas, 3rd floor), Wall Street Banquet and Night of the Rich] (92-2672 and 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.

[SHOW:Ministry of Education (Courtyard of Fiestas, 3rd floor), Night of the Poor] (92-0519)

The Arsenal

Also 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

  • In the United States, Rivera painted with the same intensity and fervor as his homeland, while incorporating American themes such as that of the machine. Specifically, Rivera incorporated the machine as a necessary component worker theme (spoke of the worker’s productivity).

Rockefeller Center, NYC

  • 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 "…capitalism is the fundamental obstacle facing twentieth-century man and posit socialism as the only rational answer to the problems confronting our civilization."
  • 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 request 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.

[SHOW: Rivera, Mural at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City] – Man at the Crossroads of the Universe, 1934

Full view (92-1505)

Detail of protagonical figure (92-2025)

Detail of right side showing communist march and red banners (92-0334)

Detail of Lenin (92-2681)

II. José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)

[SHOW: OrozcoSelf-Portrait, 1946] (92-898)

  • Like Rivera and Siqueiros, Orozco was also conscious of the need to create public art as a means of communication.
  • Although Rivera and Siqueiros achieved international prominence through their public art works, Orozco became the modernist movement’s real vanguard.
  • Unlike Rivera and Siqueiros, who publicly disavowed European-style easel art yet continued to accept private commissions for canvas paintings, once Orozco had pledged devotion to the fresco technique, he destroyed all his earlier canvases and devoted himself to the ideals of social art for the remainder of his life.
  • The importance of the mural is conveyed in many of his writings, including the following:

“The highest, the most logical, the purest and strongest form of painting is the mural. In this form alone, is it one with the other arts – with all the others. It is, too, the most disinterested form, for it cannot be made a matter of private gain; it cannot be hidden away for the benefit of a certain privileged few. It is for the people. It is for ALL”

Preparatory School ‘Escuela Nacional Preparatoria’ Murals (1923-1926)

  • His Preparatory School ‘Escuels Nacional Preparatoria’ Murals (1923-1926) brought his use of Christian iconography to the forefront.
[SHOW: Orozco, La trinchera, 1926, Colegio de San Ildefonso]
  • La trinchera: Shows concern with Mexican Revolution and the worker, albeit in a manner that is much more pessimistic than Diego Rivera’s treatment of similar subjects. The bodies of two dead figures, one crossed over the other in the form of an X, and a third one kneeling and shielding his face, all set against a red background, express defeat.
  • He consistently repeats the motif of the cross and the crucified Christ throughout his career:

[SHOW: Orozco,Christ Destroying His Cross, 1932-4, Dartmouth College, NH] (QQ-3232)

[SHOW: Orozco,Christ Destroying His Cross, 1943, O/c] (92-0571)

Back to National Prep. School cycle.

[SHOW: The Working Class] and [Cortes and Malinche] and [Absorption of the Indian] (all at Colegio de San Ildefonso, NPS, 1926)

  • All three murals convey doom and hopelessness. They are the first of Orozco’s paintings that directly address social injustice and the anonymity of an exploited class.
  • Nonetheless, beneath his indictments and apparent cynicism lies an incipient faith in the redemptive potential of industriousness.

[SHOW: Juárez and the Reform, mural at the palace of Chapultepec, 1948] (92-1679)

[SHOW: Raising of Lazarus, O/c, 1947] (92-899)

[SHOW: Hospicio Cabañas Fresco, Guadalajara, 1946] (92-2634)

  • All three convey the idea that rising up from the ashes and the bloodshed there is always the possibility of hope.
  • Orozco strong socialist views surface repeatedly in his frescoes with the intensity of his conviction.
  • His frescoes have a persuasive sense of immediacy and emotion as a result.
  • His projects are timely, created within the context of the moment.
  • He was an artist acutely aware of the potentiality of the time in which he lived.
  • Different from Rivera and Siqueiros, despite of similarities in the two-dimensionally of their work and in the preference for the fresco technique.
  • Differences: 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."

  • 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)

  • Siqueiros participated in Mexico’s revolution of 1910. After the victory, he acted repeatedly and frequently on behalf of the Communist party.
  • So entwined was he 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 outlines 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]