Mexican Muralism: A Critical History 9780520352582, 9780520271623

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Mexican Muralism

Mexican Muralism A Critical History Edited by

Alejandro Anreus, Leonard Folgarait, and Robin Adèle Greeley

University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London

Published with the assistance of The Getty Foundation.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England ISBN 978-0-520-27161-6 (cloth: alk. paper) © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Control Number: 2012939225 Manufactured in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12  10 9 8 7 6 5 4  3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper). 8

To the memory of Luis Cardoza y Aragón (1901–92) and  

Olivier Debroise (1952–2008), scholars of Mexican Art.  

Contents

List of Illustrations    xi Acknowledgments    xvii •

•

Introduction Robin Adèle Greeley  •  1 Part 1. Mexican Muralism: Beginnings, Development, Ideologies, and National Responses

1. Muralism and the State in Post-Revolution Mexico, 1920–1970    13  

•

Robin Adèle Greeley

2. Los Tres Grandes: Ideologies and Styles    37 •

Alejandro Anreus

3. “All Mexico on a Wall”: Diego Rivera’s Murals at the Ministry of Public Education    56 •

Mary K. Coffey

4. Siqueiros’ Communist Proposition for Mexican Muralism: A Mural for the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate    75 •

Jennifer A. Jolly

5. José Clemente Orozco’s Use of Architecture in the Dartmouth Mural    93 •

Leonard Folgarait

6. Murales Estridentes: Tensions and Affinities between Estridentismo and Early Muralism    108 •

Tatiana Flores

7. Young Muralists at the Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market    125 •

Esther Acevedo

8. Nietzsche contra Marx in Mexico: The Contemporáneos, Muralism, and Debates over “Revolutionary” Art in 1930s Mexico    148 •

Robin Adèle Greeley Part 2. Muralism’s Hemispheric Influences

9. Siqueiros’ Travels and “Alternative Muralisms” in Argentina and Cuba    177 •

Alejandro Anreus

10. Social Realism and Constructivist Abstraction: The Limits of the Debate on Muralism in the Río de la Plata Region (1930–1950)    196 •

 

Gabriel Peluffo Linari

11. Mexican Muralism in the United States: Controversies, Paradoxes, and Publics    208 •

Anna Indych-López Part 3. Contemporary Responses to Muralism

12. Murals and Marginality in Mexico City: The Case of Tepito Arte Acá    229 •

Leonard Folgarait

13. Radical Mestizaje in Chicano/a Murals    243 •

Holly Barnet-Sanchez

14. An Unauthorized History of Post–Mexican School Muralism    263  

•

Bruce Campbell

Part 4. Chronology and Primary Texts

Chronology    283 •

Alejandro Anreus with Holly Barnet-Sanchez and Bruce Campbell



Primary Texts    319 •

edited by Alejandro Anreus Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors (Mexico City, 1923)  •  319 José Clemente Orozco, “New World, New Races and New Art” (New York, 1929)  •  321 Diego Rivera, “The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art” (Baltimore, 1932)  •  322 David Alfaro Siqueiros, “A Call to Argentine Artists” (Buenos Aires, 1933)  •  330 David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Toward a Transformation of the Plastic Arts” (New York, 1934)  •  332 José Clemente Orozco, “Orozco ‘Explains’ ” (New York, 1940)  •  335

Bibliography    339 Contributors    357 Index    359 •

•

•

Illustrations

P l at e s

Color plates follow page 174.

1. Fermín Revueltas. Stained-glass mural for the Hospital Colonia de Ferrocarrileros (1934)

2. Diego Rivera. Distribution of the Land, fresco, first floor, south wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1923–24)  



3. Fernando Leal. The Feast of the Lord of Chalma, encaustic, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1922–23)  

4. Antonio Pujol. Corn (detail), fresco, Alvaro Obregón Center entrance portal, Mexico City (1935)

5. Pablo O’Higgins. The Struggle of the Workers Against the Financiers (detail), fresco, Alvaro Obregón Center, Mexico City (1935)

6. Rufino Tamayo. Song and Music, left and center walls, National School of Music (now the Coordinación Nacional de Arqueología), Mexico City (1933)

7. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Juan Carlos Castagnino, Enrique Lázaro. Plastic Exercise, fresco, Don Torcuato, Buenos Aires (1933)

8. Daniel Manrique. View of large mural painting on Florida Street, neighborhood of Tepito, Mexico City (1984)

xi

9. Carlos Almaraz. No Somos Esclavos de la Migra, former All Nations Community Center, Soto near 4th Street, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (1974) 10. Gustavo Bernal. Detail of mural cycle at the Tlalpujahua mines, Tlalpujahua, Michoacán (1992)

Figures

1.1. José Clemente Orozco. Maternity, National Preparatory School (1923)  •  16 1.2. Diego Rivera. Creation, National Preparatory School (1922–23)  •  17  

1.3. Ramón Alva de la Canal. Cultural Mission (1930)  •  20 1.4. Lola Alvarez Bravo. Untitled (undated)  •  21 1.5. Roberto Montenegro. Busca en la Tierra Tu Alimiento y en el Libro Tu Libertad (Search in the Earth for Your Nourishment and in the Book for Your Freedom) (1929)  •  23 1.6. Diego Rivera. Emiliano Zapata, Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca (1930)  •  24 1.7. David Alfaro Siqueiros. New Democracy, Palacio de Bellas Artes (1945)  •  28 1.8. Rufino Tamayo. Nuestra Nacionalidad (1952)  •  29 1.9. David Alfaro Siqueiros. March of Humanity, Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum (1965–71)  •  30  

2.1. Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera (left to right) at the time of the creation of the National Mural Commission (1947)  •  39 2.2. José Clemente Orozco. Revolutionary Trinity, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1923–26)  •  42  

2.3. José Clemente Orozco. The Trench, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1923–26)  •  43  

2.4. José Clemente Orozco. The Carnival of Ideologies, Palacio de Gobierno, Guadalajara (1937–39)  •  44  

2.5. Diego Rivera. Mexico Today and Tomorrow, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (1935)  •  48 2.6. David Alfaro Siqueiros. From the Porfiriato to the Revolution, central panel, Palacio de Chapultepec, Mexico City (1957–66)  •  52  

3.1. Diego Rivera. The Liberation of the Peon, fresco, first floor, south wall, Court of Labor, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1923)  •  58 3.2. Diego Rivera. The Distribution of Arms, fresco, third floor, south wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1928)  •  59 3.3. Diego Rivera. May Day, fresco, first floor, west wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1923–24)  •  65  

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3.4. Diego Rivera. The Market/Tianguis, fresco, first floor, north wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1923–24)  •  66  

3.5. Diego Rivera. Our Daily Bread, fresco, third floor, west wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1928)  •  69 3.6. Diego Rivera. The Mechanization of the Countryside, fresco, third floor, west wall, stairwell, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1926)  •  72 4.1. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau, and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (original version), detail  •  80 4.2. Josep Renau. Photomontage diagram of SME mural’s six ideal vantage points (1969)  •  82 4.3. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau, and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail  •  83 4.4. David Alfaro Siqueiros and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail  •  84 4.5. David Alfaro Siqueiros and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail  •  85 4.6. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau, and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail  •  87 5.1. José Clemente Orozco. “Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life,” in The Epic of American Civilization, fresco mural painting in the Baker Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (1932–34)  •  96  

5.2. Photograph of Orozco painting “Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life,” detail of Epic (May 1932)  •  97 5.3. José Clemente Orozco. “Hispano-America,” detail of Epic  •  98 5.4. José Clemente Orozco. “Hispano-America,” drawing  •  99 5.5. José Clemente Orozco. “Gods of the Modern World,” detail of Epic  •  102 5.6. José Clemente Orozco. “Gods of the Modern World,” drawing  •  103 5.7. José Clemente Orozco. “Modern Industrial Man,” drawing for right-hand panel  •  104 5.8. José Clemente Orozco. “Modern Industrial Man,” right-hand panel, detail of Epic  •  104 5.9. José Clemente Orozco. “Modern Industrial Man,” central panel, detail of Epic  •  105 5.10. José Clemente Orozco. “Modern Industrial Man,” drawing for central panel  •  105 6.1. Manuel Maples Arce. Actual No. 1  •  109

Illustrations

   •   x i i i

6.2. Fernando Leal. Portrait of Manuel Maples Arce, verso of Indian of the Tunas (1922)  •  114 6.3. Fernando Leal. Indian of the Tunas (1922)  •  115 6.4. Jean Charlot. Massacre at the Templo Mayor, fresco, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1923)  •  117 6.5. Jean Charlot. Psychological Portrait of Manuel Maples Arce, woodcut (1922)  •  118 6.6. Fermín Revueltas. Allegory of the Virgin of Guadalupe, encaustic, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1922–23)  •  120  

6.7. Fermín Revueltas. Andamios exteriores (Exterior Scaffolding) (1923)  •  121 7.1. Antonio Pujol. Mining Tragedy (detail), fresco, Alvaro Obregón Center entrance portal, Mexico City (1935)  •  132 7.2. Pablo O’Higgins. The Struggle of the Workers Against the Financiers (detail), fresco, Alvaro Obregón Center, Mexico City (1935)  •  134 7.3. Angel Bracho. Vitamins (detail), fresco, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935)  •  136 7.4. Pedro Rendón. Untitled, fresco, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935)  •  137 7.5. Marion Greenwood. Industrialization of the Countryside (detail), fresco, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935)  •  138 7.6. Grace Greenwood. Mining (detail), fresco, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935)  •  139 7.7. Isamu Noguchi. History as Seen from Mexico in 1936 (detail), sculpture-mural, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935–36)  •  141  

8.1. José Clemente Orozco. Man of Fire, Hospicio de Cabañas, Guadalajara (1938– 39)  •  159  

8.2. José Clemente Orozco. Cortés, Hospicio de Cabañas, Guadalajara (1939)  •  160 8.3. Rufino Tamayo. Landscape in the Night (1933)  •  161 8.4. Rufino Tamayo. Song and Music, right wall, National School of Music, Mexico City (1933)  •  162 8.5. Diego Rivera. Liberated Earth with the Natural Forces Controlled by Man, Autonomous University of Chapingo (1926)  •  163 8.6. David Alfaro Siqueiros. Burial of a Worker, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria) (1923–24)  •  164  

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9.1. Antonio Berni. Demonstration, MALBA Fundación Eduardo F. Constantini, Buenos Aires (1934)  •  180 9.2. Antonio Berni. The Wounded Man (1935)  •  182 9.3. Siqueiros in front of detail of Allegory of Racial Equality and Confraternity of the White and Black Races in Cuba (1943)  •  186 9.4. Mario Carreño. Sugar Cane Cutters (1943)  •  188 9.5. Mario Carreño. Afro-Cuban Dance (1943)  •  189 10.1.

Cândido Portinari. A Primeira Missa no Brasil (The First Mass in Brazil) (1947)  •  197

10.2. Joaquín Torres García. Arte Constructivo (1943)  •  198 10.3.

Cândido Portinari. Retirantes (Refugees) (1945)  •  202

11.1. Diego Rivera. Man at the Crossroads, partially painted mural at Rockefeller Center  •  209 11.2. Diego Rivera. Preparation drawing for Man at the Crossroads (1932)  •  213 11.3. José Clemente Orozco. Struggle in the Occident, fresco (1931)  •  214 11.4. David Alfaro Siqueiros. Tropical America (with Robert Berdecio standing in front)  •  215 11.5. Olvera Street before 1930 renovation  •  216 11.6.

Tropical America, whitewashed  •  218

11.7. Diego Rivera. Detroit Industry, north wall, Detroit Institute of Arts (1932–33)  •  219  

11.8. Charles Sheeler. American Landscape (1930)  •  221 12.1. Untitled, figure of a woman, arms held up, outside of cabinetmaker’s shop  •  231 12.2. Untitled, a man of Tepito fixing the armor of Don Quixote, ink on paper (1983)  •  234 12.3. Untitled, family of three  •  239 12.4. Untitled, male figures at work in a machine environment  •  239 12.5. Detail of Figure 12.4  •  240 13.1. Antonio Bernal. The Del Rey Mural, left panel, Teatro Campesino Cultural Center, Del Rey, California (1968)  •  248 13.2. Antonio Bernal. The Del Rey Mural, right panel, Teatro Campesino Cultural Center, Del Rey, California (1968)  •  249 13.3. Willie Herrón. The Wall That Cracked Open, alley, City Terrace, Los Angeles (1972)  •  252

Illustrations

   •   x v

13.4. Willie Herrón with the assistance of Gronk and neighborhood youths. Caras, City Terrace Park, City Terrace, Los Angeles (1973)  •  253 13.5. Willie Herrón. The Plumed Serpent, alley, City Terrace, Los Angeles (1972)  •  254 13.6.

Carlos Almaraz. No Compre Vino Gallo (Don’t Buy Gallo Wine), former All Nations Community Center, Soto near 4th Street, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (1974)  •  255

13.7. Carlos Almaraz. United Farm Workers Banner, portable mural (1972)  •  256 14.1. José Hernández Delgadillo. La Mujer en la Lucha (for Asamblea de Barrios), marble grain on cement, Iztapalapa, Mexico City (1992)  •  269 14.2. Daniel Manrique. Detail of community mural for Centro Cultural de Campamentos Unidos, acrylic on cement, Colonia Guerrero, Mexico City (1997)  •  273 14.3. José Luis Soto. El Sepelio, study for a mural image for the Taller de Investigación Plástica, oil on canvas (1977)  •  274 14.4. Ojos de Lucha. Zapatista manta, acrylic on polyvinyl cloth (1994)  •  275

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Acknowledgments

This book began seven years ago when one of us thought there was a need for a multiauthor volume that dealt critically and from a variety of thematic perspectives with Mexican mural painting: its problems, achievements, failures, and legacy. The idea of such a book became the project of three editors, contributors, and camaradas, who invited eight other scholars to join us in this endeavor. We are grateful to Esther Acevedo, Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Bruce Campbell, Mary K. Coffey, Tatiana Flores, Anna Indych-López, Jennifer A. Jolly, and Gabriel Peluffo Linari for their contributions to this volume and their continuing patience and enthusiasm for this project. In the process of acquiring photographs and permissions we are grateful to: The Carlos Almaraz Estate; Archivo Fotográfico José Gómez Sicre, Miami; Artists Rights Society (ARS); Baker Library and Hood Museum, Dartmouth College; Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico City; Lily and José Antonio Berni; The Detroit Institute of Art; Fundación Eduardo F. Constantini, Buenos Aires; Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, A.C.; Ida González de Carreño, Santiago de Chile; The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Willie Herrón; Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Fernando Leal-Audirac; Los Angeles Public Library; Daniel Manrique; Museo de Arte de São Paulo; Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City; Museo Torres García, Montevideo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Projeto Portinari, Rio de Janeiro; The Revueltas Family; The University of Arizona Foundation; Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; SOMAAP, Mexico City; José Luis Soto; and El Teatro Campesino.

x vii

Colleagues who assisted and supported this project in various and important ways include: Florencia Bazzano-Nelson, Michelle Bigenho, Richard Brown, Thomas B.F. Cummins, José Falconi, Emilio Kourí, Gilbert Joseph, Diana L. Linden, Claudio Lomnitz, Rick López, Juan A. Martínez, Michael R. Orwicz, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Coral Revueltas, Enrico Mario Santí, Doris Sommer, Megan Sullivan, Joaquín Terrones, Alan Wallach, Stacie Widdifield, Carla Zurián. At the University of California Press, we owe Stephanie Fay, our first editor at the press, more than we can express for her support of this book. To Kari Dahlgren, our editor, and Eric Schmidt, we are grateful for their patience and encouragements in seeing this project evolve from manuscript to book. At BookMatters, David Peattie and Hope Steele took care of a thousand and one technical details, polished our prose, and clarified our content. The wonderful cover was designed by Nicole Hayward. Alejandro Anreus wishes to thank Dr. Nina Jemmott, Associate Vice President and Dean, and the office of Graduate Studies and Research, William Paterson University. Last but never least, he thanks his mother Margarita Rodríguez Anreus, his aunt Gladys Anreus, his children David and Isabel, and most importantly his wife and best friend Debra Blehart, who keeps him grounded and happy. She deserves more recognition and gratitude than he can offer here. Leonard Folgarait wishes to thank his two co-editors for pulling together as an exemplary collective of collegial purposefulness. Their single-mindedness in shepherding these essays toward completion was a marvel to observe. He is honored to have been part of the dynamic that oversaw the quality of the individual essays and the coherence of the thematic matrix. His family in California deserves special mention for their bottomless interest in what he does, and for their generosity and good will. As always, his wife Yvonne Boyer receives his deepest gratitude for her bibliographic expertise as Librarian at Vanderbilt University, but even more so for the consistency and depth of her support for this project and for his life work in general. Robin Greeley wishes to thank the following institutions for their support: The Howard Foundation; The Humanities Institute, University of Connecticut; The School of Fine Arts Dean’s Grant Fund, University of Connecticut; The David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University. She would also like to thank her mother, Jaclyn Yaeger Greeley, for all her support and enthusiasm.

x v i i i    •   A c k n o w l e dgm e n t s

Introduction Robin Adèle Greeley

Latin America, it has long been recognized, has experienced modernity differently from Europe or the United States.1 In the region, twentieth-century Mexican mural painting holds a unique place in the search for an aesthetic form capable of encompassing that experience at both the national and the hemispheric levels. Through a monumental narrative art, epic in scope and size, the artists of the mural movement aimed to make art a weapon in the political struggles of Mexico’s peasants and workers during the crucial decades of national renovation after the 1910 –1920 Mexican Revolution. In their search for a project of national renewal in the Revolution’s aftermath, those mural artists deployed a leftist realism that stressed the fundamental importance of popular agency to the functioning of the nation. They not only posited mestizo workers and indigenous peasants as the true essence of modern Mexican culture, thereby incorporating into modernity those elements previously excluded as uncivilized and archaic, but they also proposed both new forms of social organization to overcome modernity’s crisis of meaning and new ideas about the structure of the nation-state implementing those forms. The mural movement thus linked a Marxist-inspired populism to an aesthetic critique of modernity, so that art would serve simultaneously to regenerate society and to inaugurate the utopian promise of modernity. In this way, mural painting was central to envisioning both the distinctiveness of Mexican modernity and the restructuring of Mexican society from the 1920s onward, as newly enfranchised groups of peasants, workers, and indigenous peoples grappled with the state and its intellectuals over how to constitute the nation and its citizens. The  

1

epic sweep of muralism — its resolutely grand and utopian ethos — derived from the impassioned attempts of mural artists to forge a unified national project out of Mexico’s diverse experiences of modernity, one that could link in common cause all the nation’s inhabitants from the most rustic farmer to the most powerful military and political leaders. As such, mural painters aspired to bring the critical energies and utopian aspirations of the aesthetic realm to bear on the realm of the political in order to prompt public debate on interpretations of the nation and the contours of citizenship. How and to what extent mural painting provided a forum for public dialogue throughout the Western hemisphere on issues of socially committed art, modernity, and the modern nation-state is the subject of this book. The men and women who participated in the mural movement, who claimed a central role in constructing a national culture, we argue, proposed a model for the social and political life of the nation and, by extension, of the Americas as a whole. In positing a monumental public art in the decades following 1920, in an overwhelmingly rural country that lacked both a developed bourgeoisie and a strong civil society, these mural artists acted in a moment when older forms of national cohesion were exhausted but new ones had not yet taken shape, and when the need for public debate about the form of that new national identity was greatest. By invoking the concept of the public sphere vis-à-vis muralism, this book raises the wider issue of civil society in relation to the state in modern society. Habermas, Peter Uwe Hohendahl notes, posited that “the development of political freedom in modern Western societies depends on the constitution of a space between the realm of the state and the private sphere of its subjects or citizens. This is precisely the space where critical discussion of cultural and political matters can take place.”2 The Habermasian Enlightenment ideal may have been one of disinterested individuals democratically engaged in rational debate, but post-Revolution Mexico was deeply suspicious of European Enlightenment’s imperialist foundations —a suspicion that affected Mexico’s reception of the democratic ideal. Furthermore, during this period Mexico lacked many of the classical mechanisms for open civic discussion at the national level.3 Whereas nineteenth-century Mexican politicians and intellectuals adhered (at least in theory) to a liberal Enlightenment definition of the nation as a “rational polity composed of free and autonomous individuals,”4 in the 1920s and 1930s a sharply different attitude toward the nation and national culture developed that rejected liberalism in favor of an official policy of “revolutionary nationalism” embodied visually in the mural movement.5 In part, this policy reflected the ruling elite’s aggressive efforts to centralize political control by discouraging individual or regional initiatives while simultaneously promoting mass participation in worker unions and peasant cooperatives under state jurisdiction. Thus Mexico’s political leaders sought both to stave off the dual threat of invasion by the United States and Mexico’s fragmentation into regional fiefdoms, and to tie the masses to the state. But the official strategy also denoted concessions to popular, nonHabermasian forms of community—rural political communities such as the Zapatistas based on ancient forms of territoriality, religious communities such as the Cristeros,  

 

 

 

2    •   I n t r o d u c t i o n

or ethnic communities based on long-standing indigenous kinship ties and traditions, for example—that had erupted into national consciousness because of the Revolution. The history of Mexican mural painting’s envisioning the national polity exhibits a continual tension between the murals’ ability to foster an unfettered civic dialogue that legitimates the public sphere at the national level and the increasingly authoritarian state’s gradual co-optation of the movement as part of the nationalist mythology to underwrite its own grasp on political culture. Several chapters in this book study this dynamic in the 1920s and 1930s, when mural practices were the most innovative and the state-led program of modernization seemed the most likely to deliver its promise of full citizenship and economic equality for all. Other chapters investigate the effects on the mural movement of the cold war and subsequent entrenchment of neoliberalism, when the state ramped up its use of mass media and control of the burgeoning culture industry (especially film and radio), and exploited the prestige of murals as a socially committed art form toward new and different political ends.6 As several authors here argue, this produced an ominous schism between official and civic attitudes toward mural painting that had deep repercussions for mural practices themselves and for public debate and civil society. After the 1950s, a new generation of artists realized that the only way to recuperate muralism for public debate was to sever its long-standing ties to the state. This is what Tepito Arte Acá did, moving into outright conflict with the party that had maintained national political power since 1929, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In so doing, Tepito Arte Acá became a model for a renewed contract between art and leftist politics, one that was forced, however, to forfeit (at least temporarily) its claim to represent the “nation” and to accept the role of representing the “local” rather than the idea of the nation, which had been effectively co-opted by the state. In light of such evolutions, shifts, and reversals in mural painting’s long history, the essays in this book account for the actual function of muralism as a public art, less through a Habermasian lens than as a set of competing discourses embedded in conditions of social fragmentation and differentiated, unequal access to public discourse. They aim to do this, moreover, without losing sight of the real power of the mural movement’s combination of aesthetics and social commitment as a model for civic organization and national renovation— a model that proved extraordinarily persuasive in the Western hemisphere for decades and that posited an experience of modernity altogether different from that of Anglo-Eurocentric culture, which many in Latin America perceived as bankrupt.7 Key to this dynamic was the mural artists’ use of visual aesthetics to construct that space of open, public debate between the state and the heterogeneous citizens newly mobilized by the Revolution, even as the movement relied on state patronage. Muralists, at their best, sought to use the semi-autonomous status of art —its aesthetic appropriation of the world such that the image stands in productive contradistinction to reality — as an allegory for political conduct. That is to say, they linked an aesthetic imagining to a political critique of modernity, in which the visual shaped the view of reality and  

 

 

 

Introduction

   •   3

reconfigured what was thought possible.8 A foremost objective of these artists was to overcome the divide between the indeterminacy of the aesthetic realm and the determinacy of the political realm.9 This problematic issue was at the heart of the famous Rivera-Siqueiros debates of 1935 about the concepts of “collectivity” put forward over time by different muralist groups, and of the close —if often contentious—relationship between many artists and the Mexican state. It was also at the center of debates about aesthetic autonomy itself. The muralists, for example, were deeply suspicious of the arguments of the Contemporáneos for an arte puro as a metaphor for political freedom, viewing this concept of art as a self-contained, self-reflexive experience as being too close to the ideology of bourgeois individuality at the center of both Mexico’s failed nineteenth-century national project and Western imperialism. Yet, as several of the book’s chapters show, in practice (if not always in theory) mural artists often prioritized the autonomous aesthetic experience as a space of social critique, and thus could hypothesize new links between that aesthetic experience and indigenous, peasant, and proletarian agency. The examination of these arguments and others about the relationship between art and politics is a core element of this book, and its chapters attend closely to the nature of visual art as a medium uniquely able to hold conflicting attitudes toward the public sphere, the modern nation, and the political in productive tension. Nevertheless, these essays also stress the fragility of the dialectic of art and politics, as demonstrated by the loss of muralism’s early dynamism and its rigidification after World War II. The politically pragmatic Mexican state eventually absorbed the movement’s critical attitude. The essays further explore alternative mural practices—such as those of Tepito Arte Acá and the Chicano/a murals— that originated in efforts to rethink the utopian aspirations of early muralism in light of economic and political shifts imposed by the cold war and neoliberalism. Our book thus reassesses the relationship between art and politics as it played out in post-Revolution Mexico and beyond. We tie this to two further goals: first, illuminating the mural movement’s negotiation of the dynamic between national and international politics and culture, and second, elucidating the larger critique of modernity offered by the movement. The question of the nation in the twentieth century, along with the related questions of citizenship and subjectivity, must be formulated in terms of tension with international and global pressures, particularly those of capitalism. This book explores this tension vis-à-vis Mexican muralism. The most overt pressures in post-Revolution Mexico were the perceived threat of US invasion and the contingent reaction against Eurocentrism, which led to a strategy of economic modernization and independence combined with efforts to give the nation a mestizo or indigenous cultural character. The muralists’ Marxist-based critique of capitalism, along with their emphasis on popular agency, proved crucial to this strategy. Their diverse and even contradictory interpretations of Marxism were formed in response not only to the worldwide effects of the Stalinization  

 

 

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of the Communist Party, but also to the regionally distinct development of Marxism in Mexico and Latin America.10 Mural artists thus operated at the point of friction between utopian Marxist internationalism (which emphasized the proletariat as a class across national borders) and the configuring of class within the paradigm of the nation-state in Latin America and Mexico. Tension between the national and the international also frames muralism’s status as an avant-garde movement. The mural movement participated in the critique of modernity by the European avant-garde, but we cannot simply superimpose Europe and the developments there onto Mexico. Unlike the European avant-garde, for example, the muralists were not marginalized by society. Their central position meant that they could reformulate the European avant-garde’s critique of modernity to address the project of national revitalization in Mexico and the Americas. That is to say, rather than interrogating Eurocentrism from within (thus producing a necessarily negative critique, as did the European avant-garde), the muralists’ avant-gardism attacked Eurocentrism from outside and posited the Americas as a positive counter-modernity, a utopian space of socio-political and cultural renewal against Europe’s degenerated modernity.11 The Mexican response to these global forces fostered anti-imperialist nationalisms across Latin America. This anti-imperialism was both a reaction to the region’s long experience of foreign invasions and a progressive force for cultural unification of the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. Muralists articulated the distinctiveness of the Mexican nation from its counterparts, the United States and Europe, as well as a model for Latin American unification. This regional dynamic, however, was by no means straightforward.12 Several essays in this book explore the link between a social realist aesthetics and political revolution in other countries in the hemisphere where social and historical conditions differed from those in Mexico. Debates about transplanting muralism intact to other countries— to Argentina, for example, which had not experienced a revolution and had no strong indigenous culture, or to Cuba, with different forms of patronage, state structures, and political cultures — shaped muralist aesthetics outside Mexico.13 So, too, did debates about realism versus abstraction as paradigmatic expressions of Latin America’s uneven relationship to modernity. These debates at times figured as international confrontations (as between Siqueiros and Uruguay’s influential abstract modernist, Joaquín Torres García), and as national disputes with hemispheric implications (as was the case with Rufino Tamayo, the Contemporáneos, and Isamu Noguchi). This book further treats the flip side of the nationalist coin by examining the diaspora that took muralism to the United States, with the sojourns of los tres grandes in el Norte during the 1930s, and the Chicano movement’s later reformulation of muralism’s precepts during the US civil rights era. All these concerns form muralism’s larger critique of modernity. In investigating this critique, the chapters of this book approach the movement’s historical and aesthetic particulars with questions about modernity. How (and to what degree), for example,  

 

Introduction

   •   5

did mural artists give visual form to an emergent historical consciousness in Mexico of the country’s uneven modernization under the increasingly globalized onslaught of capitalism? To what extent did they expose Western imperialism as the spatial precondition for modernity? How did these artists link that critique of imperialism to modernity’s hierarchical differentiation between European and non-European cultures? This book’s chapters further investigate muralism’s critique of the commodification of social space under capitalism and the resulting alienated subjectivity of modern life. They also explore what the mural movement can tell us about the relationship between that Western imperialist project and modernity’s abstract temporality of the eternal “new” in which an ephemeral present exists only in a state of “perpetual transition between a constantly changing past and an as yet indeterminate future.”14 In treating these issues, we argue neither for the outdated model of a singular Eurocentric modernity imposed on non-modern regions, nor for the alternative modernities model that, despite its welcome anti-Eurocentrism, too often fails to account for the universalizing aspect of modernity’s project. Instead, we follow Timothy Mitchell in “acknowleg[ing] the singularity and universalism of the project of modernity, a universalism of which imperialism is the most powerful expression and effective means” while at the same time attending to the ways in which that universalism remains incomplete. Indeed, modernity’s universalizing logic “can be produced only by displacing and discounting what remains heterogeneous to it,” yet this repressed heterogeneity constantly returns both to define and to rupture that logic.15 The Mexican mural movement’s greatness, as well as its failures, is at the heart of its efforts to overcome this conundrum. .   .   . We have grouped the chapters of this book into four parts. Essays in Parts 1, 2, and 3 address the national and hemispheric impact of Mexican mural painting, while Part 4 offers a detailed chronology and a set of primary texts, several of them translated here for the first time. The chapters move from wide-frame overviews to intensive case studies and back again and include different readings of significant murals and events, thus putting the various parts of the book into dialogue. Part 1 looks at the beginnings and development of the mural movement in Mexico, examining the ideologies of the images and their producers, and situating them in the national context. In Chapter 1, Robin Greeley considers the muralists’ claim that they act as mediators between the Mexican people and the state. Contextualizing this claim in the years from the Revolution to the 1970s, she dissects the tensions in muralism’s response to the official policy of “revolutionary nationalism.” The state courted muralism in a series of often ad hoc responses to social and political situations. By examining muralism’s relationship to the state, she argues, we can learn much about the interweavings of the muralists and their production with Mexico’s state formation and modernization. In the second chapter, Alejandro Anreus places José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros in their ideological trajectories (anarchist,

6   •   I n t r o d u c t i o n

heretical Marxist, and Marxist-Leninist) and analyzes how these ideologies manifest themselves in depictions of revolution. A section of this essay focuses on the RiveraSiqueiros polemic of 1935 and its effects on the politics of muralism. In the next chapter, Mary Coffey analyzes the stylistic eclecticism of Rivera’s murals at the Ministry of Public Education (1923–28). She argues that Rivera at the Ministry created an art rooted in indigenous traditions that reflected the struggles of peasant, worker, and soldier in Mexico’s social revolution. Next, Jennifer Jolly investigates Siqueiros’ avant-garde attempt to revise muralism in the 1930s, in the artistic culture of the international Popular Front, and subsequently in the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate mural (1939–40). While Siqueiros’ original proposal for the mural argued for collective artistic practice, new technologies, and perspective theory to revitalize art’s production and reception, the mural’s transformation by collaborator Josep Renau suggests the limits of his vision. In Chapter 5, Leonard Folgarait poses questions about the architecture rendered in Orozco’s murals and easel paintings and speculates about how it guided the work the artist completed in the United States. He argues that Orozco, in approaching architecture as an agent of expressive content, ultimately changed the look and meaning of his imagery. Indeed, the metadiscourse of painting buildings on buildings allowed Orozco to recast architecture so that it was no longer a scene-setting background but an active agent in the narrative. Tatiana Flores examines the relationship between the avant-garde movement Estridentismo and the launch of muralism in Mexico City in Chapter 6. Highlighting artists who worked in both, she argues that murals by Leal, Charlot, and Revueltas engaged in a critical dialogue with Estridentismo as these artists developed a visual language suited to post-Revolutionary Mexico. Esther Acevedo examines the extraordinary murals painted by a second generation of muralists at the Abelardo Rodríguez Market in one of Mexico City’s central workingclass neighborhoods in Chapter 7. She details how these young muralists were caught up in the Rivera/Siqueiros polemic of 1934 –35, debates about how to formulate a “revolutionary” aesthetic, and investigates the tension between realism and abstraction in formulating a politicized art. In the final essay of Part 1, Robin Greeley looks at the most influential critics of muralism, the Contemporáneos, to raise questions about the structure and function of nationalism in Mexico. The Contemporáneos, noting the propagandistic tendencies of muralism’s Marxist ideologies — which they felt flirted with fascism by dangerously collapsing “nation” into “state” —posited an alternative view of national identity. Their Nietzschean version of “aesthetic statism” delineated a psychological, existentialist approach to mexicanidad that had strong repercussions afterward. Part 2 takes up the hemispheric contexts and influences of muralism, re-examining well-known histories such as those of los tres grandes in the United States as well as exploring episodes little known outside Latin America. In Chapter 9, Alejandro Anreus argues that Siqueiros’ proselytizing trips through the Americas promoted a muralist agenda that ranged from critical to opportunistic. Anreus’ chapter focuses on Siqueiros’ travels to Argentina (1933) and Cuba (1943); the work he produced in these countries;  

 

 

 

 

Introduction

   •   7

and his contact with two artists, Antonio Berni and Mario Carreño, along with the work they produced in response to Siqueiros’ challenge. Gabriel Peluffo Linari, in Chapter 10, takes up the vibrant dialogue between social realism and abstraction in the form of Brazilian muralist Cândido Portinari’s response to the famous Siqueiros –Torres García debates in Uruguay. Portinari, Peluffo argues, defined a third vector that challenged both Siqueiros’ trenchant militant realism and Torres García’s ahistorical universalist abstraction. Formulated around a “realist aesthetics of sacrifice,” Portinari’s mural production in Montevideo defined a new art of public painting that responded to the distinct social and political circumstances of the Río de la Plata region. In the final chapter of Part 2, Anna Indych-López analyzes the controversies surrounding murals by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States. Rather than satisfy social consensus, she argues, the murals expressed the mutability of relations and the communicative inefficacy of realism in the urban sphere, as well as a misapprehension of imagery that was not necessarily shared by the artists, patrons, critics, and viewers. Part 3 examines contemporary responses to muralism, both in Mexico and elsewhere. The three essays examine particular histories of mural painting as it changed dramatically during the cold war, the civil rights era, and as a result of neoliberalism. In Chapter 12, Leonard Folgarait examines the artists’ collective Tepito Arte Acá, which began producing mural paintings in Mexico City in the 1970s. Tepito Arte Acá is noteworthy for working outside established institutions of patronage and locating its paintings on the walls of residences and commercial buildings far removed from “official” or high-culture venues. In the next chapter, Holly Barnet-Sanchez argues that Chicano/a murals painted across the United States from the mid-1960s onward embody and formulate multiple simultaneous and shifting positions of Chicano/a culture. A reading of four early murals demonstrates the strategies of what Rafael Pérez-Torrez termed a “radical mestizaje” that facilitated the incorporation, integration, and transformation of numerous, varied sources in a specifically Chicano/a mural tradition. And finally, Bruce Campbell provides an overview of mural production since the 1960s. Post – Mexican School mural production, he argues, responds to social movements challenging state power, conflict over control of urban space, and critical interventions in the mass cultural environment. The mural art of this period has also been unevenly documented, or simply ignored in favor of the officially sponsored Mexican School. Part 4 of the book presents a chronology of Mexican muralism, providing a context for the movement by including political as well as artistic events. The section ends with six primary texts.  

 

Notes

1.  The literature on this is vast. Some key texts include Gerardo Mosquera, ed., Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Néstor García

8    •   I n t r o d u c t i o n

Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher Chiappari and Silvia López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves, eds., The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores, eds., On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); and John Beverly, José Oviedo, Michael Aronna, eds., The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 2. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Recasting the Public Sphere,” October, Vol. 73 (Summer 1995): 31. 3. In this regard, Mexico’s post-Revolution public sphere presents less a decline (à la Habermas) of an Enlightenment ideal (and the subsequent rise of, first, a proletariat public sphere and then a mass culture public sphere) than a long-term result of the Enlightenment’s imperialist underpinnings. See Claudio Lomnitz, “Ritual, Rumor, and Corruption in the Formation of Mexican Polities,” in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001): 145 –64. 4. Ricardo Roque-Baldovinos, “The ‘Epic Novel’: Charismatic Nationalism and the Avant-Garde in Latin America,” Cultural Critique, No. 49 (Autumn, 2001): 61. On the nineteenth century and the Liberal Reforma, see Jan Bazant, “From independence to the Liberal Republic, 1821 – 1867,” and Friedrich Katz, “The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867 – 1910,” both in Leslie Bethell, ed., Mexico Since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and Charles Hale, “José María Luis Mora and the Structure of Mexican Liberalism,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 45, No. 2 (May, 1965): 196 –227. 5.  On the term “revolutionary nationalism,” see note 8 in Greeley, “Muralism and the State in Post-Revolution Mexico, 1920–1970,” this volume. 6. See Carlos Monsiváis, “Persistencia de la memoria,” in Julio Scherer García and Carlos Monsiváis, Parte de guerra II: Los rostros del ’68 (Mexico City: Nuevo Siglo/Editorial Aguilar, 2002): 31–32. 7.  The purported decline of European civilization was a theme taken up by a wide variety of European and Latin American intellectuals, especially after World War I. 8.  In arguing thus, we seek to position the movement between the pessimism of Theodor Adorno and the optimism of Jacques Rancière by tracking muralism’s continual negotiation of the art-politics issue. 9.  I take the term “aesthetic indeterminacy” from David Aram Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10.  In the 1920s, for instance, the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) had three leading painters (Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Xavier Guerrero) serving on its central committee; like the theorist José Carlos Mariátegui in Peru and the avant-garde poet Rubén Martínez Villena in Cuba, these artists were not receiving party dictums but rather formulating social and cultural policies. 11.  For a general treatment of this phenomenon in Latin American literature, see RoqueBaldovinos, “The ‘Epic Novel’: Charismatic Nationalism and the Avant-Garde in Latin America,” Cultural Critique, No. 49 (Autumn, 2001): 58 –83.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

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12. On the ideological repercussions of the Mexican Revolution in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, see Pablo Yankelevich, “La Revolución Mexicana en el debate político latino­americano,” Cuadernos americanos, Vol. 19, No. 111 (2005): 161–86. 13. Space limitations have meant that all manifestations of muralism’s hemispheric influence could not be treated here. Some, such as the murals of revolutionary Cuba and Nicaragua, have received documentation — see David Kunzle, The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and David Craven, Art and Revolution in Latin America 1910–1990 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002)—others, such as the influence of Orozco on Venezuela’s realism/abstraction debates of the 1940s and 1950s, remain to be fully investigated; see the catalog, Taller Libre de Arte, 1948 – 1952 (Caracas: Museo Jacobo Borges, 1997). 14. Peter Osborne, “Modernity,” in Michael Payne, ed., A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 348. 15. Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, pp. xii– xiii. Mitchell pertinently goes on to argue that “representation” or “the world-as-picture . . . is the source of modernity’s enormous capacity for replication and expansion, and at the same time the origin of its instability” (pp. xiii–xiv).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Part 1

Mexican Muralism Beginnings, Development, Ideologies, and National Responses

1 Muralism and the State in Post-Revolution Mexico, 1920 – 1970  

Robin Adèle Greeley

I begin with a problem: throughout much of the twentieth century, the Mexican muralists—especially los tres grandes (José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros)—claimed to occupy the role of the “voice and vote” of the Mexican national consciousness.1 Purportedly acting as mediators between “the people” and the state,2 as the “voice of the voiceless,”3 the muralists elaborated a legendary visual program remembered for lauding the worker, the Indian, and the peasant as active agents of national formation. In so doing, los tres grandes positioned themselves as visionaries and moral leaders of the new post-Revolution Mexico, acting as political leaders at the national level during the tumultuous period of national consolidation and beyond. And they provided this leadership more than any other visual art movement in Mexico or in the Americas, to such an extent that Siqueiros could famously claim of muralism “there is no other way but ours.”4 Countering this view is another arguing that the muralists’ self-appointed role as guardians of the national soul played a reactionary role in Mexico’s formation as a modern nation-state. This alternative view asserts that they did not act as mediators between the state and the masses to the benefit of those peoples, but instead assisted in perpetuating a state-sponsored social order that continually marginalized popular demands. In his 1958 manifesto “The Cactus Curtain,” José Luis Cuevas compared muralism’s stranglehold on Mexican national culture to Stalinist totalitarianism, echoing earlier criticisms from los Contemporáneos.5 Anthropologist Roger Bartra has repeatedly detailed the procedures by which “government bureaucracy gives the seal of  

 

13

approval to artistic and literary creation, so as to restructure [that creation] in accordance with established canons” of national cultural identity. Thus generated primarily from state mandates rather than from any real attention to popular culture, the “myth” of a Mexican “revolutionary nationalism” “carries out an enormously important function in regulating the [national] consensus on which the state is based.”6 In Bartra’s view, muralism and other officially sponsored arts served not as a conduit of popular opinion upward from the masses to their political leaders, but rather as a means of channeling and neutralizing popular power. What are we to make of such divergent views? How might we evaluate the implicit claim of los tres grandes that the mural movement functioned, in the absence of a fully formed civil society, as a surrogate to safeguard the rights of downtrodden peoples? What can an interrogation of muralism’s trajectory vis-à-vis the state tell us about the remarkably intimate relationship in Mexico between culture and political power? My argument will be that the reality of muralism’s role in Mexico’s state formation lies somewhere in between these two views I have just sketched. It has to do in part with the conditions under which the muralists worked. Mexican artists of the 1920s and 1930s, in constant interchange with an international avant-garde, radically reconceptualized European avant-garde precepts in terms of Mexico’s specific historical conditions, and in doing so, began a vibrant exchange regarding the formulation of modernity in nations beyond Europe. Muralism’s utopian vision of a shared cultural patrimony that interwove the avant-garde with the popular opened up unprecedented space for public debate on the character of Mexican national identity. Yet because there was no strong civil society, the muralists depended heavily upon the state not only economically (no thriving art market existed until well after World War II), but also politically and ideologically. The shortage of alternative outlets meant that artists —even the politically and aesthetically renegade Siqueiros— relied on the state to elaborate their utopian aspirations. Muralism’s development thus had much to do with the coincidence of those aspirations with the needs of state consolidation as well as the state’s management of the Mexican intellectual community—including the artistic avant-garde, and especially the muralists — in the service of its long-range plans for modernization.7 The Mexican state sponsored muralism, I argue, not as a focused project with a clear goal, but as an ad hoc response to diverse social and political situations. Reciprocally, muralism developed during a period when the state, in the early unstable stages of consolidation, was forced to accede to some of the muralists’ aspirations and to the essential indeterminacy of art’s formal procedures. An investigation of the process by which muralism became the standard-bearer for the official state ideology of “revolutionary nationalism” can explain why the muralists and their artistic production were caught up in the uneven development of modernity in post-Revolution Mexico.8 Individuals, movements, and regimes all responded to the overwhelming urge toward state-sponsored modernization that marked Mexico indelibly in the twentieth century; this is the case whether the regimes were populist or  

 

 

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Muralism

authoritarian, socialist or developmental capitalist. Examination of such circumstances, in turn, can tell us a great deal about the disjunctive nature of modernization in what Beatriz Sarlo has qualified as the “peripheral modernity” experienced by Latin America.9 This essay looks at four periods in the development of muralism, beginning with the immediate aftermath of the Revolution (1920–24) and moving on to nationalist authoritarianism under President Plutarco Elías Calles and the Maximato (1924– 34), then to socialism under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 – 40), and finally to the reversal of Cárdenas’ socialist programs and the institutionalization of capitalism under Presidents Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46), Miguel Alemán (1946–52), and beyond.  

 

 

 

 

.   .   . General Alvaro Obregón came to power in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution—a revolution that launched the country’s transition from what Laurence Whitehead has termed an “oligarchic” state to a “modernizing” one.10 The modernizing state, in this paradigm, favored the urban bourgeoisie (rather than oligarchic landed colonial families based on a semi-feudal agrarian economy); import-substitution industrialization that sought to diminish Mexico’s dependence on foreign investment; state economic interventionism (instead of laissez-faire economic policies controlled by an elite few with no government regulation); and nationalism based on inclusion of the masses, at least symbolically (over the Eurocentrism of nineteenth-century nationalisms, which excluded those masses). Obregón astutely realized that reconstruction after the Revolution depended not simply on economic recovery from the devastating effects of civil war. Nor did it depend solely on building a strong, centralized state. It also required the comprehensive manipulation of symbols of Mexican identity on both cultural and political levels. The Revolution ruptured entrenched oligarchic circuits of power to open new political opportunities for the middle class, but there was no art market to speak of in its aftermath—a sign of the weakness of the urban bourgeoisie during this period.11 Indeed, the state was the primary source of artistic patronage, and Obregón took advantage of this situation to set up a state-run culture. One of his first moves in 1920 was to appoint the liberal lawyer-philosopher, José Vasconcelos, as Minister of Public Education. Vasconcelos proposed a cultural program in which the artist-intellectual was a “redeemer” and “prophet” for “the oppressed.” “Art and knowledge must serve to improve the condition of the people,” Vasconcelos exhorted, urging all Mexican intellectuals to “leave their ivory towers and seal a pact of alliance with the Revolution.”12 The cultural messianism of Vasconcelos’ program was based on a concept of mestizaje, in which European culture would rescue the Indian from his “underdeveloped” ways.13 Vasconcelos hired the muralists to paint this ideology, and his project for Mexico’s spiritual renewal through high culture affected mural production through 1923. Indeed, Vasconcelos toed the obregonista line in that he avoided any direct reference to the violence of the previous decade, and he made sure that his muralists did likewise. Thus, Orozco’s Maternity at the National Preparatory School (the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, or Prepa) in Mexico  

 

Muralism and the State in Post-Revolution Mexico

   •   15

Figure 1.1 José Clemente Orozco. Maternity, National Preparatory School (1923). © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

City makes no reference to Mexico’s tumultuous history, instead addressing Italian Renaissance painting traditions with a blonde Madonna — beautiful, but strategically distant from any indigenous culture (figure 1.1). Rivera’s mural Creation centers not on a European but on the allegorical mestizo figure “Primal Energy,”14 meant to symbolize the uplifting blend of indigenous and European races, while Man and Woman, sitting at the right and left bases of the mural, rearticulate the mestizo body through a monumentalizing post-cubist stylistics. Yet the surrounding allegorical figures still derive primarily from Italian Byzantine and Renaissance models, while Man and Woman reference the biblical Adam and Eve before the Fall (figure 1.2). Creation, in fact, emerged as the principal symbol of Vasconcelos’ mystical nationalism — deliberately omitting  

 

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Muralism

Figure 1.2 Diego Rivera. Creation, National Preparatory School (1922–23). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk/Art Resource

any reference to the class violence of the Revolution, in order to give art a redemptive, regenerative role in post-Revolutionary Mexico. How did such early murals function ideologically? How did they fulfill state needs? In what ways were they responsive to popular or avant-garde concerns? Early muralism was certainly a heterogeneous affair, caught up in tensions between artistic imaginings and the often improvisational nature of Mexico’s pre– World War II state formation. Vasconcelos, for example, clearly knew that public arts such as muralism could help consolidate a vision of the nation. But he never conceived of muralism as a stand-alone project, nor was he (or anyone) able to explain what precise form that vision should take. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, Vasconcelos, Obregón, and other state officials sought to use government patronage of muralism to navigate between the need to legitimate the state’s national base and the need to calm international fears. Foreign trade deteriorated in the years after the civil war, largely as a result of clauses in the 1917 Constitution restricting foreign property ownership. Relations with the United States were especially tense, although in the Bucareli Accords of 1923 Mexico resolved some grievances of US corporations in exchange for official US recogni 

Muralism and the State in Post-Revolution Mexico

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tion of Obregón’s government. On the domestic front, Obregón faced armed challenges to his authority from regional caudillos and peasant groups. He turned to muralism for three purposes. The first was to signal to the international community Mexico’s transformation from semi-feudal agrarianism to a modern, industrialized nation-state on par with Europe and the United States. Muralism was the grandest cultural attempt at countering the international perception of Mexico as barbarous and primitive. The movement’s European-trained avant-garde artists helped raise international awareness of Mexico’s cultural sophistication, and by avoiding controversial themes, the murals presented an image of Mexico as civilized, modern, and safe for financial investment. Obregón’s second purpose was to use muralism internally to construct an ideology of cross-class national consensus. The Revolution had broken apart the narrow, self-reinforcing political and economic monopolies that characterized the nineteenthcentury Porfiriato, and sent the oligarchic hacienda system of land tenure into decline. Obregón sought to capitalize on this, not to institute liberal parliamentary democracy (as President Madero had envisioned before his assassination in 1913) but rather to incorporate Mexico’s incipient national bourgeoisie and proletariat, along with the rural sectors, into an increasingly centralized government.15 It was hoped that muralism would translate this new situation into a visual ideology palatable to all concerned. The movement’s early experimentation reconfigured the national patrimony, inspired by an extensive amalgam of pre-Conquest sculpture, painting, and monumental architecture; colonial churches and baroque painting; popular cantina murals; motifs from traditional pottery, lacquer ware, and weaving; European avant-gardisms from cubism, futurism, constructivism, and beyond. All of these arts afforded source material for utopian visions of a unified, modern nation. Muralists helped demarcate this nascent cultural field—transformed by new connections between artists, government officials, unions, and popular movements—as a space of populist nationalism. In so doing, they opened up new avenues for cross-class dialogue, but also simultaneously provided a means for the state to channel mass demand for social justice away from the political and economic spheres. And third, Obregón turned to muralism to resolve the monumental problem of the rebellious peasantry. Although Zapatista agrarianism had largely been defeated, the rural masses had stepped firmly onto the stage of history. Local and regional interests crucially affected the efficacy of federal policy in the countryside, and regional rebellions continued throughout the century.16 Campesinos, who could no longer be ignored, had to be made to believe that Obregón’s government represented their best interests (especially on the land question) and, at the same time, had to be prevented from interfering with efforts to turn Mexico into a modern, profit-making nation. Obregón and his successors thus sought— with varying degrees of success— to incorporate the masses as symbol into the new nationalist rhetoric while at the same time undermining their real political effectiveness and subordinating them to the centralized state. Muralism was crucial to visualizing this strategy.  

 

 

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The structure of the state thus turned from the Porfirian exclusionary model toward an inclusive ideology in which the state incorporated and modernized all levels of society. This model of the state in part resembles its European bourgeois counterpart. But whereas European modernization was generated through a close collaboration between European states and a developed bourgeoisie, the post-Revolution Mexican state had no strong middle class upon which to rely. The state was thus vulnerable to internal pressures— from latifundio oligarchies and regional strongmen, the rural and urban masses, the military, and the Catholic Church. It was also vulnerable to external pressures, particularly from the United States.17 As a result, in late 1923, as the condition for recognizing the Mexican government, the United States forced Mexico to guarantee that it would not nationalize United States– owned industries (the Bucareli Accords). Obregón, unwilling to risk the continuity of government by holding truly democratic elections, named Plutarco Elías Calles as his successor. The military revolted against this decree—an event with immediate and harsh consequences for the muralists. Vasconcelos sided with Adolfo de la Huerta’s attempted coup d’état, voicing disapproval of Obregón’s authoritarian tactics and kowtowing to US business interests. But the power of the Mexican state itself remained precarious until after World War II, and it could tolerate no dissent from artists and intellectuals. Vasconcelos was forced into exile in July 1924 and Obregón put a halt to virtually all mural projects.18 In December 1924 Calles took power as El Jefe Máximo (Supreme Leader). By late 1923, the muralists had radicalized their politics in an effort to distance themselves from Vasconcelos.19 Their paintings now described contemporary political events rather than allegories, past histories, or scenes from folklore. Their work developed sophisticated ideas about class and race that privileged the peasantry and proletariat but nevertheless advocated populist cross-class alliances with certain sectors of the bourgeoisie, particularly intellectuals. Through an iconography of workers, peasants, and Indians, the muralists shifted their rhetoric, taking a position to the left of Vasconcelos but remaining within the limits of state-sponsored populism. Rivera’s Distribution of the Land (1923–24), for instance, celebrates a utopian fiction in which the state implements the Plan de Ayala’s mandated restitutions of land, while Emiliano Zapata and Otilio Montaño look on (see plate 2).20 Siqueiros painted the powerfully somber Burial of a Worker (1923– 24), one of the earliest murals to portray a Mexicanized proletariat (see figure 8.6). Orozco began his series of drawings, Horrors of the Revolution, translating their raw pessimism into the sublime tragedy of the 1926 Prepa murals (see figure 2.3). With Calles in power, however, the muralists were tainted by their earlier affiliation with Vasconcelos and their increasing connections to the Mexican Communist Party (PCM).21 The state, not yet stable enough to control potential threats, tended toward coercion and outright repression. Calles banned the PCM in 1929 and brought organized labor unions to heel, subordinating labor to the centralized state apparatus— a configuration of state-labor relations that would remain a hallmark of the Mexican state throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Many muralists were prominently involved  

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 1.3 Ramón Alva de la Canal. Cultural Mission (1930). © 2011 Museo Nacional de Arte/Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photograph: Robin Greeley

in PCM leadership as well as in the Party’s paper El Machete.22 Once the Party was banned, they were fired, demoted, or exiled. Some, such as Fermín Revueltas, were reduced to painting shop signs or other menial jobs.23 Siqueiros and Roberto Reyes Pérez gave up mural painting to engage in political activism and repeated confrontation with the state.24 Orozco had already gone into self-imposed exile in the United States. Mistrusting both institutionalized politics and blind faith in the “revolutionary masses,” Orozco increasingly felt that, with the Maximato’s turn toward authoritarianism, monumental public painting provided the sole possible redemptive stance against human degradation.25 Other muralists suffered internal exile in the form of government-sponsored

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Figure 1.4 Lola Alvarez Bravo. Untitled (Rivera Murals at the Ministry of Education). Posthumous digital reproduction from original negative, Lola Alvarez Bravo Archive, Center for Creative Photography. © 1995 The University of Arizona Foundation.

“cultural missions” to the countryside.26 In 1930, Ramón Alva de la Canal imaged the cultural missions as a positive opportunity that allowed intellectuals to put their utopian ideals into practice among the peasantry (figure 1.3). Yet as Alva de la Canal himself had lamented the year before, those cultural missions were often isolated from the urban centers of power and thus made culturally and politically marginal.27 Even Rivera, although he had been allowed to continue working on his mural cycle for the Secretaría de Educación Pública (the Ministry of Public Education, or SEP), did so without pay. He produced murals such as the politically vague allegory Mechanization of the Countryside (1926) (see figure 3.6), which idealizes for an urban middle-class audience the modernization projects of the Maximato and imagines the nation as a brotherhood of peasant, worker, and soldier — with “soldier” a code word for the state, which was led consistently by military generals. The “enemies of the nation” are not the bourgeoisie, but hacendados and the Catholic Church, struck by a lightning bolt thrown by the Proletariat as a red-swathed allegory.28 The courtyards with the murals, however, once Rivera had finished them, were used for storage and deliberately neglected because  

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the irrepressible Rivera had included explicitly communist rhetoric and scathing critiques of the bourgeoisie in other panels (figure 1.4). .   .   . At this point, muralism seems far from being lauded as the visual arbiter of official revolutionary nationalism. Without Vasconcelos as unifier and Calles as supporter, “Muralism” fragmented into “muralisms.” Paradoxically, however, political disenfranchisement fostered vibrant ideological and aesthetic diversity, a period of visual innovation unrivaled in modern Latin America. Aesthetic production became a site of public debate about the character of mexicanidad, the nature of the Mexican state, and the relationship between modernity and modernization. Artists dynamically intervened in the public sphere— writing, engaging in political organizing, teaching (rural and urban), debating, and producing graphic works (illustrations, posters, pamphlets, etc.)—in ways that complemented muralism while expanding the limits and complexity of civic discourse. Another set of national crises, however, forced the Mexican state to reassess its cultural policies. Mexico desperately needed the support of the United States, especially during the Great Depression. But the country’s relations with el Norte remained uneasy. Muralism was again called on to present Mexico internally as defiantly nationalist, yet externally as open to foreign interests—especially oil.29 Particularly in Rivera’s hands, muralism began to serve as a “cultural liaison to American industrialists” and bankers.30 One such banker, US Ambassador Dwight Morrow, commissioned Rivera in 1930 to paint murals in the historic city of Cuernavaca as a means of cementing ties between the two nations. Other industrialists soon followed suit: both Henry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller commissioned Rivera to paint murals in Detroit and New York City. Muralism’s populism helped the Mexican state present itself at home as independent of el Norte while continuing efforts abroad to court foreign capital. The state also tried to use muralism to control opposition within Mexico, marginalizing those intellectuals and artists who did not accept the movement’s social realism and nationalist commitments.31 Even artists in the mural movement — Siqueiros being the most notorious — could be persecuted for defying state political mandates or rewarded for complying.32 Muralism also helped resolve another major threat to the stability of the state: the Cristero rebellion (1926 – 29), one of the bloodiest episodes between 1910 and 1950, occurred when state-sponsored modernization of the nation’s predominantly rural population was most rapid. In response to increased antagonism between the Catholic Church and the anticlericalism and enforced agrarian policies of the state, many rural communities rose in revolt, demanding, at gunpoint, restitution of lands and an end to the state-enforced limits on the Church.33 To combat the Cristero revolt, the state again sought to use muralism to contain the peasantry—with mixed results, which depended largely on local circumstances. Whereas urban murals were largely oriented toward city inhabitants and an international audience, murals painted under the auspices of the SEP’s rural education program were aimed directly at the peasantry. Roberto Monte 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 1.5 Roberto Montenegro. Busca en la Tierra Tu Alimiento y en el Libro Tu Libertad (Search in the Earth for Your Nourishment and in the Book for Your Freedom). Mural for Ministry of Education rural education program in Tepecuacuilca, Guerrero. Reproduced in El Sembrador (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, June 5, 1929).

negro’s school mural painted in 1929 for the town of Tepecuacuilca, for example, has a stylized cornstalk at the center, emphasizing pre-Conquest maize symbolism over Christian iconography (figure 1.5). The mural links ancient indigenous ties to the land with state agrarian and educational policies, admonishing its campesino viewers to find freedom in books rather than in religion. It is also no accident that Rivera’s Cuernavaca mural cycle, painted in 1930 in the immediate aftermath of the Cristero rebellion, highlighted the oppressive role Catholicism played in the conquest of Mexico and in the country’s subsequent colonial history. Against this history of subjugation, Rivera paints Emiliano Zapata, the mustachioed

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Figure 1.6 Diego Rivera. Emiliano Zapata, Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca (1930). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

hero of revolutionary peasant resistance (figure 1.6). Cuernavaca is the capital of Morelos, Zapata’s home state. To paint Zapata there was to hail the Mexican government (and Rivera, its prize artist) as leaders of the oppressed.34 Yet the reality differed considerably from this utopian ideal; in Morelos, Zapata’s image was — and remains— a site of constant struggle between the state and the martyred peasant leader’s rural followers. After Zapata’s assassination in 1919, official histories at first portrayed him as a bandit and an outlaw.35 The state, moreover, ran roughshod over local communities’ modes of  

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political and moral organization, continually presenting agrarian reform as its “gift” to the campesinos, rarely presenting it as the realization of Zapatista demands for land restitution.36 The Morelos peasantry, however, stubbornly refused to legitimate either this official view or Obregón’s version of land reform, instead using their moral authority over Zapata’s image to force the state to negotiate. Obregón soon realized that he “needed Zapata’s name to reap the political benefits of his own appeal for land reform,” both domestically and internationally.37 Because Zapata, unlike Pancho Villa, had never fought the United States, he could be recuperated by post-Revolution administrations as a national figure without angering the United States. But in Mexico, Zapata’s official image had to be shifted from that of class enemy of the bourgeoisie to that of national martyr.38 Muralism was often caught up in this disagreement about historical interpretation between the state and rural peoples, and Rivera’s Zapata was no exception. The artist claimed of his Zapata, “I took care to authenticate every detail by exact research, because I wanted to leave no opening for anyone to try to discredit the murals as a whole by the charge that any detail was a fabrication.”39 Such a claim— that “truth” is to be located in a realist, purely visual iconography outside political concerns — prompts questions about the appropriation of local heroes to legitimize state authority.40 Rivera painted a highly ideological portrait of Zapata that supported efforts to harness the violent clashes of the Revolution and the Cristero rebellion for an ideology of national harmony. Rivera painted Zapata standing to one side of his horse, holding a farmer’s sickle (rather than on horseback, gun in hand— the traditional warrior pose that Zapata readily adopted for photographers), placing the agrarian leader just above the viewer’s eye level. Clothed in mythic campesino white, he seems almost conjoined with the equally mythic white horse, his legs superimposed over the horse’s back hooves, as though man and animal were a single luminous being.41 Rivera places Zapata at the head of a line of peasant fighters, their faces echoing his. In this image, Zapata stands in unity with his people and with the natural world, unlike the capataz (foreman) and conquistadores on horseback elsewhere in the mural, who tower over the indigenous masses. More importantly, viewers see him just above eye level, so that an imagined camaraderie links us with Zapata’s heroic struggle, eliding any cultural differences or class antagonisms. In front of this mural, we are all Zapatistas.42 Here, as elsewhere, the Mexican state repeatedly used the iconic image of Zapata to fuse the rural masses and the self-proclaimed revolutionary state.43 But the Cuernavaca mural effects that fusion subtly. Visually, Rivera’s mural, by placing the revolutionary leader in the final panel, proclaims that history culminates in Zapata. He marks the defiant resolution to Mexico’s long history of oppression — an oppression schematized as primarily colonial, rather than modern. The mural makes all viewers —whether peasant, elite, indio, or gringo tourist— not active historical actors but part of the undifferentiated mass who are merely implementing Zapata’s vision. Thus, the modern state, although deliberately left out of the mural, is figured through its very absence, in the  

 

 

 

 

 

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empty physical space in front of the mural where spectators stand. In that space, viewers automatically do what the state commands; they stand passive, whatever their class position, before the mural that asserts the triumph of Zapata’s land reform, which the caretaker state has purportedly implemented in the absence of Zapata himself. Rivera, in his mural, defines Mexico’s modern state—not its rural peoples—as legitimate heir to Morelos’ leader. He helps co-opt and disempower the revolutionary forces that Zapata represented and—much to the dismay of the Maximato —the Cristeros continued.44 The Maximato and subsequent regimes stressed not Vasconcelos’ model of mestizaje, but a model of indigenismo that mythologized the “authenticity” of indigenous and popular cultures as the basis for a national culture. This was a tactic, in part, for producing history. Official views on the nation’s history coincided with the muralists’ ideas of national cultural identity, resulting in the construction of a highly ideological version of Mexico’s past under the rubric of mexicanidad. “Culture” and “history” became synonymous, and the muralists became the most flamboyant brokers of this relationship. They interpreted the past through the lens of a “revolutionary” present, selectively providing the grounds for an equally “revolutionary” future. In particular, the muralists conflated Mexico’s pre-Conquest indigenous past with the state’s modernization project, so that the past became the ideological referent for Mexico’s industrialized future. Even the famously pessimistic Orozco would frame his great 1939 Cabañas murals according to this ideology, although he questions the standard presentation of that future as idyllic. His Cortés, an apocalyptic machine-man and a precursor of the Terminator, combines the horror of the Conquest with the distopia of modern technology (see figure 8.2). This effort to implement a national culture of indigenismo and resolve the problem of unruly indigenous and rural peoples at the national level, which historian Laurence Whitehead has called the “federalization of the Indian question,” further resulted in expansion of state powers at the expense of local patrones.45 It was also a tactic to gain the support of resistant peasants for the state’s modernization project, which sought to industrialize Mexico’s agrarian production and subordinate the masses to the state’s single-party regime. During the 1920s and 1930s, this tactic did not always succeed, because both muralists and the masses continually tested the limits of state ideology.46 When the mural collective, Alianza de Trabajadores de las Artes Plásticas, painted an anticlerical mural in a working class school that infuriated parents, for instance, the collective sought (but failed to get) police protection.47 In Oaxaca, by contrast, teachers complained to the governor about a Virgen del Perpetuo Socorro that local muralists in Tezoatlán had painted on the school wall.48 Beyond such iconography wars over religion, however, the effect of muralism’s focus on the indigenous, peasant, and working classes was at once to incorporate those sectors into official history and to acknowledge the power of the masses to challenge that history. In mediating between the state and civil society, muralism risked awakening the latent revolutionary power of campesinos and workers. But without that mediation, the state could have been accused of illegitimacy for ignoring popular versions of history.  

 

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Cárdenas— aware that Calles’ authoritarianism had masked, rather than resolved, Mexico’s volatile social tensions — renewed state support for muralism, which had lapsed during the Maximato, as a means to garner social consensus. Despite his legendary reputation as friend of the campesino, however, Cárdenas continued the Maximato’s interventionist modernizing policies in both the countryside and the cities, and, like the previous regimes, enlisted the muralists in the effort to industrialize agriculture and incorporate the peasantry into the national economy. As part of its corporate socialist plans to organize workers and farmers into federalized unions tied to the state, the Cárdenas regime sponsored a wealth of murals in proletarian and rural communities; plate 1 is an example of this abundance in stained glass. Debates on the role of the peasantry in post-Revolution Mexico centered on the image of the campesino. The state, in creating a coherent sense of mexicanidad, had to contend with the popular. In the murals, the visual, social, and political elements combined to encourage dialogue about the nature of citizenship for Mexico’s rural peoples. After 1940, the Mexican state intensified efforts to industrialize, adopting the developmentalist economic policy of import-substitution industrialization to reduce Mexico’s dependence on foreign investment. The regimes of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940 –46) and Miguel Alemán (1946–52) kept Cardenismo’s corporate state structure, but rejected its socialist rhetoric in favor of the full-out, state-sponsored consumer capitalism known as the “Mexican Miracle.”49 In contrast to Cárdenas’ focus on the peasant and working classes, these regimes strove to consolidate an urban consumerist bourgeoisie on the US model, linking consumerism to the health of the national economy.50 Essential to this shift was the use of old institutions, including muralism, for new purposes. As historian Alan Knight puts it, “the Alemán sexenio [six-year presidential term], imbued with a modernizing, Cold War ideology, and a get-rich-quick ethic, quarried the rubble of Cardenismo and utilized the material — the corporate party, the mass institutions, the powerful executive, the tamed army and subordinated peasantry — to build a new Mexico.”51 Muralism was further institutionalized through a series of highly public official awards, exhibitions, and commissions, and mined for its ability to project a unified national ethos as representative of “the struggles and desires of the masses” even as the Mexican state programmatically turned its back on those masses.52 Yet whereas Cárdenas and previous regimes had focused on controlling the actual murals, the politically pragmatic regimes of Ávila Camacho and Alemán concentrated on harnessing the aura of the mural painters for the Mexican state. Neither president was interested in the content of what the muralists had to say, but both wanted to manipulate the personas of the painters to serve the state. For this reason they systematically linked the mass media cult of personalities to the state, cultivating a few muralists and others as “national” figures. In 1943, for example, Ávila Camacho founded the prestigious Colegio Nacional de México, with Orozco and Rivera representing the visual arts. He permitted Siqueiros to return from his enforced exile over the Trotsky affair,53 and in 1945, allowed Siqueiros his first state commission since the mid-1920s, on the third floor of the Palacio  

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 1.7 David Alfaro Siqueiros. New Democracy, Palacio de Bellas Artes (1945). © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk/Art Resource

de Bellas Artes. Ávila Camacho also used muralism to further Mexico’s foreign relations with prominent capitalist nations, especially the United States. During World War II, the Mexican state actively improved its deteriorated ties to the United States, which had reached an all-time low in 1938 over Cárdenas’ nationalization of the oil industry. Muralism formed part of this approach, and the state made sure that works by Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros held prominent positions in the major exhibition Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, held in 1940 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Alemán continued this public relations strategy of state patronage, calling upon los tres grandes, in 1947, to form a national Commission of Mural Painting. The government awarded the National Art Prize to Orozco in 1946 and to Rivera in 1950. In 1952, Rufino Tamayo became the fourth grande when he added a mural panel to those painted by the Big Three in the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Thus only in the mid-1940s, when the government decided to embark on a developmentalist strategy of full industrialization, did relations between the state and its artists cease being contentious. For artists and intellectuals, the Mexican Miracle meant a reduction in direct repression that lasted until the 1960s, because the stability of the state encouraged its “nurturing” of the arts. But cooperation came at the cost of a genuine critical stance on the part of the muralists. Rivera, having long abandoned any true commitment to communism, adopted the anti-fascist rhetoric of hemispheric cooperation, painting Pan-American Unity (San Francisco, 1940) in response to the new wartime détente between Mexico and the United States and a series of Pan-American conferences the United States initiated to secure itself against Axis infiltration of the Americas.54 Orozco’s savage pessimism was now safely contained in the series of annual

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Figure 1.8 Rufino Tamayo. Nuestra Nacionalidad (1952). © D.R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/México/2009/ Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, A.C.

exhibitions at the Colegio Nacional.55 With his mural New Democracy in the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Siqueiros surpassed Orozco and Rivera as Mexico’s most highly regarded muralist (figure 1.7).56 Siqueiros used the mural to display his technical innovations to full effect, but instead of his usual theme, class warfare, his mural took up the rhetoric of the government’s cold war ideology, which pitted democracy against communism.57 By 1952, Tamayo’s mural Nuestra Nacionalidad signaled yet another shift, marking the ascendancy of abstraction over social realism (figure 1.8). Tamayo’s abstraction could be characterized as profoundly Mexican but avoided the communist taint of muralism’s social realism and conveniently coincided with the rise in the United States of abstract expressionism as the cultural embodiment of cold war anti-communism.58 Not until the presidency of Alemán did the fine arts —including muralism—receive consistent state support, and then it was only at the cost of any earlier socialist commitments. In this period the productive debates about muralisms finally gave way to the officially sanctioned unity of Muralism. The historian Enrique Krauze, looking back on this period, accused the muralists of capitulating: “The relationship between the government and the intellectuals had returned to the old, palmy days of Don Porfirio. . . . Converted into national icons, the mural painters . . . continued to rely on generous state patronage while they painted the walls of public and private buildings, hotels, theaters, the homes of artists and high society.”59 Siqueiros’ March of Humanity, produced from 1964 to 1971 under the violently repressive regimes of Presidents Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría, is perhaps the most famous example of the situation Krauze describes (figure 1.9).60 The mural, housed in the Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum, a conference building on the grounds of the Hotel de México, aimed to signal both the end of Mexico’s  

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Figure 1.9 David Alfaro Siqueiros. March of Humanity, Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum (1965–71). © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Photograph: Robin Greeley

internal social conflicts under the guidance of the revolutionary state and the openness of the nation to international tourism. The Mexican Miracle, however, obscured the growing disparity of income and increased political unrest among the nation’s population. The government that sponsored Siqueiros’ mural would also carry out a planned massacre during student protests in Mexico City in October 1968.61 Some three to four hundred unarmed students and bystanders, including children, were killed on the eve of the Olympic Games.62 The Tlatelolco Massacre remains a wound in the Mexican national psyche, signifying the abandonment of the Mexican people by their government. Siqueiros, however, not only continued to accept support from the state, but also condemned any disruption of the Olympic Games.63 Although he did not specify the disruption to which he was referring, he did not mean the murderous police. Four years later, in 1972, President Echeverría signed a law declaring Mexican muralism to be a part of the cultural patrimony of the nation.64 The decree, although presented as a measure to preserve works from deterioration, vandalism, and neglect, was selectively implemented and thus for many it marked the death knell of the mural

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movement. Muralism, originally central to the rebuilding of the nation after the Revolution precisely because it provoked public debate, was now thoroughly institutionalized, its message of popular consciousness effectively neutralized. The adventure of the 1920s and 1930s had ended; it would be left to others outside the institutional reach of the state to express a popular national consciousness.65

Notes

1. Diego Rivera, “Manifiesto a los obreros y campesinos de México,” (26 May 1930), reprinted in Rivera, Arte y política, ed. Raquel Tibol (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1979), p. 99. All translations in this chapter are by the author unless otherwise noted. 2. Two typical examples of the muralists’ conception of “the people” might suffice: Siqueiros characterized muralism’s relationship to “the people” thus: “The people follow us, they surround us, because our movement gets close to the people and lives from them, from them it extracts it juices and its essences.” Siqueiros, “La corrupción en el arte” (1969) translated in Gilbert Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, eds., The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 498. And, in the words of Rivera: “I tried always to be that which they call an artist, that is, a receiver of the struggles and desires of the masses and a transmitter that could offer the masses the synthesis of their desires, thus to serve them as their conscience and aid them in their social organization.” Rivera, “La obra del pintor Diego Rivera,” Das Werk Des Malers Diego Rivera (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1928), reprinted in Diego Rivera, Textos de arte, ed. Xavier Moyssén (Mexico City: UNAM, 1986), p. 131. 3.  Carlos Fuentes invokes this phrase with regard to twentieth-century Mexican intellectuals generally. Carlos Fuentes, interview, in Jorge Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 182. 4.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, No hay más ruta que la nuestra (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1945). 5.  José Luis Cuevas, “La cortina de nopal,” a 1957–59 series of articles published in México en la cultura, supplement to Novedades. The most important appeared in No. 468 (2 March 1958):1, 6; No. 473 (4 April 1958):7. Published in English in Evergreen Review No. 2 (1959):111– 20. On the Contemporáneos, see my chapter “Nietzsche contra Marx in Mexico: The Contemporáneos, Muralism, and Debates over ‘Revolutionary’ Art in 1930s Mexico” in this volume. 6.  Roger Bartra, Oficio mexicano (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1993), pp. 32, 102. 7.  On state management of intellectuals, see Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America (London: Verso, 1999). 8.  “Revolutionary nationalism,” declared official policy under President Calles in 1930, expressed politically the idea that the nation-state embodied popular demands for social justice. See Francisco Valdés Ugalde, “Nationalism and the Polity in Mexico,” unpublished paper, Brown University (1999), pp. 4 –6, 17. 9.  Beatriz Sarlo, Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1988).  

 

 

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10.  Laurence Whitehead, “State Organization in Latin America since 1930,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. VI, part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 90 –91. 11.  See Christine Frérot, El mercado de arte en México, 1950 – 1970 (Mexico City: INBA, 1990). 12.  José Vasconcelos, “Discurso en la Universidad,” in Discursos 1920–1950 (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1950), pp. 7–12. 13.  José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica/The Cosmic Race, [1925] trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 5. 14.  Vasconcelos, quoted in Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement, 1920– 1925” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1989), p. 183. Ramírez analyzes the role of Vasconcelos’ spiritual messianism in Rivera’s Creation. 15.  See Whitehead, “State Organization in Latin America since 1930.” 16.  The Cristero rebellion (1926– 29) is the most important episode of post-Revolution rebellion, but resistance continued throughout the century, most recently and spectacularly embodied in the EZLN rebellion in Chiapas. See Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacán (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 17.  See Gilbert Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), especially Chapter 9; Arnaldo Córdova, La ideología de la Revolución Mexicana: La formación del nuevo régimen (Mexico City: Edicones Era, 1973), p. 280. 18. Presidential decree, issued August 1924. See SEP Archives, Colección: Personal Sobresaliente, Serie: Siqueiros, No. de expediente: S2/29 19. In September 1923, Siqueiros led the formation of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. In response to Huerta’s attempted coup, Siqueiros and the Syndicate published a manifesto reiterating their support for Calles against Huerta’s “counter-revolutionary” “bourgeois” movement. See the Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, this volume. 20.  The Plan de Ayala, written by Montaño and mandated by Zapata, differed sharply from the agrarian reform envisioned by the 1917 Constitution; the former demanded land restitutions, while the latter decreed that land belonged not to the individual farmer but to “the nation,” which would, in effect, lend it to the farmers. Despite Rivera’s rosy picture, land distribution proceeded slowly under Obregón, and at an even slower pace under Calles. Cárdenas, by contrast, distributed more land in during his presidential term than all previous presidencies combined. See Alan Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., Mexico Since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 256–64. 21.  The Syndicate began an alliance with the PCM in late 1922; by early 1923, artists occupied several PCM leadership positions. The PCM at first supported Calles (thus the progovernment tone of the Syndicate’s 1923 Manifesto) but then began to criticize him harshly when his presidency soon proved less than radical. 22.  Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 35–37. 23. Ramírez, The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement, pp. 395–96; Leon 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920 – 1940. Art of the New Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 85. 24.  Olivier Debroise, “Action Art: David Alfaro Siqueiros and the Artistic and Ideological Strategies of the 1930s,” in Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930 –1940 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1997), p. 29. 25.  “Painting assails the mind. It persuades the heart.” Orozco, quoted in Alma Reed, Orozco (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 95. 26.  On the cultural missions sponsored by the SEP from 1923 through 1938, see Secretaría de Educación Pública, Las misiones culturales en 1927 (Las escuelas normales rurales) (Mexico City: SEP, 1928); Secretaría de Educación Pública, Las misiones culturales, 1932 – 33 (Mexico City: SEP, 1933); Misiones culturales: los años utópicos, 1920 – 1938, exhibition catalogue (Mexico City: CONACULTA/INBA/Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo, 1999); Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 27.  Ramón Alva de la Canal was convinced that the SEP deliberately sent the most radical artists of the ¡30-30! movement on cultural missions in order to break it up. He wrote to Fernando Leal that he was forced into taking the job of cultural missionary “in order to fill [my] belly with potatoes.” Sofía Rosales, “El anónimo muralismo de las Misiones Culturales,” in Misiones culturales: los años utópicos, pp. 46–7. 28.  Rivera’s demonization of the Catholic Church clearly aimed to please the notoriously anticlerical Calles. 29.  See Lorenzo Meyer, México y los Estados Unidos en el Conflicto Petrolero (1917 – 1942) (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1972) and Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 72. 30.  Anthony Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 51 31.  On the Contemporáneos, see my chapter “Nietzsche contra Marx in Mexico,” this volume. See also Miller, In the Shadow of the State, pp. 50 –51. 32.  See Anreus, Chapter 2, and Jolly, Chapter 4, this volume. 33. In addition to Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico, see Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910– 1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review Vol. 74, No. 3 (1994): 393– 444; Jean Meyer, La Cristiada, 3 vols., (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1974); David C. Bailey, ¡Viva Cristo Rey! The Cristero Rebellion and the Church-State Conflict in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974); and Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico’s Cristero Rebellion: Michoacán, 1927–29 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 34.  See my essay, “Aesthetic Statism and Peasant Resistance: Calles, the Cristero War and Diego Rivera’s Cuernavaca Mural” forthcoming. 35.  JoAnn Martin, “Contesting Authenticity: Battles over the Representation of History in Morelos, Mexico,” Ethnohistory Vol. 40, No. 3 (Summer, 1993):438–65. 36. John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970), p. 372; Arturo Warman, “We Come to Object”: The Peasants of Morelos and the National State, trans. Stephen Ault (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 37.  Martin, “Contesting Authenticity,” p. 450.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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38.  Zapata’s official image changed dramatically between 1919 and the 1930s. See Martin, “Contesting Authenticity.” 39.  Rivera, translated in Victor Sorell, “The Photography as a Source for Visual Artists: Images from the Archive Casasola in the Works of Mexican and Chicano Artists,” in The World of Agustín Víctor Casasola: Mexico, 1900– 1938 (Washington D.C.: The Fondo del Sol Visual Arts and Media Center, 1984), p. 19, quoted in Jane Creighton, “Bierce, Fuentes, and the Critique of Reading: A Study of Carlos Fuentes’s Old Gringo,” South Central Review, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1992):73. This statement seems to relate to both images of Zapata that Rivera painted at Cuernavaca. The second portrait is painted on the central pier, opposite Independence hero José María Morelos, and copies the 1914 Brehme photograph of the revolutionary. 40.  Martin, in “Contesting Authenticity,” develops this interrogation of the hegemonizing uses of authenticity in detail. She argues that such discourses of authenticity paradoxically “enable subversive practices by inviting consideration of the unauthentic and by encouraging practices that expose the arbitrary limits of the authentic” (p. 441). 41.  Rivera’s insistence on white strategically combines Zapata’s advocacy for the peasantry with the popular myth that the Revolutionary’s spirit, after his assassination, left his body to reside in that of his white horse. By contrast, the historical Zapata adored the fancy, silver-studded outfit of the charro, rode a dark horse, and never donned the campesino whites. 42.  My use of this phrase echoes, with deliberate irony, that chanted by 1990s EZLN supporters: “todos somos Zapatistas.” 43.  Roger Bartra, The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, trans. Christopher Hall (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), p. 164. 44.  Rivera’s mural pits Zapata against Catholicism, despite the fact that the Zapatistas (like the Cristeros) fought under the banner of Mexico’s most venerated Catholic image: the Guadalupe Virgin. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol.1: Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), p. 311. 45.  Laurence Whitehead, “State Organization in Latin American since 1930,” p. 24. 46. See Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994):73 – 107 and Stephen Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890–1940 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 172 –73. 47.  Máximo Pacheco, interview in Cristina Pacheco, La luz de México: Entrevistas con pintores y fotógrafos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988), p. 500. 48.  Benjamin Thomas Smith, “Anticlericalism and Resistance: The Diocese of Huajuapam de León, 1930–1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies 37 (August 2005):469. 49. On developmentalism and import-substitution industrialization in Mexico, see Sarah Babb, Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 75 –105. 50.  See Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home! Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920 – 1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Peter Smith, “Mexico Since 1946: Dynamics of an Authoritarian Regime,” in Bethell, Mexico Since Independence.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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51.  Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo,” p. 320. 52.  Rivera, see note 2 above. 53.  In May 1940, Siqueiros was involved in an unsuccessful first assassination attempt against Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who had been given asylum in Mexico by Cárdenas. 54.  The United States organized Pan-American conferences in Panama (1939) and in Havana (1940). 55.  The exhibitions ran from 1943 through 1948. Raquel Tibol, José Clemente Orozco: una vida para el arte (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984), pp. 200 –201. 56.  Mary Coffey, The State of Culture: Institutional Patrimony in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (PhD dissertation, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, 1999), p. 167. See also Karen Cordero Reiman, “Narraciones corpóreas e incorporaciones en los Murales del Palacio de Bellas Artes,” Curare, No. 24 (July–December 2004). 57.  Knight, “The Rise and Fall of Cardenismo,” p. 316. 58. Coffey, The State of Culture, p. 167. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 59.  Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996, trans. Hank Heifetz (New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 1997), p. 589. 60.  Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría are overwhelmingly considered responsible for the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, described below, and the 1970s Mexican Dirty War. See The National Security Archive, George Washington University, report on the Tlatelolco Massacre, www .gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB99/ and on the Dirty War, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB180/index.htm (accessed 4 January 2010). 61.  Not only was the Polyforum’s patron, industrialist Manuel Suárez, a close confidant of all three presidents, but he also petitioned the government for monies when the project ran over budget. Leonard Folgarait, So Far from Heaven: David Alfaro Siqueiros’ The March of Humanity and Mexican Revolutionary Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 53. This section is heavily indebted to Folgarait’s analysis. 62. The massacre took place in Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City. Under government orders, military and police trapped the peaceful student rally in the plaza and opened fire. The exact number of dead is a matter of controversy, but most accounts put it around three hundred, with many more arrested. The government claimed that its forces were provoked by student fire; not until 2001 was it proved that snipers from the Presidential Guard had instigated the shooting. See Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1971); Julio Scherer García and Carlos Monsiváis, Parte de Guerra, Tlatelolco 1968: documentos del general Marcelino García Barragán (Mexico: Nuevo Siglo/Aguilar, 1999); and Scherer García and Monsiváis, Parte de Guerra II: los rostros del 68 (Mexico: Nuevo Signo/ Aguilar, 2002). 63. Siqueiros, Me llamaban el coronelazo (Mexico City: Biografías Gandesa, 1977), p. 592, quoted in Folgarait, p. 27. Siqueiros, who had been at Echeverría’s home when the shooting was reported to the future president, firmly supported Echeverría when the latter claimed not to have been complicit in planning the massacre. Philip Stein, Siqueiros. His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers, 1994), p. 326. Enrique Krauze, however, sug 

 

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gests that Siqueiros was deliberately invited to dinner that evening to witness Echeverría taking the phone call and acting surprised to hear of violence in Tlatelolco. Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, p. 726. Siqueiros, it seems, could be relied upon not to question too closely. 64.  “Ley Federal sobre Monumentos y Zonas Arqueológicos, Artísticos e Históricos,” Diario Oficial de la Federación (6 May 1972). 65.  See Olivier Debroise, ed., La era de la discrepancia: arte y cultural visual en México 1968– 1997/The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico 1968– 1997 (Mexico City: UNAM, 2006), trans. James Oles.  

 

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2 Los Tres Grandes Ideologies and Styles

Alejandro Anreus We believe that while our society is in a transitional stage between the destruction of an old order and the introduction of a new order, the creators of beauty must turn their work into clear ideological propaganda for the people, and make art, which at present is mere individualist masturbation, something of beauty, education and purpose for everyone.  

— Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, El Machete, June 1924

The Mexican Mural Renaissance was the end product of multiple historical forces: social and aesthetic, political and cultural, communal and individual. Without the Mexican Revolution and the patronage of President Alvaro Obregón’s government, the mural movement as we know it would not have taken place, or at the very least would have been radically different. On December 9, 1923, the recently organized artists’ union, Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, wrote their manifesto as a response to the de la Huerta attempted coup against the Obregón government. An important early document of the Latin American avant-garde, the manifesto’s principal author was David Alfaro Siqueiros, and its signers were the painters Xavier Guerrero, Fermín Revueltas, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Ramón Guadarrama, Germán Cueto, and Carlos Mérida. The manifesto was published in June 1924, in the official paper of the artists’ union, El Machete. The manifesto’s content is straightforward; it begins with a politically charged dedication: To the Indian race humiliated for centuries; to soldiers made executioners by the praetorians; to workers and peasants beaten by the greed of the rich; to intellectuals uncorrupted by the bourgeoisie.1

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The document proceeds to reject “salon” and easel painting, bourgeois approval, the picturesque and the American Kewpie doll—all signs of a commercial and imperialist culture. The conclusion issues an unequivocal call to arms:  

We appeal to common soldiers who, unaware of what is happening or deceived by their traitorous officers, are about to shed the blood of their brothers of race and class. Remember that the bourgeoisie will use the self-same weapons with which the Revolution guaranteed your brother’s land and livelihood to now seize them.2

A brilliant piece of propaganda, the manifesto still jolts a first-time reader with its clarity and force. It espoused a revolutionary aesthetic for public art, through the mural or the print. More important, however, it defined the role of the politically responsible artist. Three of the manifesto’s signers — José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros— would achieve national and international prominence unparalleled among Latin American artists of their generation. Christened los tres grandes —The Big Three—by admirers and foes, the three artists’ names, lives, and works would become part of Mexican cultural mythology. Yet these three artists held radically different views of art and politics, and as a result they rarely appeared together publicly. One exception was in 1947, when the three together, in a congenial mood, were memorialized in a photograph (figure 2.1). The occasion was the creation by Miguel Alemán, then President of Mexico, of a National Commission of Mural Painting, consisting of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. This representation of the trinity of Mexican mural painting is, however, a fiction. In reality, the three artists were separated by profound ideological and stylistic differences. In his memoirs, Siqueiros writes of the artists’ encounter prior to the taking of the photograph:  

 

 

 

I believe that we waited for him (Rivera) for more than an hour. When he arrived he told us: “I am late because I have been thinking what we should propose to the gentleman . . . My proposal is the following.” He took paper, a pencil and started to draw. It took him more than a half hour to accomplish his task. When he was finished, he told us, pointing with his finger: “This here is the section for film and theatre. Here would be Fine Arts. Here, Dance, etc. and the whole thing would be called ‘The City of Art’ . . . But we should represent the culinary art of Mexico; in these small rectangles there will be as many places to eat as there are states in the Republic” . . . Orozco came close to Diego and told him: “You are no fool, but the president of the republic is going to believe you are the biggest pendejo that ever existed. Not a single Mexican will come to this; there, English will be spoken and you are always imagining things for tourists.” [Rivera replied:] “I am tired of the tourist thing being blamed on me. And what do you live off, you old hijo de la chingada, if not from the tourists.”3

In life, los tres grandes feuded constantly, yet at Orozco’s funeral both Rivera and Siqueiros paid homage to the older artist. Likewise, upon Rivera’s death, Siqueiros con-

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Figure 2.1 Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera (left to right) at the time of the creation of the National Mural Commission (1947). Courtesy of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City.

tinued the tradition of praising a colleague against whom he had spoken. All three painters wrote or dictated autobiographies or memoirs, each feeling strongly that in their own words they could set the record straight. But each man’s records were colored by myth, distortion, and even outright lying. Orozco wrote his Autobiografía in 1945; it is a mere 112 pages long and concludes in 1936, when he arrived in Guadalajara to commence his great cycle of murals at the Hospicio Cabañas. He omits his early radical politics and his affair with Alma Reed. Rivera dictated his Confesiones de Diego Rivera shortly before his death in 1957 to the Spanish journalist Luis Suárez. The book was published posthumously in 1962. Just over 200 pages long, Rivera’s confessions are a picaresque romp, with the muralist making light of his onetime association with Leon Trotsky and emphasizing his love of beautiful women such as Mexican actresses María Felix and Silvia Pinal. Siqueiros’ memoirs, Me llamaban el coronelazo, were published in 1977 (by his widow), almost four years after his death, from a manuscript partly written by the artist and partly dictated to the journalist Julio Scherer García. It is a chronological memoir some 603 pages long, organized into twenty-seven chapters. A well-written and at times humorous account, it heroicizes its subject from his childhood to his last imprisonment (from 1960 to 1964), as a macho revolutionary.

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This chapter will explore the ideologies and styles in the works of los tres grandes, focusing on the representation of the Mexican Revolution and of Marxism. By “style” I mean what Meyer Schapiro, in 1962, called a system of forms whose qualities and meaningful expressions make visible both the personality of the artist and outlook of a group.

Orozco

In 1910 the Mexican Revolution began and spread to all levels of Mexican society. As Orozco recalled it, “I did not take any part whatsoever in the revolution, nothing bad happened to me and I was not in any kind of danger. For me the revolution was the most happy and diverting of carnivals. . . . I was never concerned with the cause of the Indians, never threw a bomb, or was executed by firing squad three times. . . . ” 4 Orozco’s cavalier humor transforms both the ideals and the brutality of the revolution into apolitical frivolity to hide his disillusionment with both the conflict itself and its aftermath. His only recorded political affiliation was with the anarcho-syndicalist organization Casa del Obrero Mundial. Its agenda was urban, pro-worker, secularist, and decidedly anti-peasant. The origins of anarcho-syndicalism can be traced to 1869 in the ideas of both Mikhail Bakunin and Eugene Hins, who theorized that the trade union movement and workers’ councils were weapons of class struggle that would bring about the libertarian society of the future. This anti-authoritarian revolutionary position would find many followers in the labor movements of Mexico, South America, and Cuba in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Orozco’s association with the Casa came through the painter Dr. Atl.5 When the Casa took the side of Venustiano Carranza and Obregón during the struggle against the forces of Villa and Zapata in 1915, Dr. Atl enlisted Orozco to join; Orozco became the political cartoonist of the Casa’s newspaper La Vanguardia, and as such he traveled throughout the countryside with its Red Battalions, who fought against the forces of Zapata and Villa. Orozco’s virulent anti-clericalism may date from this period, when he both participated in church lootings and burnings with fellow anarchists and witnessed the religious piety —for him a manifestation of superstition —of Zapata’s and Villa’s followers.6 The Casa’s heyday lasted from about 1915 to 1921, when its members transformed themselves from a revolutionary movement into an independent labor union, the Confederación General de Trabajadores. Orozco’s activism in the Casa was over by 1919–20,7 when the Casa’s politics shifted. As a labor union, the organization had a subordinated relation to the state. Despite the brevity of Orozco’s experience with anarchism, it left a profound mark on him: his skepticism about all authority, his tragic view of the poor and the exploited, and his sarcasm about the betrayal of revolutionary ideals are all rooted in anarchism. By the spring of 1927, the Confederación General de Trabajadores —which had clashed  

 

 

 

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with President Calles over his pro-US policies —was disempowered by the government, persecuted, and replaced by the less radical Confederación Obrera Mexicana, under the leadership of Luis Morones.8 Orozco would have felt keenly the persecution and repression of his one-time anarcho-syndicalist comrades. From 1922 through 1927 he flirted with the Mexican Communist Party (PCM). During this period the PCM was close politically to the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, of which Orozco was a founding member. Nevertheless, the artist’s anarchist sensibility— his libertarian notions of free individual action and hopes for the abolition of formal government—did not fit the Party, with its centralized structure and disciplined membership. According to the artist’s FBI file, he “was never a [p]arty member, he attended meetings and occasionally gave financial aid.”9 Orozco’s panel Revolutionary Trinity (figure 2.2), part of his first monumental works at San Ildefonso (1923–26), exemplifies powerfully this ideological moment and the artist’s developing style. On the first of the three floors of this cycle, Orozco is in transition, experimenting and deciding. Revolutionary Trinity evokes the Holy Trinity of Christianity, but replaces an image essential to Mexican Catholic culture with a new secular image of the Mexican Revolution. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are replaced by a peasant at lower left, a soldier in the center, and a worker at lower right. Both the peasant and worker are on their knees, the peasant praying with hands clasped and covering his face. The worker, who has lost both hands, looks angrily over his right shoulder at the towering figure of the soldier, who hovers or floats above the other two, a physical analog of the Holy Ghost’s ethereal hovering. The soldier is all brute physical strength: with powerful hands, arms, and shoulders he holds a rifle, ready for battle. But he cannot see; a red flag covers his head, obscuring his face. This is the trinity of a damaged revolution, in which the peasant escapes through prayer, the worker is physically broken, and the soldier’s vision and conscience are blocked by the red flag, which stands for the revolution itself. These austere, block-like figures resemble neoclassical shapes infused with expressionist emotion, conveyed in the bold reds, browns, grays, and blues of the palette. The figures, squeezed together in a triangular composition, are contained by the fiery red background and the charcoal gray ground on which they kneel —a tight and uncomfortable visual structure in which the soldier, peasant, and worker are condemned to their proximity with no escape possible. The art historian Justino Fernández argued in his monograph of 1942, Orozco, Forma e Idea, that the mural panels on the first floor, including Revolutionary Trinity, represent “the ideals.” Yet these images suggest the opposite of ideals. The Strike depicts the haloed and floating head of Christ above three paralyzed peasants holding a limp red flag; in The Trench (figure 2.3) a crucifixion scene is transformed into one with three peasant figures, one dead, one struggling, one weeping; and Destruction of the Old Order shows two peasants with bullet cartridges around their waists, looking back at what has been destroyed, rather than forward to what will be constructed. Thus, Orozco’s first  

 

 

 

 

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Figure 2.2 José Clemente Orozco. Revolutionary Trinity, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1923–26). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ SOMAAP, Mexico City and INBA.

mural program visually displays his ideology as a via negativa, a perpetually critical stance that embraces no simplistic possibilities and bluntly depicts the Revolution’s unfulfilled promise, its corruption and failure. Orozco’s murals at Dartmouth (1932 – 34), the last cycle he painted in the United States, give evidence of a shift and growth in his style. By this time, the artist had completely abandoned any belief in direct political agency. The anarcho-syndicalism of his youth gave way to an anarchist individualism, in which the only possibility of liberation lies in personal rebellion. Orozco’s palette expanded to bright yellows, deep greens, and purples; his drawing abandoned the forced geometry of the New School murals in favor of a clear delineation that is nevertheless expressionistic. His composition acquired a rhythm that unites all the panels into a sequence. The content, as fiercely anti-technological as it is anti-imperialist, derives its strength from the apocalyptic disgust expressed in the destructive themes of most of the panels of his murals over the years. For Orozco, agency is possible only in painting itself; it resists the world and  

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Figure 2.3 José Clemente Orozco. The Trench, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1923–26). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City and INBA.

questions its propaganda, and it creates a language that critiques political reality yet escapes the restraints of conventionally understood politics. In November 1935, as Orozco was about to begin his mural cycle in Guadalajara, he became a founding member of the Unión de Pintores y Escultores de Jalisco. At this time he was active in the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR, founded in 1933), representing it at the American Artists’ Congress in New York in 1936. These years of anti-fascist Popular Front activities transformed Orozco’s ideology temporarily into that of a fellow traveler, a typical reaction at a time when fascism was conquering Europe and Asia. In late 1937 Orozco began the fresco panel The Carnival of Ideologies (figure 2.4) on the right side of the stairwell at the Governor’s Palace in Guadalajara. The central panel depicts a gigantic Father Hidalgo starting the revolution with a torch,10 beneath which the masses have gone out of control; below seventeen red flags, humans are massacred. On the other side of the stairwell is The Ghosts of Religion in Alliance with Militarism (also

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Figure 2.4 José Clemente Orozco. The Carnival of Ideologies, Palacio de Gobierno, Guadalajara (1937–39). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City and INBA.

titled The Sinister Forces), where a faceless mass of people, all wearing bishop’s miters, carry heavy crosses. A soldier, this time in a general’s cap, again is covered by a red flag. Only his hand, holding a sword, is visible. Snakes lead this heap of dark forms toward the central panel. There, revolution, born out of the need for freedom and justice, has deteriorated into a chaos assailed by clericalism and militarism. The anticlericalism, which for Orozco typifies the urban elite, shows their real distance from the peasantry. His dim view of official religiosity is premised on his conviction that modernity and its progress are secular. Yet in his work the formal religiosity of the church and idiosyn-

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cratic spirituality remain separate and distinct: the first is portrayed as oppressive and backward; the second, as libertarian and possibly enlightening. In this mural, the Mexican state for Orozco is at once a national power and a corrupt entity. This is his view of the Mexican Revolution in the late 1930s. The Carnival of Ideologies is doubly significant in this view. In it the artist looks for answers in ideologies outside or beyond the Mexican Revolution, such as communism and fascism; he encounters not answers but a farce. In this carnival or circus Marx appears as a muscular dwarf at the bottom of a pyramid of buffoons. Above him, grotesque figures climb and fall on each other, juggle and exchange hammers, sickles, swastikas, and crosses. Among them, Hitler is recognizable, screaming and gesturing from a balcony at right, off-center below, Mussolini puffs out his chest, grinning, a hammer in one hand and a trowel in the other. Above them all is Stalin, mustachioed and dour, holding an enormous sickle and hammer. Behind him a masked military figure squeezes the Bolshevik’s arm and whispers into his ear. In Orozco’s mind, leftist and rightist ideologies and symbols are interchangeable — dogmatic clowns putting on a spectacle to entertain, dupe, and massacre the masses.11 Large areas of the works in this cycle are blacks and reds that shift from fiery to bloody; yellow, white, and grays in the three panels offset this oppressive darkness. The drawing is agitated but avoids caricature. It is a baroque expressionism, where pyramidal compositions are destabilized by the overall painterly application of the pigments. Style crystallizes the content; history is a delirious chaos in which truculent demagogues lead the people to slaughter. In the Governor’s Palace, Orozco returned to his earlier, iconoclastic anarchist politics, forgiving no one, ridiculing all —Christians, communists, and fascists. His anarchist individualism rejected institutional religion as well as mass movements organized into political parties; in each of them a power structure manipulates and oppresses the populace. His via negativa critiques and dismantles history so that its ruin is clearly visible. Only after acknowledging the rubble, he suggests, can humanity move beyond it. Orozco developed this vision further in the Hospicio Cabañas murals: in this cycle, forms become bolder, colors cooler, and the compositions more abstract. The sweeping narrative includes history from pre-Conquest to the 1930s, so that Philip II and Cervantes share the stage, pre-Conquest religions and Catholicism are intertwined in their brutality, and both Cortés and the Franciscans destroy the past and build a problematic future. The one glimmer of hope in this dystopic imagery is the dome, where Man on Fire ascends in apocalyptic enlightenment. How could Orozco get away with representing such bruising and parodic visions on public walls? By choosing to work in a capital in the more marginal provinces instead of Mexico City?12 Or by avoiding publicity (unlike Rivera and Siqueiros)? Or did his seemingly apolitical persona protect him from censorship by his patrons? Undoubtedly the government of Jalisco, during the Cárdenas presidency, was stable and secure enough to tolerate the artist’s visual critiques. These factors may all have played a role, as may  

 

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have Orozco’s symbolic/expressionistic style, which both avoided Rivera’s didacticism and refused Siqueiros’ mythic figuration of social realism. His message ignores the “revolutionary nationalism” of the Mexican State, proposing instead a turbulent vision of rebellion. Ultimately, Orozco’s ideology placed him in a position of independence. As an anarchist he could have no place in organized party politics; he therefore chose a solitary solidarity. That choice informed his vision of history and of the human condition as a process of constant struggle against betrayal and corruption, where sacrifice is neverending and redemption is at best a distant promise.

River a

Rivera returned to Mexico from his studies in Europe in July 1921, and that year traveled in Yucatán to acquaint himself with the daily life and crafts of the region. By early 1922, he had begun work on his first mural, the encaustic Creation in the Anfiteatro Bolívar at San Ildefonso. Stylistically this mural synthesizes Rivera’s earlier experiments with postimpressionism and cubism and his studies of Renaissance mural painting. Conceptually it reflects Vasconcelos’ intellectual agenda, for it depicts symbolically the fusion of the indigenous, Judeo-Christian, and Hellenistic traditions in a new and cosmic race. In the autumn of 1922, Rivera— along with Siqueiros, Orozco, and others— founded the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. In December of that year, Rivera joined the Partido Comunista Mexicano (Mexican Communist Party, or PCM). From the beginning he was a critical member of the PCM, expressing his sympathies for the peasantry and an almost anarchist irreverence toward the Party’s hierarchy and structure. In 1925 Rivera met the Marxist author and activist Bertram Wolfe. Their friendship and influence on each other would last until the late 1940s, when Wolfe started moving ideologically right. Following Wolfe’s advice, Rivera resigned from the PCM in 1925, stating that he would serve the communist cause better through his art than through Party activism. In 1926 he requested re-admission to the PCM, and was immediately reaccepted. In 1939, Bertram Wolfe published Diego Rivera: His Life and Times, the first biography of Rivera in the English language. Its tone was polemical, reflecting Rivera’s personality as well as Wolfe’s “Lovestonite” Marxism.13 All through the 1920s, Rivera participated in the significant Latin American leftwing organizations the Hands-Off Nicaragua Committee and the Liga Anti-Imperialista de las Américas. He was also involved in grassroots peasant organizations in Mexico and, unlike Orozco and Siqueiros, consistently expressed his sympathy with the Zapatista strain in the peasant movements. In September 1927, Rivera visited the Soviet Union for the first time, remaining there until June 1928 when he returned to Mexico. While in the USSR Rivera spoke out against proponents of academic Socialist Realism, defended Modernism, and became disillusioned with the Stalin regime.14 In 1930 the Calles government declared the PCM illegal.  

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During the 1920s to the 1930s Rivera produced what most scholars consider his most significant murals, at the Secretaría de Educación Pública (1923–28), Chapingo (1926– 27), and Palacio Nacional (1929–30, 1935). These frescoes display his mature style with great clarity and force. A synthesis of cubist structure in composition, neoclassical clarity of line, and a bright palette that reflects both pre-Conquest and post-impressionist painting, Rivera’s didactic narrative and epic breath make his style cohere.15 The Palacio Nacional stairway murals present a clear example, particularly in the central panel, which consists of five sections. Starting at the bottom with the fall of Tenochtitlán, Rivera builds a historical archaeology. The colonial world is built on the pre-Conquest one. Above the colonial section appear the liberal revolutions of the nineteenth century from Hidalgo through Juárez; those are superseded by the 1910 –1920 Revolution. Recognizable lead actors in the history of Mexico intermingle with generic actors representing “the people.” Tragic and gruesome events (massacres, the Inquisition, the depredations of dictators) are not central to the composition; they are another part of history. Rivera’s vision of history evolves and ascends in a series of Hegelian layers, with progress inevitable. The nationalist revolution of the twentieth century improves upon the liberal revolution of the nineteenth and will in turn be perfected by the Marxist one of the future. This future is depicted in Mexico Today and Tomorrow (figure 2.5), where a pyramidal structure of four layers shows the roots of social evil, exploitation, and repression of the Mexican people even as they are in the midst of struggle. Above, Marx, like a new Moses, holds a text from the Communist Manifesto while pointing to the promised land of the future, where collective farms and factories co-exist in harmony with nature. Beside Marx a revolutionary trinity —the antithesis of Orozco’s—consists of a worker, a soldier, and a peasant holding hands in solidarity as they all listen to Marx’s message. Behind them are factories, and behind those a crusty material representation of the sun, the source of energy for the universe. At right, balancing the harmonious farms and factories on the left, is what looks like the Zocalo, with the cathedral going up in flames and workers clashing with the army. The four layers of the pyramid from the bottom show peasants and welders working in horrific conditions; Frida Kahlo and her sister Cristina teaching children to read; peasants awaiting execution; police repressing a strike; the reactionary trinity of Mexico— church, army, and state— and their allies, high society and corrupt journalism. Opposite sides of this panel depict Marxist union laborers mocking doctrines being preached in a classroom, as well as an armed uprising. Rivera’s stylistic clarity is welded to his revolutionary vision. The polemical tone of this panel could have been acceptable only in the Mexico of President Cárdenas, with its left-wing nationalist and populist politics. Rivera maintains and explicates the optimistic vision of his politics in his clear drawing, sensuous forms, and bright colors. He is a pantheistic materialist, for whom humanity and the revolution function as cosmic substances in a concrete world. In Rivera’s vision, utopia is inevitable. On September 10, 1929, Rivera was expelled from the PCM for acts of disobedience  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 2.5 Diego Rivera. Mexico Today and Tomorrow, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City (1935). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City and INBA.

and failure to follow its policies. From this time to 1941, when Rivera again petitioned for re-admission to the Party (he was re-admitted after his fifth request, in 1954), he evolved ideologically from Lovestone to Trotsky to Mao. He enriched his artistic production by deviating from Stalinism and Soviet officialdom, so that his heretical Marxist period paralleled his most innovative murals. Rivera in his last years, however, came to exemplify artistic and political decadence. He returned to the PCM, and in 1955 –56 he visited the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, just as his artistic production was becoming simplistic and sentimental. As David Craven has written: “From the period of the Second World War until his death at seventy-one in 1957, Rivera found himself increasingly in the paradoxical position of being a national icon (albeit a controversial one) for the more conservative post-Cárdenas Mexican state. Similarly, and hardly less paradoxically, Rivera was also an international Cold War symbol for the Communist Movement, which alternately held him at arm’s  

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length and then embraced him. In short, Rivera became more famous and less ‘ultraleftist’ or independent.”16

Th e S i q u e i r o s - R i v e r a P o l e m i c , 193 4 – 1935  

In the May 29, 1934, issue of the New Masses, Siqueiros published an article titled “The Counter-revolutionary Road of Rivera.” This text began a polemic that lasted until after the assassination of Leon Trotsky on August 20, 1940. In his article Siqueiros attacked Rivera’s art as “Indigenist, folkloric, archeological (Picasso in Aztecland). In Mexico he was the Mexican chauvinist in indigenism, and when he arrived in the United States all of a sudden he gave importance to the continental aspect of his indigenism.” 17 Siqueiros technically defined Rivera’s art as retarded, incapable of working outside of traditional fresco, and lacking the technically inventive capacity needed for revolutionary art. The article represented Rivera’s politics as everything detestable to an authentic communist: Rivera was a bohemian who spent the years of the Mexican Revolution in his Parisian atelier; an opportunist who painted murals for the Calles regime and capitalists in the United States; and, finally, the painter of the Trotsky-Lovestone coalition.18 The following year, on August 27, 1935, Rivera spoke on the revolutionary role of the arts at the North American Congress for the Foundation of the New Education, which was held at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. The following day Siqueiros addressed the congress in a talk titled “Art,” in which he repeated his critiques of Rivera from the New Masses article. Rivera, who was in the audience, demanded time to respond, and the session degenerated into a shouting match between the artists and their supporters.19 Because the administration at the Palace of Fine Arts had canceled that evening’s opera, the artists and their partisans were free to regather in the theater to continue their dispute. According to the former Siqueiros archivist and art critic Raquel Tibol, the polemic continued into the early days of September, when the two grandes met at the baker’s trade union hall and signed an agreement with nine points,20 including a call for selfcriticism among the artists who participated in the mural movement, and an assertion of the need for a revolutionary politics that rejected romanticism and naïveté in favor of the mural as a strategic political space.21 In December 1935, Rivera published his response to Siqueiros in a pamphlet titled “Defense and Attack against the Stalinists.” It was republished in Argentina as an article in February 1936, in the magazine Claridad.22 With his usual humor, Rivera attacked Siqueiros and his allies as dogmatic Stalinists who were the enemies of both plurality in the arts and permanent revolution in politics. He specifically called Siqueiros an opportunist, trying to gain merit with the PCM after his expulsion in 1930, and an artist who had not yet produced a consistent body of work in the mural format. Rivera defended his own right to sell his work to capitalist patrons, because doing so extended the circulation of his art in a non-socialist world.23

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In the dispute, a Stalinist and a Trotskyite collided head-on. Siqueiros favored the Party line dictated from Moscow, synthesized with his version of a formally and technically innovative muralism; Rivera embraced Trotsky and the autonomy of modern art, and was comfortable with the presence of a contradictory nationalism in his murals. The substance of the polemic faded after World War II when, in 1954, Rivera was readmitted to the PCM. The Marxist novelist José Revueltas offered an interesting footnote to the clash in 1967 when he published his essay “The Mexican School of Painting and the Novel of the Revolution” in the magazine Espejo.24 In the essay, Revueltas took to task both Siqueiros and Rivera, blaming them for the self-alienation, lack of authenticity, and mythification of the mural movement. Revueltas believed that Siqueiros’ and Rivera’s political and artistic differences dissolved because their murals functioned as ideological fetishes and deformed concepts of the “National Myth of Mexico,” where ultimately they served the bourgeois and bureaucratic politics of the Mexican State.25

Siqueiros

In 1921, while in Europe, Siqueiros wrote and published “Tres Llamamientos de Orientación Actual a los Pintores y Escultores de la Nueva Generación Americana” in the magazine Vida Americana in Barcelona. In this piece, he stated: Let us abandon literary motifs. Let us devote ourselves to pure art! Let us reject theories anchored in the relativity of “national art.” We must become universal! Our own racial and regional physiognomy will always show through in our work. Our Free Schools are open air academies (as dangerous as the official academies in which at least we learn about the classic masters); in them we have commercially oriented teachers and a type of criticism that stifles the individuality of aspiring artists. Let us close our ears to the critical dictates of our poets; they produce beautiful literary articles which are completely divorced from the real value of our work.26

Already in this first piece of theoretical writing, Siqueiros attacked a naïve and picturesque notion of the national, as exemplified by the open-air schools and nativist subjects. He also declared himself an “internationalist” under the call of the “universal,” and an avant-gardist who favored experimental art over literary subjects. Siqueiros’ first mural project at San Ildefonso was left unfinished in 1924; what remains are formally interesting fragments and subjects (the burial of a worker, an Indian Christ). In the United States he completed significant murals in Los Angeles (Workers’ Meeting [destroyed], Tropical America, and Portrait of Mexico Today, all completed in 1932). Siqueiros’ artistic production from the late 1940s until his death, however, suffered from a bloated monumentalism and a mechanical repetition of techniques that had

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been innovative in the mid 1930s and early 1940s.27 It can be argued that his most avant-garde work ended with the collaborative Mexican Electricians’ Union mural of 1940.28 From 1922 through 1940 he executed five mural projects; most of his production consisted of easel paintings and prints. In 1957 Siqueiros began From the Porfiriato to the Revolution at Chapultepec Castle. This work, disrupted by the artist’s imprisonment from 1960 to 1964, is arguably his final statement on revolution and Marxism. The mural occupies what was initially a small room; Siqueiros increased the paintable area by installing a single wall in the enclosure, which he painted on both sides. The mural, which measures 419 square meters, depicts five themes: the martyrs of the Cananea strike, Porfirio Díaz and his regime, women who dance to delight the dictator, an uprising of “the people,” and the image of Díaz as a fossilized figure. Of these, the central panel —General Uprising of the Mexican People Against the Porfirian Regime (figure 2.6)— best crystallizes Siqueiros’ ideology and style. Painted on two walls, it shows a multitude of workers and peasants rising up to confront the soldiers of the regime. At the head of the revolt is a man holding the Mexican flag, he struggles with a soldier who is attempting to snatch it. Behind him a mother holds a child, and behind her, lines of figures march. Siqueiros combines portraits of anonymous men and women of all ages with those of recognizable historical figures, thus moving back and forth from the general to the specific. The figures in the foreground have fully modeled heads and hands, but into middle ground and background, hats, shawls, and shoulders repeat so that the masses look like automatons marching in unison to the rhythm of the revolt. Four workers carrying a slain revolutionary on their shoulders serve as the axis of the composition. Another man behind this group moves forward holding a red flag; farther back, identifiable figures push toward the revolution. These figures cross time periods, geography, and politics: Karl Marx and the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón, and the liberal José Martí are all compressed into the same history. On the left panel four soldiers and a woman march toward the viewer; behind them Carranza, Zapata, Obregón, and Calles seem to join arms and push forward. The overall color scheme is strident, even harsh, with bold yellows and an overabundance of reds flowing from panel to panel. The drawing, which achieves some structural power in the foreground heads, deteriorates into a schematic repetition of shapes. The entire mural explodes in dizzying perpetual movement. The “will of the people” is depicted as a frenetic wave, in which action seems devoid of thought. The revolution, this mural argues, is emerging, but never arrives. Siqueiros’ Marxism in this panel is muddled and confusing, closer to the ideas of a machista man of action than of an artist involved in class struggle.29 The colors and extreme movement of the composition in the relatively small space assault the viewer visually and emotionally. Siqueiros’ style here parodies that of his earlier work. Where once his work embodied an “American” classicism indebted to Olmec and Toltec forms, made tense and dynamic by movement acquired from both futurism and film,30 now it has become mannered, with some exaggerated forms and others  

 

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Figure 2.6 David Alfaro Siqueiros. From the Porfiriato to the Revolution, central panel, Palacio de Chapultepec, Mexico City (1957–66). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City and INBA. Photograph: Robin Greeley

repeated mechanically in the composition. This visual realization of Siqueiros’ ideology represents a knee jerk situational politics. Leonard Folgarait attributes it to “Siqueiros’ inability ever to develop for himself a systematic Marxist theory. . . . His shifts between Leninism and Stalinism, between pro-China and pro-Soviet sympathies bewildered his fellow communists.”31

Conclusion

Orozco, from an initial identification with anarcho-syndicalism, shifted to a belief in anarchist individualism whose critical reading of social conflict, his via negativa, was grounded in his disillusionment with the failed Mexican Revolution. His style, from its early block-like neoclassicism to his late tenebrous expressionism, elucidates this vision. If political agency is possible, it exists in painting itself. Rivera’s ultra-leftist Marxist period was also that of his most innovative mural work, from the late 1920s to the end of the 1930s. The transcultural modernity of this work and its synthesis of cubist composition, classical linear clarity, and bright palette presents a life-affirming vision of inevitable revolution. From 1941 until his death, Rivera’s pilgrimage back into the fold of the PCM is evident in the anecdotal and sentimental decadence of his painting. In Siqueiros’ work we find a disconnect between bold formal experimentation through the 1930s and a politics dependent on a Leninist-Stalinist content provided by the PCM. His

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best pictorial achievements occur despite his crude and simplistic version of Marxism, a version of politics that would infect his art, which deteriorated to the point of grotesque self-parody during the last three and a half decades of his life. Nevertheless, beyond the mythology of los tres grandes, beyond the co-opting of their imagery by the post-Revolutionary Mexican state, the visual legacy of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros remains one of the great adventures of modernism —a fragmented, paradoxical modernism charged with both utopian belief and disillusionment, where monumental, figural visual vocabularies at their best reflected and critiqued the historical experience of Mexico.  

Notes

1.  Manifesto of the Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores, in Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1828–1980 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), Appendix 7.2, pp. 323–24. 2. Ibid. 3.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, Me llamaban el coronelazo (México: Grijalbo, 1977), pp. 472 – 73. This and all translations from the Spanish are by the author. 4.  Ibid., p. 34. 5.  Gerardo Murillo (1875– 1964), Dr. Atl— painter, theorist, and vulcanologist— is credited for being the first to promote the idea of a modern, revolutionary mural painting in Mexico. His own work consists of landscapes. Politically, Dr. Atl evolved from anarchosyndicalism to fascism in the 1930s. 6.  The traditional communal religiosity of the Indian followers of both Zapata and Pancho Villa was perceived as backward and superstitious by the secular urban-based radical groups such as the anarchists and Marxists. See Jean Meyer, Historia de los cristianos en América Latina. Siglos XIX y XX, 2nd ed. (México, D.F.: Editorial Vuelta, 1991). 7.  Luis Cardoza y Aragón, letter to the author, October 6, 1991. 8.  John M. Hart, Anarchism & the Mexican Working Class, 1860– 1931, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), pp. 173 –74. 9.  US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, José Clemente Orozco file, No. 403427, p. 46. 10.  Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753–1811) is regarded as the leader of the Mexican Independence movement (1810 –11). Successful at first in his revolt (with an impromptu army of Indians and mestizos) against the Spanish authorities, he was captured in Coahuila and sent to Chihuahua, where he was excommunicated, judged, and executed by firing squad. 11.  Although it is not clear when Orozco completed this cycle, 1939 is usually the assigned year. This was the year of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and the dismemberment of Poland by both the Nazis and Soviets. Orozco is either reflecting this reality or, if painted earlier, prophesying it. 12.  Orozco’s patron was Everardo Topete, governor of Jalisco (1935– 39). Topete was an ally of Mexican President Cárdenas, who shared in the president’s “practical populism.” During Cárdenas’ struggle with former president Plutarco Elías Calles in 1935 – 36, Topete  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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was among the majority of governors who supported Cárdenas. According to Orozco’s assistant Jorge Martínez, there is no concrete or anecdotal evidence that Topete had any problems with the artist’s mural program. Letter from Jorge Martínez to the author, July 9, 1996. 13.  Bertram Wolfe was Jay Lovestone’s ideological aide from 1928 to 1941. Lovestone represented the “Right Opposition” to Stalinism within the international Left. 14.  Cardoza y Aragón. 15.  This epic breadth has a literary equivalent in Pablo Neruda’s Canto general (1950), which was in fact influenced by both Rivera’s murals (sections I through VII) and Siqueiros’ (sections VIII through XV). Both muralists illustrated a deluxe edition of the poem in 1950. The best discussion of this inter-relationship of the visual and the literary is to be found in the introduction by Enrico Mario Santí in the Catedra critical edition of Canto general (Madrid, 1990). 16.  David Craven, Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist (New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1997), pp. 151 –52. 17.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, “El camino contrarrevolucionario de Rivera,” in Palabras de Siqueiros, Raquel Tibol, ed. (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), p. 115. 18.  Ibid., pp. 115–22. 19. Maricela González Cruz Manjarrez, La polémica Siqueiros-Rivera. Planteamientos estético-políticos 1934– 35 (México, D.F.: Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, 1996), pp. 25– 26. This book, published on the centenary of Siqueiros’ birth, is the most complete presentation and analysis of the polemic between the two artists. See also Esther Acevedo’s chapter in this volume. 20.  Ibid., p. 28. The incident of August 28 was reported in the newspapers Excélsior and El Universal on August 30, 1935. Raquel Tibol, interview by the author, June 22, 1995. 21.  Ibid., p. 161, Appendix, Acuerdos resultantes de la polémica, firmados por Siqueiros y Rivera. The five-page typed document was in the personal archive of Roberto Guarda Berdecio, an assistant of Siqueiros. 22.  Ibid., p. 27. 23.  Diego Rivera, “Defensa y ataque contra los stalinistas,” in Documentación sobre el arte mexicano, Raquel Tibol, ed. (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974), pp. 73–74. 24.  José Revueltas, “Escuela Mexicana de Pintura y novela de la revolución,” in Cuestionamientos e intenciones, Vol. 18 of Revueltas’ Obras Completas (México, D.F.: Era, 1978), pp. 241–74. 25.  Ibid., pp. 260–61. 26.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Tres llamamientos de orientación actual a los pintores y escultores de la nueva generación americana” in Palabras de Siqueiros, Raquel Tibol, ed. (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), p. 20. 27.  See Leonard Folgarait’s So Far from Heaven: David Alfaro Siqueiros’ The March of Humanity and Mexican Revolutionary Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), as well as Luis Cardoza y Aragón’s essay “Polyforum” republished in Antología (México, D.F.: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1987). Cardoza y Aragón’s essay originally appeared in the Mexican press shortly after the Polyforum was inaugurated in December 1971. Both of these authors analyze the artist’s late style and the contradictions of patronage of his last mural.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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28.  See Jennifer A. Jolly’s chapter in this volume. 29.  Mexican mural painting reflects a strong machista sensibility throughout, particularly in the work of Siqueiros. See Robin Adéle Greeley’s chapter in this volume dealing with the artists associated with the Contemporáneos group as oppositional to muralism. 30.  Mari Carmen Ramírez, “El clasicismo dinámico de David Alfaro Siqueiros. Paradojas de un modelo excéntrico de vanguardia,” in Otras rutas hacia Siqueiros, Olivier Debroise, ed. (México, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes & CURARE, Espacio Crítico para las Artes, 1996), pp. 130–32. 31.  Folgarait, p. 41.  

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3 “All Mexico on a Wall” Diego Rivera’s Murals at the Ministry of Public Education

Mary K. Coffey There are two families of artists: those who define themselves by their negations and exclusions and those who aspire to integrate different manners and styles in their work. Diego belongs to the second. . . . In the strict domain of painting, he was not a revolutionary or an innovator: he was an assimilator and an adapter. Like Poussin’s, his eclecticism was a search for a complete art that would include many tendencies.  

— Octavio Paz1

To begin, we place two iconic frescoes by Diego Rivera side by side. The Liberation of the Peon (1923) (figure 3.1) represents Rivera the popular-nationalist, the Homer of Mexico’s violent revolution and the odyssey of her Indian and peasant populations. The Distribution of Arms (1928) (figure 3.2) reveals Rivera the Marxist propagandist agitating for the worldwide historical proletarian revolution to come. The former opens onto a vista of the Mesa Central. In the foreground four revolutionary soldiers release a degraded, darkskinned peon, while a hacienda smolders in the distance. The latter counters the naturalism and agrarian theme of this view with a scene of urban unrest relayed through a dense composition of overlapping forms. A communist worker rallies his peers to join a phalanx of campesinos riding into town. Along the proscenium a young Frida Kahlo passes out weapons, Tina Modotti disperses ammunition, and David Alfaro Siqueiros joins the rank and file in working-class solidarity. Both panels derive from the vast cycle that Rivera executed at the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) between 1923 and 1928. The differences in style and ideological emphasis testify to Rivera’s development as a mural artist over the five years he worked on the commission. During that period he mastered the fresco technique, elaborated a narrative approach to architectural space, and developed an often-emulated visual language that has become for many synonymous with the Mexican mural renaissance. For several scholars, the changes evident in this juxtaposition signal the artist’s formal and

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political maturation from an Italianate neo-primitivist to an engaged social realist, from a humanizing positivist toward a more radical materialist.2 For others, these vagaries reveal Rivera’s strategic self-promotion and capitulation to the ideological pretensions of his state patrons, an increasingly corrupt political regime that cloaked itself in the rhetoric of popular socialism.3 These explanations, however, obscure Rivera’s sophisticated sense of style as an index of politics and history. When analyzing this transitional work from the standpoint of the present, we should not lose sight of the political and economic vulnerability of the new regime; the social devastation and lack of civil society left in the wake of the Revolution; and the desire of politicians, artists, and intellectuals to raise the profile and increase the esteem and power of Mexico in a racist and economically imperialist international order. In retrospect, there is a clear shift from 1923 to 1928, from Obregón’s charismatic caudillismo to Calles’ corporate party system, from Vasconcelos’ laissez-faire approach to content to an emerging social-realist orthodoxy that privileged Rivera and his followers. The visual and ideological power of Rivera’s SEP cycle would play an important role in this transformation. This essay analyzes the artist’s aesthetic program across the cycle as a whole. Following Paz’s insight, it argues that the different “manners” and “styles” evident in the SEP murals reveal an intentional integration of “multiple tendencies” in the service of a “complete art” that could encompass the complexity of Mexico’s history, geography, and people or, as Bertram Wolfe would claim, put “all Mexico on a wall.”4 In the different visual strategies Rivera employs, we can appreciate both the scope and logic of this project. As he painted at the SEP, certainly he matured as a fresco artist and his personal style evolved. But his stylistic changes were also calibrated to appeal to the administrators and politicians in the post-Revolutionary state and thereby to win a permanent place for mural art in its cultural programs. Likewise, by combining different formal languages, he strove to communicate a vision of the nation that was able to reflect its highly stratified social classes. The great accomplishment of Rivera’s SEP cycle was his successful visualization of the ideals put forth by the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors in its 1923 Manifesto: to create an ideologically focused art, rooted in “indigenous traditions,” that reflected the struggles of peasant, worker, and soldier in Mexico’s “transition from an old order to a new one.”5 In so doing, Rivera also offered the political regime the appearance of being a “revolutionary” state responsive to the demands of a mobilized peasantry as well as the growing power of a small but vocal confederation of communist and socialist labor organizations. In the cycle, Rivera depicts a cross-class alliance unified by its common origins in an indigenized popular culture. Thus his SEP frescoes offered a vision of national unity at a moment when the state was at war with the Cristeros and when most elites viewed Mexico’s fractured popular classes as, at best, a drag on national development — and, at worst, a guerrilla force ever ready to renew armed conflict.  

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Figure 3.1 Diego Rivera. The Liberation of the Peon, fresco, first floor, south wall, Court of Labor, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1923). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

To be sure, Rivera’s SEP cycle offers his own highly ideological take on the Revolution, agrarian reform, and socialist politics. The artist acknowledged as much when he declared in his 1960 autobiography that in the SEP murals he sought to “reflect the social life of Mexico as I saw it, and through my vision of the truth to show the masses the outline of the future.”6 What follows is a close reading of Rivera’s “vision of the truth” that pays particular attention to his stylistically encoded storytelling. This reading takes a discursive approach that does not presume that the mural corresponds with “reality.” Rather, I treat mural art as a productive material practice that endeavored to shape the real toward specific ideological ends.7 Although Rivera pursued “eclecticism” in the name of Mexico’s popular classes, his mural spoke more directly to the urban elite. Rivera’s working- and middle-class public would not have perceived or understood his aesthetic synthesis. The peasants

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Figure 3.2 Diego Rivera. The Distribution of Arms, fresco, third floor, south wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1928). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

for whom he claimed to paint would have had virtually no access to his frescoes, and the record of public reception suggests that his actual audience was made up of bureaucrats and members of the bourgeoisie. Bureaucrats viewed his art as potentially useful propaganda; the bourgeoisie saw it as incoherent and incendiary. Only a small circle of leftist intellectuals seems to have understood the stylistic gambit Rivera used while he was working at the SEP. When he completed the cycle, however, the political utility of his integration of Giotto’s Christian humanism, modernist experimentation with space and form, and agitprop didactics became evident and Rivera became a de-facto “state artist.” A paradox of Rivera’s accomplishment is that his “vision of the truth” succeeded so well that it continues to determine public memory of the events and peoples depicted in it. As Francisco Reyes Palma notes, with sanguine admiration, mural art responded

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to the chaos of the Revolution by effecting a “radical change at the core of the social imaginary” and a “founding order, even at the expense of historical accuracy.”8 What was that “founding order”? How did Rivera’s formal and conceptual choices respond to and negotiate the demands of his patrons, the political and social chaos of postRevolutionary Mexico, his own artistic ambition, and his desire (and that of his peers) to promote the cause of mural art as a tool for social engagement and change? In 1923, José Vasconcelos contracted a team of artists to decorate the walls of the new SEP headquarters. The building’s three stories enclose two large interior patios with arched passageways that afford nearly 17,000 square feet of wall surface.9 Initially, in the collective spirit of the recently drafted Syndicate Manifesto, Rivera worked with a team that included fellow artists Xavier Guerrero, Jean Charlot, Amado de la Cueva, and the mason Luis Escobar. Within five months, however, Rivera demoted his peers and claimed the project for himself.10 With the exception of four frescoes on the first floor and the state emblems on the second, the 124 panels of the cycle were conceived, designed, and painted by Rivera. In the architecturally challenging corridors Rivera painted an epic narrative that unfolds for visitors as they move through the space. On these walls Rivera presents Mexico’s recent revolution as prologue to a proletarian one to come. He visualizes this “progressive” tale in an iconography of Mexican geography and popular tradition that moves from the rural countryside to the city, from exploitation to liberation, from Zapatismo to the death of the capitalist system. Style, too, mobilizes the narrative, as Rivera shifts from pictorial naturalism to social realism, informed by the lessons of Cubism. These deliberate stylistic shifts offer the key to interpreting Rivera’s political message across the cycle. The artist signaled his encyclopedic intentions from the outset. At the SEP’s inauguration in 1923, Vasconcelos described the projected cycle as “Concerning the decoration of the corridor walls, our great artist, Diego Rivera . . . plans a frieze ascending along the staircase. Its subject matter starts with the sea level, and its tropical vegetation melts into the landscape of our high plateau and culminates with the volcanoes.”11 Over the next five years Rivera moved away from the humanist allegory seen in his first mural commission (Creation, 1923, at the National Preparatory School) and developed a more complex dialectical approach to historical narrative and the use of space. This development was nascent in the project Vasconcelos describes, and the stairwell images, with their evolutionary structure, relay in microcosm the themes of the larger cycle.

Th e C o u r t o f L a b o r

The murals in the first courtyard depict peasant and artisanal labor in rich earth tones on the first floor. The second floor is decorated with esoteric symbols related to professional work, painted in grisaille. The third floor includes portraits of martyrs, allegories,

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and a scene depicting fraternity between worker and peasant. The three floors, taken together, suggest a hierarchy that replicates the one in Creation. At the National Preparatory School, Rivera allegorized spiritual evolution through education in a single image: a nude man and woman seated along the mural’s base gaze up toward idealized figures who represent theological and cardinal virtues linking the humans to the symbols of divine knowledge represented at the top of the composition. In the hierarchy Rivera set up at the SEP, images of peasant and working-class labor, depicted on the first floor, establish the foundation of the new social order. This floor supports a second, decorated with emblems of professional work, implying that intellectual labor is undergirded by the physical labor of the popular classes. The third-floor images emphasize political ideals. Painted on the top floor and at the apex of a hierarchy of labor, these ideals espouse the virtues of work, social equality, and secularized Christian confraternity. As one moves up the floors, Rivera’s imagery argues that the social ideals guiding the formation of a new more equitable society originate in the humble work of everyday people rather than in the endeavors of the educated alone. Rivera divided the three sides of the first-floor courtyard into regions: the tropical South (north wall), central plateau (south wall), and mineral rich North (east wall). He mixes images of traditional hand labor and industrialized work. In one scene, a campesino holds sugarcane while conversing with Tehuanas — women from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec renowned for their beauty and traditional style of dress — in the lush landscape of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In another, the factory workers process the cane into sugar. Workers stretch in unison to stir vats of sugar or bend to pour the liquid into molds. The theme of the first-floor murals is the virtue of hard work. The exploitation and liberation of the worker are likewise depicted, however. With these scenes the political ideology of the cycle comes into focus. In a sequence of powerful images, peasants enter and exit claustrophobic mines while their employers fleece them. Campesinos lug bags of grain that they have harvested to be weighed as the domineering hacendado and his accountant watch. Here, Rivera demonstrates what he had learned from the Renaissance frescoes in southern Italy and Giotto’s Arena Chapel cycle (1305 –6). In both composition and style, Rivera’s Entry into the Mines (1923) recalls Giotto’s Christ on the Road to Calvary; Leaving the Mines (1923) invokes his Crucifixion; and The Liberation of the Peon (figure 3.1) evokes Giotto’s Lamentation. But Rivera secularizes Giotto’s subject matter to craft peasants as Christ-like martyrs, attempting, like Giotto, to use a vernacular style to communicate with a Catholic public. At the Arena Chapel, the Church liberates humanity; in Rivera’s cycle, the Revolution brings salvation. By emphasizing the brutalities perpetrated against miners and agrarian workers, Rivera refers obliquely to the uprising at the Cananea Copper Mines (1906) that helped to mobilize Pancho Villa’s Northern Division and the struggle for agrarian reform in central Mexico led by Emiliano Zapata. The followers of Villa and Zapata, unlike Venus 

 

 

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tiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist army, were from the peasant and working classes. They fought against the vestiges of colonial feudalism and the abusive practices of foreign-owned industries operating along the nation’s northern border. Rivera obscures the factionalism of the Revolution, however, sidelining Villa as well as the Constitutionalist cause in favor of Zapatismo and its call for “land and liberty.” In Zapata’s agitation for communal land reapportionment, Rivera found an equivalent for the socialist redistribution of wealth. Likewise, as Mari Carmen Ramírez argues, Rivera, in privileging Zapatismo, reflected the desire of the “Sonoran Dynasty” (the generals who dominated the post-Revolutionary state) to exploit Zapata’s “hero cult” to gain the support of a recalcitrant peasantry that the fledgling government desperately needed.12 In the Court of Labor, the people are depicted as one with the land. The most idealized landscapes are located in the South, where the mural locates Mexico’s racial and cultural authenticity in the legendary beauty of the Tehuana. Depicted as emblems of natural bounty, Rivera’s Tehuanas represent the national body — a feminized, indigenous body— that would give birth, both literally and symbolically, to a new mestizo nation— one that is racially and culturally mixed. In this way, he included women in the new society as the reproducers of race and culture. As Adriana Zavala demonstrates, however, the tendency of post-Revolutionary artists to feminize Indian culture only reinscribed a Creole patriarchal authority that endorsed mestizaje (the blending of Spanish and Indian “blood” and culture) on its own terms.13 Images of the Tehuana abound in post-Revolutionary art. Artists represented the culture of Tehuantepec as matriarchal and as an autochthonous form of socialism. The Tehuana’s distinctive costume, understood as a pre-modern style of dress, was praised for its purported authenticity and endurance. Miguel Covarrubias, in his book Mexico South, makes the investment of intellectuals in the Tehuana costume clear: “Economic differences [among the Tehuanas] do not mean much,” but “there is an aristocracy of citified girls who bob their hair and wear shoes, stockings, and tight fitting modern dresses, unbecoming in comparison with the stately, elegant, and colorful native costume.”14 In the difference between the Isthmus women in “colorful native costume” and their “citified” sisters who dressed in the latest international fashions, Covarrubias found a metaphor for the nation’s struggle for political autonomy and cultural authenticity in the onslaught of foreign influence and capital. In works like Cobarrubias’, the Tehuana was an emblem of “Mexico South”; this native costume was linked through a chain of culture and resistance to the radical socialism of the Yucatan and subaltern Mexico— what would later be dubbed “deep Mexico.”15 The Tehuana, in Rivera’s SEP murals, authenticates and anchors his vision of popular and proletarian revolution in “deep” Mexico. Thus, his cycle belongs to the broader intellectual project to use the Tehuana’s supposed beauty and strength to resuscitate Indian culture in the eyes of urban elites. With the “comely” Tehuana offsetting the specter of armed peasants in his murals, Rivera presented a reassuring image of Mexico’s indigenous peoples.  

 

 

 

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C o u r t o f F i e s ta s

In the second courtyard, Rivera’s linking of popular or “deep” Mexico, the agrarian revolution, and contemporary socialism is more explicit. In the Court of Fiestas, he equated three social sectors—the rural peasantry, the urban working class, and an amorphously defined popular class— that did not necessarily seek common cause. As labor in the murals gives way to fiestas, a brighter palette replaces earth tones. In the Court of Fiestas, the open vistas and Giotto-inspired compositions of the Court of Labor disappear as Rivera’s frescoes become denser and more clearly modernist. Like the first courtyard, the second has images dispersed across three of the four sides of the building on all three floors. On the first floor, Rivera depicts scenes of popular rituals along with three large sequences painted between 1923 and 1924: Distribution of the Land (plate 2) (south wall), May Day (figure 3.3) (west wall), and The Market/Tianguis (figure 3.4) (north wall). On the second floor, Jean Charlot, Xavier Guerrero, and Amado de la Cueva painted renderings in grisaille of state emblems. On the third floor, Rivera illustrates revolutionary and proletarian corridos (songs). As with the Court of Labors, the progression from first to third floor represents a hierarchy. In the Court of Fiestas, Rivera argues that the political organization and revolution originate in the spirit of resistance that can be discerned in Mexico’s popular celebrations. This is why the rituals associated with the Day of the Dead are given such prominence. Like the Tehuana, the Day of the Dead festival is unique to Mexico. Its features, such as graveside altars, macabre sugar skulls, and the spirit of “laughing at death” reveal a complex syncretism that blends Mesoamerican and Spanish Catholic ritual. On the first floor, Rivera devotes many panels to the rituals associated with the Day of the Dead, from the explosion of papier-maché Judas figures to graveside offerings at family plots to the festive boating parties at Xochimilco. Interspersed among these panels are depictions of traditional dances such as the Yaqui Deer Dance and the Zandunga. Although Rivera focuses on distinct culture groups and the popular classes in the panels dedicated to traditional celebrations, he also emphasizes social unity regardless of status. The cultural rituals that bond Mexicans, he suggests, transcend ethnic and class differences. For example, in Santa Anita (1923– 24) a “citified girl” with bobbed blond hair, “tight fitting modern dress,” and heavy makeup stands among more “elegant” and “stately” Indian beauties to purchase poppies for the Festival of Flowers. While this Mexican flapper would irk Covarrubias, Rivera presents her as a legitimate Mexican, even if artificiality makes her less comely than the women at her side. Rivera peoples his crowd scenes with dandies, bureaucrats, charros (Mexican cowboys), prostitutes, and workers purchasing fruit waters, tamales, and sugar skulls from vendors in Mexico’s colorful urban markets. These frescoes locate us in the street and among the “people.” In them Rivera brings the boisterous world outside Vasconcelos’ SEP indoors and affirms it as a source of social  

 

 

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progress and historical change. In the three large sequences that anchor the walls of the first-floor cycle, he shows alliances across classes. With Distribution of the Land, May Day, and The Market/Tianguis, Rivera asserts parity between the organic social democracy of everyday co-mingling in the street with more formal mechanisms of social equality: Zapata’s agrarian reform and the Communist Party. As Ramírez notes, these three large sequences mark a temporal shift in Rivera’s cycle from an allegorical past to the historical present and a prophetic future. Likewise, they signal an aesthetic shift from “the synthetic, symbolic language of the Court of Labor to a form of illustration based on narrative” that would come to the fore in his execution of the third-floor corridos.16 Thus, in these three sequences, style becomes important to Rivera’s attempts to overcome ideological differences between Zapata’s agrarianism and the state-endorsed Communist Party. His visual strategies link those two elements to the popular market as expressions of a “deep” Mexico still discernible in the vibrant folkways of the people. Distribution of the Land (1923– 24) (see plate 2) stretches across three panels linked by Rivera’s incorporation of the doorframes into the illusionism of the depicted space. A crowd of white-clad peasants gathers in the open air to witness the partial restitution of their communal lands, or ejidos. In the central panel, Rivera shows pueblo elders lodging their land claims. Two bureaucrats examine their request as another holds a map of local estates and a third gestures toward the landscape beyond the crowd. By dedicating a large amount of wall space to this topic, Rivera situates agrarian reform, and thus Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, as the major accomplishment of the Mexican Revolution. And by including a posthumous portrait of Zapata, Rivera implies that his proposal, articulated in the Plan de Ayala (November 25, 1911), was actualized by the post-Revolutionary Constitution. In this instance, Rivera takes liberty with the facts and deliberately obscures the betrayal of Zapata, crafting the Revolution as an essentially socialist struggle. Distribution of the Land thus constitutes the peasant equivalent of May Day, where the workers’ rights guaranteed by Article 123 establish the precondition of proletarian organization that in turn will bring the revolution to its logical conclusion. May Day (1923–24) (figure 3.3) also spans three panels. Denim-clad workers gather before a congested industrial corridor on the left. To the right, a peasant-filled landscape reiterates the scene of gathered peasants in Distribution of the Land. In the central image, proletarian and peasant organizations unite to celebrate the workers’ holiday. Over the doorframe two small boys, clad in the costumes of urban and rural labor, hold a red banner that proclaims: “True civilization will be harmony between men and the earth and among men.” The crowd scenes are agitated: leaders raise their fists and deliver speeches while participants wave red flags emblazoned with communist and Zapatista slogans. This sequence equates the struggle for agrarian reform in Mexico (a metaphor for the Revolution) with the battle for workers’ rights everywhere (the cause of the international communist organization the Third International). Whereas Rivera uses a flat, simplified naturalism in Distribution of the Land, here he pays homage to the agitprop style of socialist propaganda by incorporating signage and party slogans.  

 

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Figure 3.3 Diego Rivera. May Day, fresco, first floor, west wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1923–24). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

Rather than depict an organized gathering of workers, in The Market/Tianguis (1923– 24) (figure 3.4) Rivera chronicles a cross-section of Mexicans going about their business in the market. “Tianguis” (meaning “market”) derives from the Nahuatl language and refers to the covered outdoor markets that have been a staple of Mexican life since before the Conquest. Like the Tehuana costume, the market is a surviving indigenous folkway and therefore represents the ongoing presence of “deep” Mexico in the nation’s modern capital. In these scenes, Rivera’s mastery of cubist devices comes to the fore. Rivera stacks repeated flat forms to give a sense of shallow space. For example, he duplicates wide round sombreros throughout the middle of the composition. While Rivera suggests a horizon line along the top of the image, the perspective does not recede logically toward a single vanishing point in deep space. Rather, he presents the viewer with simultaneous points of view—much as Paul Cézanne does in his many still-life paintings. Along the base of the wall, standing figures face us directly. Instead of depicting the stretched canvas shades that cover vending kiosks as thin white lines in profile, which would correspond with the spatial logic of the figures, Rivera portrays them as  

 

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Figure 3.4 Diego Rivera. The Market/Tianguis, fresco, first floor, north wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1923–24). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

trapezoids seen from above in a bird’s eye view that tilts up the composition, as Cézanne had tilted the tabletops in his canvases. Rivera makes other references to the cubist analysis of pictorial space —for example, by slyly invoking Picasso’s illusionistic use of chair-caning and wood comb in the crosshatched wooden crates he distributes throughout the composition. The rounded gourds painted at the right in the central panel invoke the sphere; pineapples and steel funnels recall the cone; and the many boxes index the cube. This painted scene is no simplistic “window onto the world,” but a witty demonstration of Rivera’s facility with avant-garde techniques. The formal complexity of these scenes of social organization also gives them a political inflection. Whereas the images of rural and industrial labor in the first court humanize and sanctify Mexico’s popular classes, the sophisticated social realism of images in the second court argues for an equally sophisticated political society. In these three large sequences, Rivera asserts that socialism continues the Mexican Revolution, itself an organic expression of the egalitarian values of “deep” Mexico and its popular culture. This is the ideological argument of the mural cycle as a whole.  

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Rivera sacrifices historical accuracy and rationalizes Mexico’s violent past by situating the Revolution in a progressive narrative in which he interprets popular values that, for him, prefigure a proletarian revolution yet to come. In the process he Mexicanizes working-class politics and lifts the demand for agrarian reform to international significance as part of the world-historical struggle against capitalism. All the while he argues that these demands issue from the deep values of the Mexican people, not from a foreign ideology. In the third-floor murals, Rivera reinforces this connection between the agrarian struggle and a still-to-come proletarian revolution. Rivera illustrates Mexican revolutionary and international proletarian corridos in a visual loop that implies continuity between one political struggle and the other. The third-floor cycle begins with The Distribution of Arms (1928) (figure 3.2) and reiterates the solidarity between peasant and proletarian depicted in May Day. This image, however, is set in a prophetic future, signaled in the lyrics on the red ribbon that frames the vignette: “And so the proletarian revolution will be . . .” Subsequent scenes depict the suffering and resilience of an armed population fighting for their rights. There are views from the trenches and views that elaborate a post-combat social order in which the poor are fed, the ignorant educated, and the old social hierarchy overturned. Rifle-bearing peasants and hammerand-sickle wielding workers harass and humiliate the elite. Rivera uses an illusionistic archway to frame each scene of the third-floor suite and to establish a shallow sense of space. The painted arches conjure the trompe l’oeil techniques of cubist paintings as well as Giotto’s rendering of the imitation marble veneer at the Arena Chapel. The faux architecture also supports the ribbon of text that directs viewers from one panel to the next as they follow the narrative around the corridor. Midway through the cycle, the proletarian song ends and a revolutionary corrido resumes. The lyrics of this song issue from the mouth of a peasant guitarist. Here, in one of many instances where Rivera quotes Mesoamerican imagery, he renders the song-ribbon in the guise of a Maya speech glyph. Through these references to both Western and nonWestern visual techniques, Rivera associates his “social realism” with both European and ancient indigenous art. The corrido panels bring together some of the styles Rivera employed in the three large sequences on the first floor: cubist devices, a simplified naturalism, and agitprop realism. This integration of competing formulations of mass culture and politics is precisely the “outline of the future” that Rivera sought to conjure with his “vision of the truth.” For in these future-oriented vignettes, the social antagonisms generated by colonialism and years of armed conflict are slowly overcome as socialism unites different ethnic groups and classes into a nation capable of participating in an international industrial order vouchsafed by a world-historical proletarian revolution in which Mexico, by implication, takes the lead. In some of Rivera’s most humorous, dense, and visually economical images he juxtaposes scenes of capitalist society with prophetic scenes of Mexican socialism. For

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example, in Wall Street Banquet (1926) a scene of American monopolists (J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford) makes witty references to the fable of King Midas’ golden touch.17 The safe, out of which gilded tickertape streams, resembles a mechanical ass with light bulbs for eyes and megaphones for ears. Financiers dine on champagne and stock receipts in the arid atmosphere of a bank vault. Rivera signals the social decay of US capitalism by distorting the physiognomy of these financiers and their consorts. Rivera contrasts their greed with images of socialist society. In Our Daily Bread (1928) (figure 3.5), a dark-skinned communist worker presides over a humble meal of bread and fruit. The figures seated at the table represent the young and old, light and dark, working, popular, and middle classes, demonstrating the social unity of the new political order. Rivera situates their frugal repast in a productive landscape of factories and grain silos. A Tehuana bearing a woven basket of indigenous fruits stands behind the worker, marking the location as Mexican. Behind her, peasants, laborers, and soldiers gather as participants and guardians in the new social order. Our Daily Bread is hieratically ordered in a shallow pictorial space that recedes as forms overlap along a vertical axis. The Tehuana’s pose echoes the industrial architecture behind her. In this way Rivera recalls the frescoes from the first floor’s Court of Labor and suggests that industrial modernity will be grounded in the “authentic” values and culture of “deep” Mexico, which she represents. In this world, social differences cease to matter because an egalitarian political order and a socially just economic system enable a hybrid society. Unlike Vasconcelos’ spiritually directed racial eugenics, Rivera’s vision of mestizaje is social, with culture as its medium. Just as the tianguis served as a model for the political organization of the Communist Party, the Tehuana is equated visually with industry, and her presence insists that “deep” Mexico will not be sacrificed to technological modernity. Like the Tehuana’s costume, indigenous culture will persevere. Bertram Wolfe, Rivera’s biographer, used Rivera’s SEP frescoes to illustrate Portrait of Mexico (1937), his socialist account of the country’s post-Revolutionary transformation. Writer and artist worked closely together on this book, and Wolfe’s description makes explicit the ideological argument encoded in Rivera’s cycle. He writes, “Mexico is a land in transition: it is in the process of changing from pre-capitalist to capitalist, from handicraft to machinofacture, from local to national-international economy— from a conglomerate of folks and regions into a nation.”18 Modernization, he concludes:  

would involve aiding [Indians] to construct a written language, to preserve . . . what is worthwhile in their traditions and literature and dances and songs and decorative arts, and to lead to their voluntary incorporation into a free union of peoples on the basis of a common national, and ultimately international, economy, in which their immediate part in the national and world division of labor would flow from the climatic-telluric nature of their regions, the local fauna and flora, their special temperaments and aptitudes, and the application of the methods of modern science to the development of the possibilities latent in each of these factors [emphasis added].19

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Figure 3.5 Diego Rivera. Our Daily Bread, fresco, third floor, west wall, Court of Fiestas, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1928). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

Wolfe’s un-self-conscious paternalism toward Mexico’s indigenous populations as well as his assumptions about the “natural” relationship among race, culture, and region typify the fundamentally assimilationist and modernizing rhetoric of the postRevolutionary discourse on the “Indian problem.” And Rivera’s SEP murals represent one of the most powerful and cogent articulations of this period discourse.20 Particularly significant in Wolfe’s statement is the assertion that preserving “what is worthwhile” in Mexico’s indigenous traditions and folk cultures will enable the country’s smooth and inevitable transformation into a modern, industrialized nation-state. The ongoing (but highly circumscribed) presence of indigenized culture, he implies, will guarantee that Mexico stays “Mexican” despite the political-economic changes on the horizon. While this argument is implicit throughout the cycle, in the stairwell sequence it becomes explicit. In these murals Rivera weaves the “climatic-telluric nature” of Mexico’s regions and people into a narrative of socio-political development. And his use of style to encode ideology is paramount in that accomplishment.

Th e S ta i r w e l l C yc l e

The stairwell cycle unwinds from the first to the third floors. Visitors ascending the stairs replicate the movement upward in the mural from sea level through tropical vegetation and then the high plateau, and finally the volcanoes.21 These landscapes, in turn, narrate the history of the country from a mythical past through episodes of exploitation and revolution to the building of a modern and egalitarian society. Thus the ascent is a journey of social and political evolution. Although described as early as 1923, the stairwell was painted in 1928. On the first floor Rivera depicts the coastal waters, with nymphs, a scuba diver, and a tugboat. The watery milieu, anthropomorphized clouds, and seminude women call to mind Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (ca. 1482), thereby reinforcing viewers’ sense of witnessing an ancient and divine origin. As we move up the stairs, Tehuantepec Landscape comes into view. Nubile beauties cavort and lie languidly amidst flowering trees and palapas (thatched roof huts). The iconography and style recalls such post-impressionist bathing scenes as Henri Matisse’s Fauvist works or Paul Gauguin’s South Pacific idylls. Like the remote worlds those artists conjured, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec represents a pre-lapsarian world before Conquest. Next, the visitor confronts Xochipili, the Aztec god of flowers and spring shown seated in ecstasy within a jungle and surrounded by mysterious figures. The scene evokes The Dream (1910) by the Douanier Rousseau and the figures recall both Rivera’s use of allegory in Creation and the symbolist penchant for Gnosticism.22 They also speak to Rivera’s attempts to represent a utopian pre-Conquest world that has been lost but can nonetheless be re-created through progressive social change. Shown participating in a sacred ritual, these figures hold the esoteric secrets of Mexico’s indigenous past. Farther up the stairs, the paradise of indigenous Mexico is lost to feudal land ten-

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ancy in The Hacienda (plantation). Peasants labor while their lazy boss naps; his posture echoes the languid figures in Tehuantepec Landscape, emphasizing the original inhabitants’ dispossession and marking the beginnings of capitalism. Whereas once people coexisted in harmony on communal lands, now they are indentured workers in a system of private ownership. The sugar hacienda depicted in this scene suggests its location in the agricultural zone that encompasses the state of Morelos, the birthplace of Zapatismo. Just as he had sanctified peasants in the Court of Labor by referring to Giotto’s figures at the Arena Chapel, Rivera uses an Italianate naturalism in this part of the stairwell to humanize the plight of peasants subjected to the abuses of a corrupt owner class. But in a dark grove, a campesino patiently sharpens a machete, auguring peasant revolt. In The Burial, Rivera renders the interment of a slain peon at dusk as figures gather around an open grave. The scene, located in the arid high plateau, recalls Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans (1849) as well as Giotto’s Lamentation. As a secular entombment, the fresco elevates the death of revolutionaries to martyrdom and prepares viewers for the social rebirth depicted in the scenes that follow. The final sequence begins with The Mechanization of the Countryside (figure 3.6). Rivera reintroduces the golden hues from the Court of Labor in a utopian image of Mexico’s industrialization. At the lower left, a priest, a federal soldier, and a capitalist are struck down by an allegorical figure of the proletariat wielding a red thunderbolt. At the upper right, a worker, a peasant, and a revolutionary soldier stand in unity. The image is anchored by a kneeling indigenous woman, who holds an ear of corn in each hand. She is modeled on statues of the Aztec fertility goddess Xilonen. Behind her we see a dam, airplanes, a railroad, and electrical wires. Here, as in panels such as Our Daily Bread, Rivera argues that the countryside will be mechanized according to the values and cultural legacies of “deep” Mexico. The Teacher details the technologically advanced and egalitarian future that socialist organization promises. A young woman educates students before a functionalist building under construction. At left, a worker, a soldier, and a peasant have traded their arms for the surveyor’s tape and the engineer’s compass. To the right, researchers proffer medicine to a mother and her child. While the teacher brings Vasconcelos’ educational mission to the rural countryside, men consult blueprints and erect a grade school, a reference to one of the SEP’s premier architectural projects. The cycle culminates with Rivera’s self-portrait as an architect gazing at blueprints while a mason and an assistant prepare the wall for fresco. Rivera, by representing the three components of mural labor—design, masonry, and painting—in this final image, endorses the collaborative working-class values of the Syndicate’s Manifesto —an ironic gesture, given Rivera’s monopoly of this commission. And by invoking the Renaissance concept of the true artist as one equally adept at painting, architecture, and sculpture, Rivera claims to be a modern Michelangelo. Like the Italian artists who enabled the rebirth of humanism, Rivera and his cohort are pictured as midwives to the renascent  

 

 

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Figure 3.6 Diego Rivera. The Mechanization of the Countryside, fresco, third floor, west wall, stairwell, Ministry of Public Education, Mexico City (1926). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

socialist culture of “deep” Mexico. By placing artistic labor at the top of the stairwell’s evolutionary walk, moreover, Rivera argues that mural art should play a central role in Mexico’s post-Revolutionary transformation. Rivera’s stairwell explains the process that will tie the activities depicted in the Court of Labor to those described in the Court of Fiestas. It also demonstrates the stylistic steps that lead the viewer from the naturalistic scene in The Liberation of the Peon to the dense cubist one in The Distribution of Arms. This frieze surveys Mexico’s many regions and telescopes its complex political history into stylistically coded scenes that demonstrate the artist’s wide knowledge of Western art and his commitment to a modern industrialized, but socialist, future. For Jean Charlot, Rivera’s integration of the painterly values of the School of Paris into his social realist style betrays a bohemian youth spent among the European avant-garde. Rivera’s effort to reconcile certain elements of avant-garde plastic experimentation with the social mandate of a public art was not merely evidence of a bohemian’s first serious political engagement. It also signals his innovative attempt to activate the avant-garde’s belief in the political significance of formal experimentation for the purposes of a public, rather than a private, art. .   .   .

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During his years at the SEP Rivera aligned himself with the Communist Party and with a dialectical materialist view of history and social change. He worked to invent a visual language that could correspond with the different social groups whose unification could lead to a socialist revolution in Mexico —a mostly illiterate country with a colonial legacy, deep racial inequality, and a working “class” that was more peasant than proletarian. By incorporating “multiple tendencies” and slyly nodding to the utopian politics of avantgarde experimentation, he tried to offer the public a “complete art,” that constructed “all Mexico” according to his unique insight as a utopian visionary. The SEP murals remain crucial to analyses of Rivera’s art, and of Mexican muralism more broadly, because their aesthetic, political, and ethical eclecticism demonstrate the complexities and contradictions of putting “all Mexico on a wall.”  

Notes

1.  Octavio Paz, “Re/Visions: Mural Painting,” Essays on Mexican Art, trans. Helen Lane (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1987), p. 124. 2. Jean Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance 1920– 1925 (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979), pp. 269 –79; and Bertram Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Stein and Day, 1963), pp. 167–81. 3.  Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920 –1940: The Art of a New Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 13– 26 and pp. 75– 85; and Mari Carmen Ramírez, “The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement: 1920–1925” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1989), pp. 247 –65, 344–54, 396–400. 4.  “All Mexico Is on a Wall” is Bertram Wolfe’s title for his chapter on Rivera’s SEP murals in The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, pp. 167–81. 5.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero, Fermín Revueltas, José Clement Orozco, Ramón Alva Guadarrama, Germán Cueto, and Carlos Mérida, “Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors,” El Machete (1923) translated and republished in Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, Inverted Utopias: Avant Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 461. 6.  Diego Rivera and Gladys March, My Life, My Life: An Autobiography (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1960), p. 79. 7.  For a discussion of the difference between realist and discursive approaches to representation, see Mary K. Coffey, “What Puts the Culture in Multiculturalism? An Analysis of Culture, Government, and Mexican Identity,” in Multicultural Curriculums, eds. Cameron McCarthy and Ram Mahalingam (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 37 –41. 8.  Francisco Reyes Palma, “Mural Devices,” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–1934, eds. Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002), p. 220. 9.  Ibid., p. 169. 10. Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, pp. 269–79. 11.  Ibid., p. 254. 12. Ramírez, The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement, p. 256.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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13.  Adriana Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender and Representation in Mexican Art and Culture (College Park: Penn State University Press, in press). 14.  Miguel Covarrubias, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), pp. 252–53. 15.  “Deep Mexico” is Guillermo Bonfil-Batalla’s term and is therefore anachronistic for the period. However, it signifies an intellectual investment in Mexico’s indigenous origins as the source of national originality and post-colonial politics. While the term and its attendant assumptions about indigeneity and authenticity have been critiqued, I use it throughout this chapter to signal the intellectual discourse on authenticity generated by post-Revolutionary Indigenismo. Guillermo Bonfil-Batalla, México profundo (Mexico: SEP, 1987). 16. Ramírez, The Ideology and Politics of the Mexican Mural Movement, p. 345. 17.  Diana Briuolo Destéfano, “Aproximaciones al Corrido de la Revolución de Diego River, en la Secretaría de Educación Pública,” unpublished paper presented at the Reunión Internacional Re-Visión del muralismo del siglo XX (décadas 20–40): México-Estados Unidos, El Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, Mexico City, August 21–23, 2000. 18.  Bertram Wolfe and Diego Rivera, Portrait of Mexico (New York: Covici, Friede Publishers, 1937), p. 22. 19.  Ibid., p. 25. 20.  See Mary K. Coffey, “The ‘Mexican Problem’: Nation and ‘Native’ in Mexican Muralism and Cultural Discourse,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, eds. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Wineberg (College Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 43–70. 21. Charlot, Mexican Mural Renaissance, p. 254. 22.  Renato Gonzalez Mello, “Manuel Gamio, Diego Rivera and the Politics of Mexican Anthropology,” RES 45 (Spring 2004):161–85.  

 

 

 

 

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4 Siqueiros’ Communist Proposition for Mexican Muralism A Mural for the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate

Jennifer A. Jolly

Although David Alfaro Siqueiros came late to José Vasconcelos’ mural project, from the start he claimed a key role in defining Mexico’s mural movement. That Mexican muralism should be categorized “a movement” rather than a loose affiliation of individual artists was not to be taken for granted, and Siqueiros dedicated his career to ensuring that muralism was sustained and promoted in collective terms. To this end, he traveled the world developing mural projects, recruiting and training new muralists, writing, lecturing, and inserting his vision of public mural art — and himself— into the center of the era’s artistic and political debates. He defined his project—and muralism in general— in highly ideological, confrontational terms. His critiques were directed against rival muralists and non-muralists alike, as the title of one of his numerous tracts asserts: Ours Is the Only Way.1 This polemical approach to muralism paired his early immersion in artistic avantgardism with a communist political commitment. His artistic and activist identities were often at odds, as he regularly abandoned successful artistic projects to engage political action: fighting in the Mexican Revolution (1910 – 20) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), organizing workers, operating as a Stalinist agent, and serving jail sentences. In the pre –World War II art world, such a pairing was feasible—even desirable. He adopted a “citizen-artist” persona, rejecting avant-garde autonomy (theoretically) in exchange for a public role; he sought to make murals “communist,” casting not just content, but also production and reception, in ideological terms. Post-war, this combination determined his uneven reception: celebrated as a revolutionary artist by many  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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in Mexico, he was condemned by critics operating within the ideological framework of cold war–era modernism. His work at the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate in 1939–40 epitomized this synthesis of avant-garde and communist ambitions and has determined his reputation at home and abroad.2 Siqueiros derived his avant-garde posture from formative experiences in international artistic circles in Europe and with his teacher Dr. Atl, who preached a variant of St. Simon’s visionary avant-gardism (1825) to his art-students-turned-soldiers during the Mexican Revolution.3 Historically, avant-gardism has served as a sociological, rather than aesthetic, category: elite groups competed to lead society; they defined their projects in contentious terms; and with their politics, aesthetics, and behavior they challenged bourgeois society, art institutions, and even our concepts of art itself. Under Dr. Atl, Siqueiros learned to ground artistic practice in social struggle and initiated his pattern of dropping art to take up arms. In Paris and Barcelona, in 1919– 22, he debated avant-garde strategies with cubists and futurists and formulated the ideas he channeled into his seminal manifesto published in Barcelona in 1921, “Three Appeals to the New Generation of Painters and Sculptors of America.”4 Using avant-garde rhetoric, Siqueiros rallied artists to create a universal modern art grounded in a distinctly American classicism: an artistic canon defined by the ancient art, races, and historical realities of the Americas. Back in Mexico, Siqueiros made his version of avant-gardism responsive to local political and cultural imperatives. Whereas in European commercial centers elites established cultural credentials by purchasing abstract art, in post-Revolutionary Mexico artists competed for government support and limited private patronage. Responding to the government’s populist premises and their own ambition to develop muralism as a public art, the muralists based their visual language in realism. The public’s hostile reception to the National Preparatory School murals, however, meant that murals would be unacceptable as government art as long as the current elite controlled public discourse. Siqueiros abandoned his unfinished contribution, the Colegio Chico stairwell murals (1922– 24), which the schoolchildren of Mexico’s elite vandalized. This violent response made it clear that the fundamental problem lay in the institutional relationship between art and its public. In rethinking this relationship, the muralists had to address not just content and style, but also the structures of viewing, commissioning, and even producing art. This challenge paralleled that faced by the nineteenth-century realist avant-garde;5 for Siqueiros, however, the solution was grounded in twentieth-century communism. In 1923, when Siqueiros joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM), communism provided an outlet for artists disillusioned by the slow pace of Mexico’s revolution and eager to match revolutionary posturing with radical political credentials. Anarchism had historically attracted artistic avant-gardes; but in the 1920s, Communist Parties worldwide—recognizing art’s potential for mass politics —began recruiting artists. The PCM advised the muralists caught up in the Preparatory School controversy to union 

 

 

 

 

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ize.6 They took this advice, forming the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors (1923–24). Many joined the PCM and quickly rose to prominence; Siqueiros, for example, served on the PCM Central Committee in 1924 –30 and 1948–71. The PCM and the artists alike courted the working classes, a rapidly growing constituency whose power consolidated in workers’ organizations with newfound resources. Both shared ambitions to lead and to cultivate a new Mexican public.  

 

 

Siqueiros’ Critique of Mur alism

After 1924, muralism as a movement seemed to disintegrate, and was replaced by sporadic individual commissions. Siqueiros soon abandoned art-making and turned to fulltime political activity: unionizing miners, lecturing, and representing the PCM internationally—until government anti-communist crackdowns in 1929 and his arrest led him to resume easel painting. Siqueiros, using his 1932 Casino Español exhibition as a platform, launched a polemic against contemporary Mexican painting and initiated a decade-long effort to revitalize the stalled Mexican mural movement. His reentry into the art world coincided with intensifying international debate on socially committed art. Artists everywhere were vying for state funds; governments seeking public legitimacy gave aesthetic form to the worldwide political confrontation among capitalism, fascism, and communism. The stakes were high: the collapse of international art markets in 1929 forced artists to compete for limited cultural resources. Regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union tightly restricted artistic and cultural values. Anti-fascist organizations, including Mexico’s League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers (LEAR), began to appear soon after Hitler’s election in 1933. They sponsored exhibitions, contests, and congresses, where major debates (such as the Siqueiros-Rivera debate in Mexico City in 1935, and the Querelle du Réalisme in Paris in 1937) were waged to determine the art best suited to the struggle. Siqueiros placed himself at the center of these debates and conflicts, visiting Uruguay, Argentina, the United States, Cuba, France, and Spain to lecture, organize antifascist artists, found mural teams, and launch experimental projects—not to mention fight for the Spanish Republic. These experiences helped him define his artistic vision, articulated against international abstraction, socialist realism, and the mural art of his better-known colleague, Diego Rivera. In their place, he proposed a modern, dynamic muralism. Siqueiros’ critique addressed the major crisis of muralism: its relationship with “the public.” “People,” “popular,” and “public” are ideological (not descriptive) categories, and for the citizen-artist in the age of mass politics, political and artistic legitimacy depended on the ability to control their definition. In Mexico, debates raged about the nature of “the people” and arte popular (popular art).7 During much of his career, Siqueiros defined the Mexican people as the proletariat, or the working masses, and revolutionary intellectuals. He eliminated the bourgeoisie and often conflated the peasantry with  

 

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the proletariat in his writing (although not in his art).8 He rejected art designed for a cultural elite and the art market, condemning trends of folkloric indigenismo and “tourist curio” art promoted as arte popular.9 He cultivated the industrial working class as his public— beginning in 1924 in his “Appeal to the Proletariat” in El Machete — and sought to dislodge the bourgeoisie and elite as the dominant art audiences. While muralism itself prevented art’s commodification, the location of a mural determined its public and threatened muralism’s revolutionary credentials.10 If art was to “serve the proletariat” and be of “great public use,” muralism first had to overcome the limits placed on public space in Mexico by finding new patrons and adapting to mass circulation by way of photography and film.11 A second facet of transforming the relationship between artist and public was the redefinition of artistic identity. The standard avant-garde idea of the alienated creator on the fringes of society appealed to artists who wished to distance themselves from bourgeois culture. This self-claimed isolation, however, limited the potential of their art to transform the world. Although Siqueiros himself struggled for recognition,12 he celebrated an artistic identity integrated into the collective fabric of society where artistic production could be shaped, and therefore engaged, by “the people.” As the critic Arquelas Vela repeatedly argued, if artistic production were determined by the spirit of the age, art would be embraced by society at large.13 Siqueiros’ insistence on identifying muralism as a movement based in collective activity, rather than as a loose affiliation of individual artists, can be understood in this context. Beginning with the short-lived Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, Siqueiros cast artists as unionized workers, defined by their group and class status. His continued refinement of muralism into a collective art form defined artistic production in communist ideological terms.14 Industrial technologies were also fundamental to Siqueiros’ vision. Such innovations would modernize the practice of muralism, challenging the archaic “Giottoisms” of artists who worked in traditional fresco. With his Los Angeles Bloc of Painters (1932), Siqueiros began projecting photographs on walls to transfer their content. Photography—unlike the sketch in which the “hand” of the artist manifests individuality —provided an “objective” aesthetic to which team members could aspire, and the projection of photographs allowed the artists to experiment with distorting images from distinct viewing angles. This technique prepared a mural not only for ideal spectators, as it anticipated their cone of vision, but also for mass distribution in photographs. In a Buenos Aires basement, Siqueiros took this idea further, designating a series of vantage points from which to project mural imagery onto the walls and ceiling that morphed in and out of perspective as the viewer passed through the space. He called the mural a “harmonic machine,” “activated” by the spectator’s movement and vision; the result, Plastic Exercise (1933), was to be filmed.15 Additional experiments in Los Angeles and New York furthered his creative use of industrial technologies, including cement, paint guns, airbrushes, synthetic paints, and a range of new resins and enamels.16 Ironically, his strategy of propelling muralism forward by synthesizing realist social content and  

 

 

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modern technology drew from Leon Trotsky’s dialectical theory of Literature and Revolution (1924). While Trotsky— Josef Stalin’s rival and the founder of the Fourth International—was the nemesis of orthodox communists, his application of Marxist principles to the realm of art remained an unrivaled model of revolutionary art. Hence it informed even Stalinists such as Tina Modotti and Siqueiros.17 The result was a muralism defined by what Siqueiros heralded as modern “dynamic realism”; his opportunity to apply it to murals in Mexico came in 1939.  

 

Th e M u r a l f o r t h e M e x i c a n E l e c t r i c i a n s ’ S y n d i c at e

In August 1939, seven months after returning to Mexico from fighting Franco’s forces in Spain, Siqueiros assembled the International Team of Plastic Artists and accepted a mural commission for the headquarters of the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (SME). The team included the Mexicans Antonio Pujol and Luis Arenal and the Bolivian Roberto Berdecio, with whom he had worked previously, as well as Spanish exiles Josep Renau, Antonio Rodríguez Luna, and Miguel Prieto, whom he would introduce to the Mexican mural movement’s history and polemics. This manifesto-scaled project synthesized Siqueiros’ critique of muralism and his ambitions for its future development. The SME was part of the art public that Mexican leftist artists sought to cultivate, and in 1939 was hardly new to cultural patronage.18 First active during the Mexican Revolution, the SME was marked by debate both about preserving its anarcho-syndicalist roots (rejecting political affiliation and focusing on workers’ rights) and about participating in local and international coalitions engaged in political struggles. Joining the united anti-fascist front brought the syndicate to the forefront of Mexican labor politics in the 1930s. Under the engineers’ communist-influenced leadership, the SME developed its journal Lux into an illustrated tool for shaping class consciousness, educating workers, and disseminating propaganda. Additionally, the SME commissioned theatrical, literary, and artistic undertakings through participation in LEAR, Mexico’s Popular Front arts organization, which made important strides in promoting art for unions—including murals, posters, films, theatrical productions, photography, and illustrations by professional artists and workers alike —during its brief existence (1933–38). The mural was commissioned to decorate the SME’s new headquarters building —a monument to the SME’s expansion and achievements—and complement the building’s role in aiding workers’ spiritual, intellectual, and physical development by providing a collective setting for their new-found leisure time. As such, the mural would be a pawn in the larger debate about the mission of the syndicate and its culture — a debate that brought the syndicate’s vision into conflict with that of Siqueiros, resulting in major revisions to the mural’s original design (figure 4.1). From the start, the artists organized as a collective to further their ambition of using a mural’s production— grounded in the spirit of the age— to determine its reception, as Vela had recommended. The collective would govern itself according to communist  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 4.1 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau, and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (original version), detail: central wall, pyroxylin/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (1939–40). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

ideals, including discussion, democratic decision making, and self-critique, and all team members would participate in painting the mural. The team elected Siqueiros to be leader and agreed to use industrial production techniques: they divided their labor according to specialty, distributed throughout the mural, and employed mechanical tools (including spray-guns, cameras, projectors), industrial materials (cement, synthetic paints), and a photorealist (“objective”) painting style to give the mural aesthetic coherence. Once painting began, however, conflicts arose: Prieto, Rodríguez Luna, and Berdecio left the project in frustration at Siqueiros’ “objective” stylistic standards, and Renau requested that tasks be reassigned so he would not be dependent on his oftenabsent teammates.19 To include the mural in SME culture, the artists engaged union members in the

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development of the project, hoping that the workers would support their petition to paint a mural with political content at a moment when the SME had voted — because political disagreements threatened syndicate unity —to be apolitical. With the workers’ backing, the artists initially conceptualized the mural in Popular Front terms, addressing the international themes of fascism, imperialism, and war.20 The muralists also honored their promise to syndicate leaders to address the electrical industry, a theme employed in Mexico and abroad to signal the confluence of the social, technological, and political facets of modernization. However, Comintern delegates (representatives of the Communist International) visited Mexico in November 1939 to ensure that the PCM had adjusted its position to adhere to post –Hitler-Stalin Pact policies, and it appears that the artists soon reworked their interpretation of the international conflict in explicitly anti-capitalist terms. By December 14, 1939, for the SME’s anniversary celebration banquet, the artists had condensed the Popular Front and electrical themes under a new satiric title, “Monument to Capitalism” (without altogether abandoning their original plans) and prepared to expose capitalism in all its faults.21 The artists sought to make these interconnected themes highly accessible to their public by employing both familiar content (some of which was adapted from the SME journal),22 and a realist style, akin to documentary photography. Thus, the artists drew from the expanding genre of photojournalism magazines and Renau’s archive of Spanish Civil War negatives, bolstering their claims to documentary objectivity. They clipped images from mainstream US magazines and the international leftist press. Such documentation was to serve as evidence in the case against fascism, imperialist war, and capitalism. Renau combined these much-reproduced and heavily circulated photographs, along with iconography taken from various graphic sources, into photomontage studies treating war and the electrical industry, while his colleagues made the fascism wall study. By assembling mass-circulated images, art, and photos of local electrical plants, the artists challenged folkloric notions of popular art and created a modern arte popular, designed to appeal specifically to electrical workers. Furthering this desire to engage their viewers, the muralists adopted Siqueiros’ theory of the “harmonic machine” activated by the spectator’s movement, and selected the stairwell as the best location for developing their dynamic mural. According to Renau, they studied stairwell traffic to determine the “average” spectator’s path up the stairs and then projected selected photographs onto the stairwell walls and ceiling, simplifying and adjusting their photomontage studies to correspond to the sequence of six vantage points provided by this ideal spectator (figure 4.2).23 In doing so, they designed the mural to be viewed as a sequence of fragmented narratives — conceptually akin to cinematic montage. In fact, in Mexico in 1931, Siqueiros had enjoyed animated discussions with the leading Soviet proponent of montage, Sergei Eisenstein, inspiring him to apply Eisenstein’s aesthetic of conflict, or dialectics, to muralism. This agitprop strategy required that the muralists create a series of dramatic contrasts of scale, lighting, content, and narrative to jar the spectator out of complacency and into a state of  

 

 

 

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Figure 4.2 Josep Renau. Photomontage diagram of SME mural’s six ideal vantage points (1969). Valencia, Josep Renau Archive, IVAM. Courtesy of the Josep Renau Archive, IVAM, Valencia.

pathos. Renau, a photomontage specialist, shared Siqueiros’ interest in these agitprop and narrative principles, and the team deployed them throughout the mural. The result combines technologically driven methods, photographic content and style, and a montage of viewpoints to create a giant painted photomontage.

N a r r at i v e i n t h e O r i g i n a l M u r a l

As originally conceived, the mural presented a monumental filmic narrative of capitalism generating fascism and imperialist war. The artists designed this narrative to be seen from six ideal vantage points, experienced by spectators as they climbed the stairs.24 The artists used contrasting modes of montage to engage the spectators: some juxtapositions shock and jar; others empower by revealing connections among figures, ideologies, and events in the international conflict. The narrative begins with a view of a capitalist’s safe, its walls cut away to reveal an induction generator, which powers gears in a subterranean factory as well as the crankshaft extending out the top of the safe (figure 4.3). Above, the second ideal viewpoint shows the crankshaft supporting and turning a parrot-headed demagogue, who was derived from a photograph of Mussolini (figure 4.4, left). A railing hides his crankshaft from the masses, who stream down to listen —but the viewers see his true nature and false speech exposed, revealing him as a mere mechanical toy whose motion and orations are produced by the safe. This duplicitous toy offers a flower with one left arm,  

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Figure 4.3 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau, and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail: strongbox of capitalism, pyroxylin/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (1939–40). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

while another left arm harangues with a torch; such futurist-inspired repetition is used throughout to suggest movement and violence. Faced with this false leader, the masses form two contrasting groups: chaotic, translucent workers and protesters above; ordered, opaque fascist troops below. The groups skirmish on the steps of a burning building: its classical style, along with the inscription “LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE” and superimposed moneybag on its pediment, symbolize capitalist democracy. The torches implicate the fascists in this destruction of capitalist democracy and recall the German Reichstag fire. Given that the capitalist’s safe powers the fascist demagogue, however, this wall in fact represents the capitalist generating the fascism and mass seduction that will destroy it.25 The next three ideal viewpoints present fascism engaged in imperialist war and employ a montage of contrasts to heighten drama. In the third ideal view, an explosion over an aircraft carrier in the stairwell’s upper right corner represents war (figure 4.5, upper center). Its fiery cloud provides a baroque transition to the ceiling, where the fourth ideal view, painted in trompe l’oeil, suggests an open sky. Smokestacks, electric pylons, and a radio tower rise above the factory and evoke a utopian, constructivist montage: according to the mural’s inscription, these towering forms represent peace, justice, solidarity, and work. They point to the sun, which is represented as a series of projections standing for liberty. This ideal peaceful vision is the antithesis of the war image that precedes it and contrasts with the destructive chaos below. The mural’s juxtaposing of antithetical thematic material in a narrative can be compared with Eisenstein’s

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Figure 4.4 David Alfaro Siqueiros and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail: left and central walls, pyroxylin/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (1939–40). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

approach to chapter structure within his films— for example, his 1925 film Potemkin heightens narrative drama by inserting a peaceful revolutionary celebration between the first conflict on the battleship and the slaughter on the Odessa steps. Similarly, the muralists provided the spectators with contrasting views to create narrative tension. At the fifth ideal viewpoint, the viewer leaps back into the fray. A fighter bearing a red flag dominates the right wall with his rifle, opposing the progress of a tank overrunning a classical building; nearby an apartment building burns (figure 4.5, right half).26 Contrast heightens the scene’s conflicts: flesh against metal; the fighter viewed from above opposing war machinery viewed from below; vitality versus death. The elongated fighter’s face and gun heighten the drama and emotional power of the image when it is viewed from within the stairwell. From this vantage, the lone gunman with his red flag is the revolutionary force needed to confront the onslaught of imperialist war. The final viewpoint, from the third floor landing, reveals the central “infernal machine” and makes the mural’s overall structure apparent (figures 4.1 and 4.5, left  

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Figure 4.5 David Alfaro Siqueiros and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail: central and right walls, pyroxylin/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (1939–40). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

half). The composition’s central vertical axis is a turbine generator, which extends from the subterranean factory into the central world stage. In the original mural (figure 4.1), the machine’s lowest zone (the gas compression chamber) enclosed six faces: two Africans, a Southeast Asian, an Indigenous American, an Asian, and a gas-mask-wearing Caucasian. Such racial typing evoked imperialism during the 1930s. In the central chamber’s spinning rotors, the team reproduced the widely circulated photographs of child victims of the Spanish Civil War. The machine is crowned by a two-headed imperialist eagle/vulture, whose heads on opposite ends of its metallic body represent the opposing electrical charges that generate current in the surrounding copper wire. The machine’s cable encircles figures representing England, France, and the United States (left), and Italy, Japan, and Germany (right), with victims at their feet. In the background, soldiers march toward war, transforming into gas-masked troops as they pass the generator, while a mournful displaced mother and child look on. From the landing, the distorted face of the fighter resolves in perspective. He is positioned above

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and opposite the fascist demagogue. Likewise, the viewer, having ascended the stairs and turned to view the entire scene, confronts the infernal machine. He or she becomes the antithesis of the imperialist generator of war between fascist and capitalist states. In short, the mural presented a communist interpretation of World War II.

Th e M u r a l’ s T r a n s f o r m at i o n

Such was the mural’s abandoned and incomplete state in May 1940. Renau finished his assigned sections in April, and soon work stopped while Siqueiros (acting as a Stalinist agent) orchestrated an attack on Leon Trotsky with the help of Arenal and Pujol, effectively ending their contributions to the mural. In response, the SME directors signed a new contract with Renau to revise the mural and reassured their membership that the SME was in no way implicated. Siqueiros’ attempted assassination of Trotsky exposed differences between the muralists and the syndicate’s now-dominant anti-communist faction. Distancing itself from the attack, the SME sought to bring the mural in line with its emerging critique of totalitarianism. Renau put aside his frustrations and completed the mural, improving its visual cohesion, addressing the SME’s political objections, and making the mural more ideologically flexible, and thus acceptable to a wider audience (figures 4.4 and 4.5). Renau created the apocalyptic mural known today as The Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, a critical exposure of capitalism in which the capitalist machine destroys its own foundations, predicting its eventual self-destruction. Renau made drastic changes on the central wall, eliminating explicit references to the anti-fascist political struggle: the flags and victims projected onto the six gas-masked figures and the Spanish Civil War children (compare figures 4.1 and 4.5, left half). He also increased the mural’s revolutionary imagery, adding depictions of resistance and workers and invoking precedents from Mexico and abroad. Finally, he reworked the electrical plant imagery. Renau, when he was in charge of painting the mural’s industrial content, had created a secondary narrative tracing the production of electricity through the subterranean zone to parallel actions on the world stage above. His colleagues never finished this area; when he returned, he worked to develop explicit parallels between the two realms. From the sixth viewpoint at the top of the stairs, the electrical production narrative was designed to engage the viewer; however rather than using agitprop, which theoretically elicits a highly emotional response, it relied on a rational spectator’s knowledge of electrical production.27 Read from left to right, the induction generator inside the safe establishes the link between the electrical plant and world stage (figure 4.3). Just as it controls the monstrous demagogue, whose speech lures the crowds, the motor drives the thermoelectric plant’s gears, which would be used to pump water through the plant (figure 4.4). The water is sent to fiery boilers, visible in the stairwell’s lower corner, to be turned into steam, while the monster sends his recruits into the burning symbol of democracy above. Just as protesters struggle above —their numbers now  

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Figure 4.6 David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau, and the International Team of Plastic Artists. Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (final version), detail: turbine generator room, pyroxylin/cement, 100 meters square, Mexico City, Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (1939–40). © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

increased — workers in the plant begin to forge the overhead towers. Originally, the pipes that fed steam into the turbine’s pressurized chambers were visible. Renau covered them as he transformed the lower turbine into an octopus—a metaphor for imperialism—that drags electrical workers into the turbine (figure 4.5, lower left). Their blood flows through the machine and is converted into cascading coins. This blood drives the generator above, where the double-headed imperialist eagle-vulture spins, generating electricity with the magnetism of its opposing charges —fascism on one side, capitalist democracy on the other. Electrical lines leading to the war image — the explosion over the aircraft carrier—replace a line of soldiers. This electrical metaphor, then, preserved the communist interpretation of World War II as an imperialist war generated by the confrontation between capitalist democracy and fascism, but asserted an explicit relationship between this conflict and the electricians. Marxists generally believed that this battle could serve as capitalism’s final apocalyptic crisis, especially if the proletariat stood ready to take charge. Renau’s adaptations— borrowing imagery from Fritz Lang’s filmic allegory of capitalism, Metropolis (1927) — make this clear. His imperialist machine begins to self-destruct: the stage cracks and the transformers that regulate and distribute electricity burn, matching the explosion over the aircraft carrier. To the right, however, a worker at the control panel takes control of the crisis, like Siqueiros’ revolutionary above. Finally, at the far end, we see the turbine generator room of a hydroelectric plant (anticipating Mexico’s state-owned Ixtapantongo plant), with order restored (figure 4.6). Like the sky above,  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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the mural promises the workers a utopian world of worker-controlled, state-sponsored industry, if they are ready to act. Renau, it appears, had found a means to connect with his public. By appealing to the rational electrician rather than the mass spectator; emphasizing the relationship between the electrical industry and the international conflict; and employing longstanding, but highly malleable, revolutionary ideology, he appealed to a broad spectrum of electricians — communists, Trotskyists, anarcho-syndicalists, and supporters of Mexico’s revolutionary nationalism —and avoided the explicit political references that demanded they take sides.  

 

Conclusions

Given the mural collective’s breakdown and the SME’s rejection of its original version, it is clear that Siqueiros had not successfully redefined his relationship with the public. Was the conflict merely political, with the syndicate communists no longer able (or willing) to support Siqueiros’ vision at the expense of syndicate unity, as support for the PCM declined following the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Extraordinary Congress, and Siqueiros’ attempt on Trotsky’s life? Or does Siqueiros’ failure to inspire his new public, seen in the syndicate’s rejection of his mural, reflect a fault not only in Siqueiros’ ambitions for muralism but also a larger contradiction whereby avant-gardism, in which an elite seeks to lead a broad public, is shown to be fundamentally at odds with popular democracy? Siqueiros’ proposal broke down in several ways, starting with the mural’s production. Despite utopian aspirations concerning the use of technology to unify and minimize mediation of mural content by individual artists, in practice the goal of renouncing the self in favor of the collective proved elusive. Writing in 1949, in the midst of an attempt to galvanize muralism by attacking foreign influences in Mexico, Siqueiros blamed his Spanish colleagues for their inability to forgo individualism.28 Renau’s angry, but unpublished, response suggests, however, that the collective’s failure extended beyond team members’ defections after Siqueiros repainted their work to include financial difficulties and the frequent absences of Siqueiros, Pujol, and Arenal.29 Ultimately, Renau claims to have painted the majority of the mural himself, although historically the project is remembered as Siqueiros’ utopian, avant-garde experiment. In retrospect, Siqueiros’ leadership can be characterized as authoritarian in his assumption that he embodied the will, and the efforts, of the collective (and the electricians).30 Renau’s published 1976 description of working with Siqueiros seals the collective’s communist designation. His article opens with a discussion of the merits of anarchism and communism, in which communism is positioned as a productive foil to the futility of the lone Spanish anarchist shaking his knife at bombers overhead. In this context, Renau describes how recognition of Siqueiros’ artistic authority, the team’s shared ideological

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commitments, and Renau’s own sense of discipline allowed him to continue working. Hence, in 1976, the ideal communist collective was rhetorically restored as one relying as much on authoritarian— and authoritative — leadership as on the choice and commitment of the led.31 If in practice there was little “collective” production to enable the mural’s collective reception, we might revisit Siqueiros’ ambitions to determine how a spectator ideally experiences the work and ask whether Siqueiros can politicize his audience or merely preaches to the choir. The mural had been created by projecting imagery onto the walls from positions that anticipated the viewing positions (both physical and psychical) of an ideal spectator (see figure 4.2). The resulting montage, it was believed, would have the power to disrupt that spectator’s sense of self, if, as the artists assumed, the spectator would experience a coherent image in one-point perspective but would be jarred by exposure to multiple perspective systems (montage claims to produce psychological conflict). The premise that such a perspective technique could create an agitprop environment, however, was fundamentally flawed, for it assumed that the audience’s viewpoints coincided with the artists’ projection points. In fact, only those spectators who seek out the artists’ points of view, or compensate virtually for different viewing angles,32 will be so affected and moved. Those literally and metaphorically farther to the right or left, above or subordinate—who refuse to conform—remain immune. For them, the technique registers merely as style: a mural characterized by a montage of perspective systems, contrasts of scale, and chiaroscuro.33 Siqueiros, following months in hiding, was arrested and exiled — a sentence that allowed him to continue his international promotion of muralism before he was allowed to return to Mexico in 1943. He continued to enhance the public character of muralism, and he dedicated a journal, Arte Público, to this cause. The Mexican state did come to embrace Siqueiros’ claims to speak for the public as its own; it awarded him prominent commissions (despite battling him politically and jailing him from 1960 to 1964), and in 1974 it declared his art, home, studio, and school to be Mexican national patrimony.34 By the 1950s, however, the state’s populist credentials were suspect, as it came to depend more on international business than on popular support. Siqueiros’ last major work, the Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum (1966–71), testifies to the appeal of his utopian avant-gardism to Mexico’s political and cultural elite. Financed by international capital, this grandiose architectural monument on Avenida Insurgentes— integrating mural painting, sculpture, and the built environment into an all-encompassing harmonic machine — presents an imposing profile to passersby; inside, the auditoriumscale mural March of Humanity orchestrates a view of Siqueiros’ utopian vision for the paying “ideal viewer.”35 Siqueiros’ career of avant-garde experimentation and polemics constituted a grand struggle to convince the public to view the world, and art, through his eyes. Fascinating as that perspective may be, it would be up to later generations of muralists to create new paths to a fully dialogical relationship with the public.  

 

 

 

 

 

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Notes

1.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, “No hay más ruta que la nuestra” (Mexico: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1945). 2.  See Jennifer Jolly, “David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau, the International Team of Plastic Artists, and their Mural for the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate, Mexico City, 1939 – 40” (PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 2003), chapter 4. 3.  St. Simon and Olinde Rodriguez, “The Artist, the Savant, and the Industrialist,” Opinions Litteraires, Philosophiques, et Industrielles (Paris, 1825). For this history in Mexico, see José Clemente Orozco, An Autobiography, trans. R. C. Stephenson (Austin: University of Texas, 1962), 47 – 56; Donald D. Egbert, “The Idea of the ‘Avant-garde’ in Art and Politics,” The American Historical Review LXXIII, no.2 (1967):339–66. 4.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, “3 llamamientos de orientación actual a los pintores y escultores de la nueva generación Americana,” Vida Americana (May 1921); Francisco Reyes Palma, “Vanguardia año 0” in Modernidad y Modernización en el arte mexicano, 1920– 1960 (México: Museo Nacional de Arte, 1991). 5.  See Stephen Eisenman, Nineteenth Century Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), pp. 206–24. 6.  Philip Stein, Siqueiros (New York: International Publishers, 1994), p. 40. 7.  For examples of texts on the topic, see Irene Vázquez Valle, ed., La cultura popular vista por las elites (México: UNAM, 1989). 8.  On Siqueiros’ use of the terms “masses” and “proletariat,” see Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Las masas son la matriz,” in Retrato de una década: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930 – 1940 (México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1996– 97); on his use of “popular” and “proletariat,” see Olivier Debroise, “Arte Acción,” in Retrato de una década, 1996– 97, pp. 47– 48. Siqueiros embraces “the people” and “popular” with the rise of Popular Front culture, which required that communists temper class warfare to reconcile with democratic anti-fascist coalitions. This culminates in his call for “public art” beginning in 1940; see David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Un Essayo de Pintura Collectiva,” Romance (March 15, 1940), p. 7. The rural working class was Siqueiros’ artistic subject, but rhetorically members of this class were conflated with the “proletariat” and “people.” 9.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Rectificaciones sobre las Artes Plásticas en México” (1932), in Raquel Tibol, ed. Palabras de Siqueiros (Mexico: Fondo de cultura económica, 1996), pp. 48–61. 10.  Thus Siqueiros argued that widely circulated, mass reproducible graphic art had a greater revolutionary potential than muralism. See Ramírez 1996– 97 and Siqueiros’ lectures: “The Vehicles of Dialectic Subversive Painting,” John Reed Club, Hollywood, California, September 1932, in Tibol 1996; Speech at the Artists’ Union, New York, see Mathew Baigell and Julia Williams, ed. Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists Congress (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 1986); and “L’art dans la bataille sociale contemporaine,” Meson de la Cultura, Paris, November–December 1938, Siqueiros Archive. 11.  Such rhetoric pervades Siqueiros’ writing. See, for example, Siqueiros, “Rectificaciones . . .” 1932. 12.  Siqueiros lamented that only an educated minority could understand his art, because  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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most people allowed the bourgeoisie to guide their tastes. Siqueiros, “Rectificaciones . . .” 1932. 13.  See Arquelas Vela, “Problemas Formales del Arte Mexicano,” El Machete, December 25, 1937; Arquelas Vela, “Problemas Formales del Arte Mexicano,” El Machete, January 1, 1938; Arquelas Vela, “La expocisión de artes plásticas de la LEAR,” Frente a Frente, July 1936. 14.  See Jennifer Jolly, “Art of the Collective: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau, and Their Collaboration at the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate,” Oxford Art Journal V. 31, N. 1 (March 2008):129–51. 15. David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Qué es Ejercicio Plástico y cómo fue realizado,” Buenos Aires, 1933. See also Ramírez 1996, pp. 81 –86. 16.  On Siqueiros’ New York Experimental Workshop, see Laurence Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1989), pp. 220– 31; and Jürgen Harten, Siqueiros/Pollock: Pollock/Siqueiros (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle, 1995). 17.  Modotti quoted Trotsky on the synthesis of technology and nature in her photograph, La Técnica, and in her 1928 Mexico City exhibition in Mexico City, at which Siqueiros spoke. See Folgarait, “Tina Modotti and the Image of Mexican Communism” Crónicas N. 10– 11 (2002–3):41–51. 18.  See Jolly, “Art for the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate: Beyond Siqueiros,” Künst und Politik V. 7 (2005):111– 39. On the SME, see Mark Elliott Thompson, “The Development of Unionism among Mexican Electrical Workers” (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1966); and Enrique de la Garza Toledo, Historia de la industria eléctrica en Mexico, V. 1. (Iztapalapa: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1994). 19. See Jolly 2008 for accounts of the collective’s formation and breakdown, notably Renau’s unpublished letter “Los pintores y escritores españoles republicanos no somos quintacolumnistas” Cuernavaca, 1949, Renau Archives, IVAM, Valencia, excerpted in Jolly 2003, appendix; and Josep Renau, “Mi experiencia con Siqueiros,” Revista de bellas artes (January–February 1976):3–25; see also the Siqueiros Archive texts: “Tésis autocrítica sobre la obra ejecutada por el Equipo Internacional de Artes Plásticas en el Edificio Social del Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas” [1939], excerpted in Raquel Tibol, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Shifra Goldman, and Agustin Arteaga, Los murales de Siqueiros (México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1998), pp. 113–16; and the book manuscript, Arte civil, Chile, 1942. See also Siqueiros, “Crítica a la Crítica del Arte: carta abierta a los escritores y artistas españoles radicados en México . . . ,” Excelsior, México, November 1, 1949. 20.  Juan Mar, “La pintura mural en el nuevo edificio del Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas,” SI, November 1939; republished in Lux, December 15, 1939: 57 –58, 61. 21.  “Monumento al Capitalismo” (1939), Siqueiros Archive. On the Comintern in Mexico, see Barry Carr, “Crisis in Mexican Communism: The Extraordinary Congress of the Mexican Communist Party,” parts 1 & 2, Science & Society V. 50, N. 4 (Winter 1986):391 –414 and V. 51, N. 1 (Spring 1987):43 – 67. On the mural’s thematic development, see Jolly, 2003, chapter 2. 22.  Leonard Folgarait argues that such familiar content made the viewers highly malleable and hence susceptible to the muralists’ goals; see his Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920– 1940: Art of the New Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 169–79.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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23.  Renau, 1976, 13–14. 24.  See Jolly, “Two Narratives in Siqueiros’s Mural for the Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate,” Crónicas No. 8–9 (2001–2):99–118. 25.  For the mural’s iconography and sources, see Hurlburt 1989, Folgarait 1998, and Jolly 2003. 26.  Evoking the Spanish Civil War, the images derive from Life magazine photos of a California school demolition and Georgia hotel fire. 27.  See Jolly 2005. 28.  Siqueiros 1949. 29.  Renau 1949. 30.  Debroise makes this claim in another context; see Debroise 1996 –97, pp. 44, 49–50. 31.  See Jolly 2008. 32.  According to Whitney Davis, this amounts to a “self-straightening” process, where the viewer compensates for a bent angle of incidence, to use the language of linear perspective. See Whitney Davis, “Virtually Straight,” Art History 19, No. 3 (1996):343–63. Such individual self-realignment to correspond to a group, or ideal, perspective has implications both for our willingness to accept familiar systems of virtuality, such as linear perspective or photography, as well as ideology or morality. 33.  See Jolly, 2003, pp. 105 –20. 34.  Ley General de Bienes Nacionales, Diario Oficial, 5 Julio 1974. 35.  See Folgarait, So Far from Heaven: David Alfaro Siqueiros’s The March of Humanity and Mexican Revolutionary Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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5 José Clemente Orozco’s use of Architecture in the Dartmouth Mural Leonard Folgarait

The extraordinary quantity and quality of scholarship in architecture and the practice of mural painting in Mexico has advanced both the practical and conceptual understanding of their relationship.1 By “architecture” I mean the material support of murals and its definition and activation of space on the walls and ceilings of the host buildings,2 as well as the architecture represented in the images —the buildings pictured on the walls of buildings. More abstractly and more accurately, I mean architecture as a concept, an informing principle that drives the image from planning to completion, and then to consumption by the viewing public. This chapter takes for granted readers’ commonsense understanding of how buildings as support material for mural paintings both allow and limit the formal exploitation of images in the paintings. I want to ask how the architecture as rendered in the paintings and architecture as a guiding idea in the work that José Clemente Orozco completed in the United States made a critical difference in the ultimate look and meaning of the imagery. I consider in passing a few easel paintings in oil, but focus my attention on one fresco mural. In so doing, I suggest why Orozco’s presence in and among modern American architecture made such a difference in his art. My analyses of the images seek to provoke some rethinking of them in these terms. But first I introduce some of Orozco’s reactions to and opinions of the architecture he saw in the cities of the United States, especially in New York. He expressed them primarily in letters of 1928 to his fellow artist Jean Charlot, back in Mexico. He never laid  

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out a sustained discourse on architecture in the United States or elsewhere. We know from his letters to Charlot that Orozco was thrilled by the industry and life in the United States that he witnessed. In one letter, he writes enthusiastically, “You should see the machines for excavating rock and burying the iron that will support a skyscraper,”3 and in another, giving excited directions for a trip from Mexico to New York, he urges Charlot, “If you go through Pittsburgh, notice the steel mills.”4 The peak of this enthusiasm is: “Everything looks different, here in New York.”5 American architecture was, for Orozco, something to “notice,” something to credit for the “difference” that the new American built environment gave life in general in “Gringoland.”6 Orozco’s appreciation of Manhattan is changeable, however. In 1929, in his article “New World, New Races and New Art,” written in English, he sees an undiluted modernism in New York architecture: “The architecture of Manhattan is a new value, something that has nothing to do with Egyptian pyramids, with the Paris Opera, with the Giralda of Seville, or with Saint Sofia, any more than it has to do with the maya palaces of Chichen-Itza or with the ‘pueblos’ of Arizona. Imagine the New York Stock Exchange in [as] a french cathedral. . . . The architecture of Manhattan is the first step.” 7 So much for his public opinion. His private one, expressed in a letter to Charlot one year earlier, strikes a different note: “There are many interesting things to see [in New York], both American and imported. With their money they are bringing Europe over here, stone by stone. Any day now they will set up the Eiffel Tower in Central Park, next to the obelisk.”8 His public and private opinions here suggest his opportunism in publicly promoting New York architecture to establish favor with New York architects, which he certainly needed—as much as any other mural painter seeking walls on which to paint. Architecture, in its material sense, becomes part of his practical need for self-promotion. Orozco, hoping to gain commissions for murals in New York, was keen to have architects there see photographs of his murals in Mexico, but he wanted these photos shot in a very particular manner. He writes, “Because of this architectural idea, I have insisted that the photographs show clearly that these are mural decorations and not simply pictures. . . . See if it may be possible to take the arches of the patio with the painting in the background, having the architecture as principal subject. . . . The paintings themselves aren’t important.”9 In another letter, he becomes even more emphatic, “asking for photos with architecture, that is, in which there is 90% architecture and only 10% painting, because architects can’t be interested in monkeys except as part of the building.”10 This trivializing of his own paintings to gain mural commissions from architects means that Orozco in New York was interested not only in buildings, but also in their designers and makers, who might hire him. He probably also wanted the photographs to demonstrate how the buildings remain fully functional, how the murals neither compromise nor change the buildings’ efficiency. That the murals in these photographs were painted on the walls of existing structures rather than in new buildings indicates that they conformed to a given archi 

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tectural function. Orozco presents them almost as an afterthought, a benign presence that defers to the architecture, rather than competes with it; he casts them as innocuous, decorative elements, almost worthy of being ignored. Orozco seems to ask, why not hire mural painters for any and all buildings, regardless of their function? Orozco, while in the United States, painted a number of works in oil on canvas between 1927 and 1934.11 The weight that Orozco asked architecture to assume in producing the meaning of certain images makes it clear that he trusted buildings to establish space and presence in these images— in their composition, in other formal operations, and in their abstract role in the human story being told. Mexican House, a canvas of 1929,12 established these elements most emphatically, as the central house and the foreground plants tell a somber tale. The cubic simplicity of the house, the open door, the angle turned toward us are all-important agents of content. The same can be said of a 1930 lithograph, Mexican Pueblo,13 where it is clear that whatever fate awaits the human figures will be determined largely by the daunting built environment. In Vigil, an oil of 1929,14 the tiny house in the distance balances the greater visual weight of the foreground elements. Sometimes human figures are strongly affected by buildings, as in Mexican Soldiers, a gouache of 1930,15 where the rigid body of the rightmost soldier resembles the post he overlaps and the brim of his sombrero echoes the convex shape of the cornice above him. In Street Corner, an oil of 1929,16 the very force of the advancing corner of this building pushes the two pedestrians aside as if they were boulders before a moving plow. Fourteenth Street, Manhattan, an oil of 1928–29,17 places a crowd amid steel I-beams and completed skyscrapers. With their stiff and motionless poses, the humans mimic these beams and structures and begin themselves to resemble clustered buildings. Winter, an oil of 1932,18 shows the bodies of men as monolithic and immovable structures; even those striding seem to move with tremendous effort against inertia, as if movement is against their very nature. In some cases, as in Subway Post, an oil of 1929,19 the standing and isolated architectural element has so much presence as to make the human occupant of this space appear redundant, irrelevant, and unnecessary. In these smaller works, Orozco established a pattern in which architecture is a potent agent of narrative and expressive content. When he shifts his attention to mural painting, where the support material is the architecture itself, it assumes even greater power to guide the meaning of the imagery. The metadiscourse of painting buildings on buildings makes all the difference. Orozco’s major mural project in the American Northeast is the fresco in the Baker Library at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. This work, The Epic of American Civilization, painted between 1932 and 1934, shows how he depended on architecture for his composition. For example, in the detail “The Departure of Quetzalcoatl,”20 the pile of resisting figures on the left mimics the shape of the pyramid behind them; and in the section titled “Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life,”21  

 

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Figure 5.1 José Clemente Orozco. “Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life,” in The Epic of American Civilization, fresco mural painting in the Baker Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (1932–34). Hereafter referred to as Epic. Trustees of Dartmouth College; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

the composition of crossed diagonals Orozco derived from the diagonal bracing of the scaffolding he used in painting the work (figure 5.1), as we see in a photograph of him working on this section (figure 5.2), with the convenient superimposition of the crossed planks directly over the diagonals in the painting. The composition of the mural grew out of a formal necessity internal to the image and out of the structure that occupied this architectural space during the painting process. Orozco here is so sensitive to the structure on which he stood to make the painting that he actually transferred part of its graphic form to the painted imagery. The crossed diagonals, appropriate to support the making of the painting, were thus acknowledged in the completed image. Or, to put it another way, the crossed diagonals were already part of the wall as an image, superimposed on its surface by the crossed planks even before it was painted. A comparison of adjustments Orozco made from drawings to finished paintings in The Epic of American Civilization demonstrates how he recast architecture from back-

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Figure 5.2 Photograph of Orozco painting “Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life,” detail of Epic (May 1932). Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

ground to active agent in the narrative. The first such example is the section titled “Hispano-America,” which I examine here in reverse order, looking first at the painting (figure 5.3), to trace certain elements back to the drawing. At left of the painting, the crumbling ruins of ancient architecture flow toward us, changing into columnar figures, hatted and bemedaled military men with their faces as old and blind as the ancient culture that they have inherited and defended, and that is now crushing them. Behind the heroic figure of a rebel that Jacquelynn Baas interprets as “resembl[ing]” Pancho Villa,22 the infamous protagonist of the bloody decade following the Mexican Revolution of 1910, is a corner of a modern building with an open frame-

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Figure 5.3 José Clemente Orozco. “Hispano-America,” detail of Epic. Trustees of Dartmouth College; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

work that is either under construction or in some derelict state. To the right, a damaged factory with a broken smokestack serves as backdrop for an attacking general and masked capitalists. All the buildings are unoccupied and unoccupiable, either bearing down on the human figures in front of them with real destructive force, as on the left, or with more subtle implications, as the factory has forced masked capital into the streets. Its broken windowpanes morph into the knife blade that in turn threatens the rebel’s unguarded back. The building directly behind the rebel is less directly open to interpretation. Does its ominous shape bear down on the rebel as yet another element of mortal danger? In the drawing (figure 5.4), again from left to right, we see some sort of classical building in the background, with arches and columns, directly over a scene of falling figures and fallen and crowned heads in the foreground. A nondescript, squarish building appears behind the head and shoulders of the rebel and, to the right, at least two mounted horses ride toward the central building. The damaged factory has not yet appeared. Notice especially the pose of the rebel here and in the painting. Here, the rebel’s feet are slightly wider apart, as are his arms, whose lines are extended by the

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Figure 5.4 José Clemente Orozco. “Hispano-America,” drawing. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

rifle and the kneeling figure of a man whose upper body is being suspended by his hair. This spreading out of the rebel’s body, extending and anchoring its extremities, takes the shape of a triangle, disposed against the picture plane. The two buildings in the background are also frontal views, oriented to the surface of the paper. Even the horses seem pasted-on in silhouette. This division of the space into two parallel planes makes it difficult for Orozco to make a narrative or character connection between them, although there is some tenuous link between the classical architecture on the left and the dead kings below, although not a logical one, as the buildings stand but their defenders do not. This wooden composition, which resists dramatic narrative, clearly presented problems, which Orozco solved in the final painting by rethinking the historical meanings of architecture and exploiting its very formal properties into agents of movement through space and in narrative.

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First, by turning classical architecture into ruins, he connects it thematically to the collapsing social system it represents and turns those who perpetuate that system into victims of their own making. Furthermore, the tumbling avalanche becomes the device by which background becomes foreground, and both plunging space and the action it hosts fuse into a coherent narrative vehicle. These forces now move in and out through the space of the picture rather than across unconnected planes. The factory on the right, with its right wall plummeting backward and the top-hatted men it pushes toward us, produces the same effect. As the lines of force now project toward and through the picture plane, the fresco wall, they come into the viewers’ space and engage us by definition as the drawing does not and cannot. Orozco’s understanding of architecture — of the way the weight of tumbling columns and the receding lines of a wall can help tell a story—allowed him to make these constructive changes. As for the changes in the pose of the figure of the rebel in the painting, Orozco brings both arms closer to his body, his left one emphatically so, so that it now hangs like a plumb line parallel to the body’s axis. The butt of the rifle now crosses into the space between his legs, which are also brought slightly closer together. His right foot now rests on a stony block, rather than on the head of a hapless victim, as in the drawing. The squared-off shoulders in the drawing have been relaxed a bit and gently rounded down. These changes transform the shape of the rebel figure from a triangle to a column, with a sense of full three-dimensionality. The dark curve of shading on the underside of his hat brim and along his legs emphasizes his cylindrical form. The drawing has no dimensional shading, and heavy marking on the straight legs serves less to depict shadow than to anchor that leg visually as part of the triangle it supports. The cylindrical figure stands like an architectural column, with the sombrero as the capital, colored in the same gray tones as the tumbling columns to the left. Color also connects the rebel to the building directly behind him: his reddish skin tones and the deep blacks of his eyes and mustache repeat the colors of that structure. This empty and brooding building has an indefinite function because it is intended not as a real building, but as an architectural aura around the heroic figure that is emanating it. The building in the painting, unlike that in the drawing, no longer serves as a flat backdrop to the flat triangle of the rebel. It now turns its corner to us and crowds the volumetric rebel more into our space. Not only is it an abstract representation of his character, but it is also the vehicle that propels him forward. The relationship, both formal and thematic, is that of the prow of some great ship bearing the carved wooden figurehead that leads the way. My reading earlier of this building as either incomplete or damaged plays fully into the tragic legend of such a rebel who both is assuming the elevated and mystified status of a heroic martyr, yet here is about to be assassinated. This central building is also the only one in this panel of the fresco whose higher stories become successively smaller. This narrowing relates not only to the overall shape of the rebel, with the brim of his sombrero less than the width of the “column” at the level of his hands, and the crown stepping back yet again from the brim, but also to the classic  

 

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shape of Mesoamerican pyramids found in Mexico and Central America, a shape that here represents ancient America in general. The block supporting the rebel’s right foot, its outside edge angled, becomes the slanting base of such pyramids. Yet the building looks very modern, very much like the step-back skyscrapers Orozco would have seen by the dozens in New York, both newly finished and under construction. The image I am presenting in this extended analysis is jumbled in its references, and that jumble has a good deal to do with the architecture Orozco represents and the meaning-processes in which these buildings are actively engaged. For instance, classical architecture is connected to both villains and heroes, as the columns crush their makers on the left but give the rebel his very form, iconic and timeless. The hyper­modern decaying factory, corrupted by its owners and bosses, shares its stepped-back form with the central rebel-as-column-as-Mesoamerican pyramid. Is this the disorganized logic of the artist, whose contradictory references add up to an incoherent message? I think not, for two reasons: first is his extremely deliberate adjustments from drawing to painting, where every change helps transform the content, making it more focused and charged at the same time. The second reason concerns the nature of Orozco’s understanding of the conflicted character and accomplishment of the rebel himself, and is discussed below. This figure of the rebel also refers to Emiliano Zapata, another major historical figure from the civil war period of 1910– 20. To my eyes, the costume, signature moustache, and figure type are more like that of Zapata than of Villa, even though the face is similar to Villa’s. The rebel’s physical stance is also more like Zapata’s, more deductively indicative of the classic revolutionary fighter. So I will treat the figure as a hybrid, “Pancho Zapata.” The Zapata side of the rebel makes him the very model of the incorruptible revolutionary, who saw through the opportunism of other leaders of the time and stayed true to his mission in the most uncompromising manner. Zapata was thought to be guided not by ideology but by simple justice and a sincere love of his people.23 With his death, he became the greatest martyr of the Revolution. His mission, most simply stated, was to return farmland to those who worked it, on the basis of collective ownership and agrarian technology that was pre-Conquest in its makeup. Yet he was fully embroiled in the first major revolution of the twentieth century, in which the most modern, class-based antagonisms and regime-forming ideas drove the ideologues of the social upheaval. Such a rebel, driven by ancient motives yet caught in very contemporary issues, was able to resolve this apparent paradox —but at great cost. He was conceptually both ancient and modern as no other major figure from this period, and a representation of him, to be compelling, had to take this dichotomy into account. Thus here his body and pose allude to ancient pyramids and columns, and his face bears the color and pattern of modern architecture. The very building behind him, his alter ego, therefore has to bear that double imprint as well: at once ancient in outline and modern in style and material. And what of the rebel’s body, formed by the classical architectural language of his class enemies? This rebel was a social power precisely because he could  

 

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Figure 5.5 José Clemente Orozco. “Gods of the Modern World,” detail of Epic. Trustees of Dartmouth College; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

not be pinned down ideologically. Although an ideology might become attached to him symbolically, he himself was driven by more immediate needs and shed those symbols easily. In other words, the architectural labels that he and his aura wear in this image are merely that—superficial labels rather than some inner, mystic essence that defines his surviving legend. I speak in these abstract and inflated terms because it is with such that Zapata as a representation still survives, even today. It is worth noting several further comparisons between a drawing and its finished painting. First, the depiction of the figures of academic calaveras (skeletons) lined up in the background to the grisly birth scene “Gods of the Modern World” (figure 5.5). In one of the drawings for this section (figure 5.6), the leftmost of these figures, the one directly above the abdomen of the figure lying prone, looks very much like a building, perhaps a skyscraper with a gabled roof. The figure next in line looks more like a human figure, the head rounded, the shoulders sloped, and the gable now the foreshortened academic hat; and the rest of these forms are simply abstract, vertical notations, the implication being that once Orozco had decided on the more human profile of these forms, there was no need to continue such specification. So the principal dynamic is between these two leftmost figures, one a building and one a human form, and in the artist’s change of mind as he moved from left to right. In the painting, the row of figures  

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Figure 5.6 José Clemente Orozco. “Gods of the Modern World,” drawing. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

is longer and all are now human skeletons, but they do have that monolithic presence of a row of tall buildings, impassive and blind, keeping some of the character of their earliest conceptualization. In the easel painting The Dead, of 1931,24 Orozco likened destroyed buildings to dead organisms, so the link I am suggesting is not so fantastic for this artist. And because this is a birth scene, could it be that the artist also gave birth to adult human skeleton academics first as buildings? And why not such a juxtaposition of disparate entities in a scene that mixes the dead with the action of the living and the giving of life to those already dead? Here architecture establishes the structural and behavioral genetic material for this deadly narrative. The right-hand panel of the section titled “Modern Industrial Man” from the Dartmouth fresco can also be usefully compared with its drawing (figures 5.7 and 5.8). In this case, the point is made rather quickly. The two major changes here are the addition of the vertical metal beam in the lower right corner and the turn of the head of the man in the foreground from back into the space of the drawing to straight down. Both drawing and painting place the two pickaxes at the bottom over the legs of the lower worker, replacing his real legs with wooden legs and steel feet. The worker becomes his tools. The axis of the rightmost pickaxe in the painting now aligns itself with the steel beam, adding a new term in this chain of related elements. The man in the foreground looks down because the uppermost man does so. The men must look alike because their horizontal torsos connect a vertical tool to a vertical beam, as horizontal beams connect vertical ones in the building they are working on. The structural system has to be repetitive and consistent for the building to hold itself up. The appearance of the lower beam and the turning of the face downward were necessary to transform these workers into the very building they are constructing. That is the point of these changes and perhaps of this detail of the panel. My final comparison of drawing to painting in the Dartmouth project is the central panel from the section “Modern Industrial Man.” A worker in the painting (figure 5.9) seems to take a break from the construction of the framed-in building behind him. Or does he? His attention is fully on the book he is reading. The break cannot be a very

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Figure 5.7 (left) José Clemente Orozco. “Modern Industrial Man,” drawing for right-hand panel. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Figure 5.8 (right) José Clemente Orozco. “Modern Industrial Man,” right-hand panel, detail of Epic. Trustees of Dartmouth College; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

long one, as he has his sledgehammer close at hand and has kept his work gloves on. The formal relations of this figure to architecture and its construction are evident in the resemblance between the general outline of his body and that of the building, with one long, dragging line on the right and two elevated spikes to the left; the arm resting on the ground is related formally to the standing hammer, giving the reason for placing this tool upright and making one more formal link between man and the tool with which he constructs the building. So again we have the familiar blending of human and architecture. But let us look at the changes again. In the drawing (figure 5.10) the man wears no

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Figure 5.9 (top) José Clemente Orozco. “Modern Industrial Man,” central panel, detail of Epic. Trustees of Dartmouth College; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Figure 5.10 (bottom) José Clemente Orozco. “Modern Industrial Man,” drawing for central panel. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

gloves and he has read a bit farther into his book. The hammer, moreover, touches his elbow (in the painting, it is moved a couple inches away). What explains the changes in the painting? The gloves are worn for working on the building, not properly for reading, so the book is now being treated as would be the building. The book is open closer to its beginning, suggesting that it is as far from being finished as the building is from being completed. The standing hammer has been moved away a bit because it is not the proper tool for performing this immediate task, which is reading. Here, the book has replaced the building, as the building will replace the book at the end of this break. Orozco had already proposed such a kinship between books and buildings in the easel painting The World’s Highest Structure of 1928– 30,25 in which both the structural and thematic equivalences I am suggesting here are stated explicitly, even to the point where a viewer might read the scale of these books as gigantic. The purposeful multi-valence of the term “structure” suggests that it may apply to either skyscraper or books, or to both together as a joined entity. In the fresco, both building and book will be finished at some point, and the worker will start on another book and another construction project. One sort of labor may be done with the hands and the other with the eyes, but both are intellectually engaging. It is important that both structures are open, to reinforce this  

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activity as a process, and that the book bears no title and that the building serves no specific function, for such specifications would detract from the all-important idea of process in the abstract. The worker here is architectural in many ways, as is the book he is reading. Thus, architecture as an abstract metaphor for the worker’s existence and his importance in a progressive society is the message here. Orozco thus could not think about painting apart from architecture, especially in his mural projects. It is taken for granted that no mural painter can disregard the architecture that supports the mural, but Orozco translated this given into a richer dialectic in which the presence of both media forced the very concept of architecture into agency in the conceptualization and execution of the imagery. Architecture, in the examples studied here, beyond its formal qualities, endows narrative with a richness and increases the expression of events and characters to the point where it seems that Orozco trusted no other device to this degree to push his images to their full measure of meaning.

Notes

1.  A briefer version of this chapter was first delivered in 2002 at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, at a symposium on the subject of Orozco’s work in the United States. 2.  See the chapter “What Is a Mural?” in Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940: Art of the New Order (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 3.  José Clemente Orozco, The Artist in New York: Letters to Jean Charlot and Unpublished Writings, Foreword and Notes by Jean Charlot, Trans. by Ruth L.C. Simms (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1974), p. 31. 4.  Orozco, 1974, p. 68. 5.  Orozco, 1974, p. 70. 6. For the most comprehensive, single-authored treatment of Orozco in the United States, see Alejandro Anreus, Orozco in Gringoland: The Years in New York (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), 2001. 7.  José Clemente Orozco, Textos de Orozco, Study and appendix by Justino Fernández, addenda by Teresa del Conde, Second edition (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983), p. 42. 8.  Orozco, 1974, p. 31. 9.  Orozco, 1974, pp. 75, 76. 10.  Orozco, 1974, p. 82. 11.  Those images not illustrated in this essay can be found in Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes, eds., José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927 –1934 (Hanover, NH, New York and London: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and W.W. Norton & Co., 2002). 12.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 49. 13.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 84. 14.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 252. 15.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 50.  

 

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16.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 299. 17.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 71. 18.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 183. 19.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 251. 20.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 149. 21.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 157. 22. “The Epic of American Civilization: The Mural at Dartmouth College (1932– 34),” in González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, pp. 142 –85; quote is from page 177. 23.  John Womack, Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1968). 24.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 68. 25.  González Mello and Miliotes, 2002, p. 72.  

 

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6 Murales Estridentes Tensions and Affinities between Estridentismo and Early Muralism

Tatiana Flores

Estridentismo (stridentism), Mexico’s first self-acknowledged avant-garde movement, erupted in Mexico City in December 1921 with the publication and dissemination of the manifesto Actual No. 1 (figure 6.1) by the poet Manuel Maples Arce (1900 – 1981). This irreverent and iconoclastic text was a battle-cry for the renovation of the Mexican arts. Sending Chopin to the electric chair, profaning the heroes of Mexican independence, and disdaining the literary establishment, Maples Arce called for artists to look for inspiration in technology and to revel in the present moment.1 In form and content, Actual No. 1 represented a radical departure from its Mexican literary predecessors. It reacted against the lyrical tendencies of modernismo, the movement that had dominated Mexican letters since the close of the nineteenth century, by employing an aggressive tone, convoluted phrasing, dissonant diction, and impenetrable vocabulary. Furthermore, Maples Arce sought to combine art and life through such tactics as posting the manifesto in public spaces, advocating an aesthetic of simultaneity, and structuring the prose as an all-encompassing multi-sensorial experience. His text closely corresponds to the model described by Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, asserting that the avant-garde seeks to unite art and life, “turn[ing] against . . . the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends . . . and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of autonomy.”2 Though Maples Arce drew inspiration from contemporary European avant-garde movements, particularly Italian futurism and Spanish  

I am grateful to the Jean Charlot Foundation for its generous support of this research. Special thanks to Fernando Leal-Audirac and John Charlot, as well as to Alejandro Anreus, Robin Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait.

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Figure 6.1 Manuel Maples Arce. Actual No. 1, broadsheet (recto), 59.5 × 40 cm (1921). Courtesy Museo Nacional de Arte, CONACULTA, INBA.

ultraísmo, the post-Revolutionary Mexican context gave his manifesto added relevance as a catalyst of cultural renovation.3 Estridentismo’s dialogues with the visual arts were integral to its development even though the movement’s literary contribution has generally been the focus of discussion. Maples Arce embarked on numerous collaborations with the first generation of muralists during the 1920s.4 Actual No. 1, deeply invested in notions of progress and development, disclosed a conviction that technology, coupled with sweeping cultural changes, would improve society. Muralists shared the belief that artists could bring about social change and that the post-Revolutionary moment called for a radical re-conception of art, though they did not necessarily accept Maples Arce’s faith in technology. Such painters as Fer-

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nando Leal (1896– 1964), Jean Charlot (1898– 1979), and Fermín Revueltas (1903– 35) engaged critically with estridentismo as they produced their first murals, either through direct collaborations or artistic dialogues with Maples Arce. While it is clear that each of them held the estridentista leader in high esteem, the heightened sense of historical consciousness they gained as a result of their experience as mural painters led them to question estridentismo’s relevance to post-Revolutionary Mexico. In this chapter, I compare the first murals of Leal, Charlot, and Revueltas to the estridentista aesthetic outlined in Actual No. 1. Juggling avant-garde theory and painterly practice as well as social and formal concerns, these murals proposed diverse futures for Mexican art that both converged with and departed from Maples Arce’s ideals. I evaluate these works in relation to official post-Revolutionary discourse and assess the tensions in them between form and content, intelligibility and erudition, and local concerns and cosmopolitan ideals.  

 

 

M u r a l i s m a n d Ava n t- G a r d e Th e o r y

Relating estridentismo to early muralism enriches the interpretation of relevant images and texts and sheds light on the dialogues and debates surrounding modernity and the avant-garde in post-Revolutionary Mexican art. Like estridentismo, mural production was initiated in 1921, arising not as a formal movement but rather as an assortment of commissions delegated by the minister of education, José Vasconcelos. From 1921 to 1924, Vasconcelos hired artists of varying reputations and experience to paint walls of public buildings in Mexico City.5 A prolific philosopher who believed that art could lift the human spirit, Vasconcelos advocated the creation of a national art.6 Though the minister had firm ideas about the nature of Mexican identity—his theory of the “cosmic race” posits that the mix of ethnicities in the Americas would produce the ideal race, capable of the most elevated creations7—he gave the mural painters autonomy over their compositions, asking them only to paint something “Mexican.” These painters faced the challenge of filling a blank wall in public space with an image whose style and content would correspond to the social and historical conditions of the post-Revolutionary moment. When Maples Arce distributed Actual No.1, he had a similar problem: to gain new readers in public space. Thus, within the same year, the muralists and Maples Arce embarked on something radically new that would alter the Mexican cultural panorama. Both lacked a predetermined audience, and their proposals were experimental “works in progress” in search of the most relevant model for a modern Mexican art. To highlight the degree of interpenetration between estridentismo and muralism, it is worth remembering that it was none other than Maples Arce who gave the inaugural address at the unveiling of Diego Rivera’s first mural, Creation, in 1923. As reported in El Universal,  

 

Señor Maples Arce occupied the stage, giving warm praise to the work of painter Rivera and to its frankly futuristic [estridentista] style. The speaker reviled the partisans of the

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impressionist style, going so far as to assert that the National School of Fine Arts was a brothel of pictorial art. He did not miss the opportunity to fling his passionate vocabulary at the periodicals of this metropolis, dubbing them literary chicken coops, in allusion to their style and taste. Having monopolized the rostrum for an hour and a half, the speaker concluded by saying that Rivera, back in Mexico after years of traveling and living on the Old Continent in impressionist surroundings, produced this intensely nationalistic work, a credit to the artist in the opinion of the speaker.8

This humorous description suggests that Maples Arce used his public appearance to stage a dadaesque action in which he both insulted and exasperated the audience through a lengthy, impassioned speech that claimed Rivera’s mural for estridentismo even though the subject matter —an allegory of Mexican identity based on Vasconcelos’ theory of the cosmic race— is contrary to Maples Arce’s prescriptions for the avantgarde.9 In Actual No. 1, the poet rejected the notion of a national art, mocking the “pitiful and goal-driven flowerings of our nationalistic medium, with the stench of pulquerías and the leftovers of fried foods [ fritangas]” and called for artists to become cosmopolitan. In his address on Rivera’s mural, however, Maples Arce paradoxically reconciled nationalism with the avant-garde.10 This willingness to compromise specific values in search of followers and supporters was typical of estridentismo, but it also reveals a fundamental tension between the manifesto’s emphasis on pure formal experimentation and muralism’s socially driven nature as well as between the urban themes and technological focus advocated by Maples Arce and Mexico’s agricultural economy, its large peasant population, and its grossly uneven distribution of resources. If, as is clear, estridentismo self-consciously emulated European models and disdained nationalism, to what degree did early muralism adopt comparable avant-garde strategies? In form and subject, the first murals are experimental and stylistically diverse but share anti-academic and anti-bourgeois attitudes. Like Maples Arce, who rejected official literature, early muralism made significant departures from nineteenth-century academic models of painting and sought to expand art’s audience. It also experimented with the formal innovations of European modernism. Whereas Maples Arce acted independently, however, the mural painters were government employees and thus keenly aware of their social and educational mission. A tension arises in the theory of the avant-garde between art’s content and its function. Bürger, in his analysis of the historical avant-gardes, asserts that “when the avantgardistes demand that art become practical once again, they do not mean that the contents of works of art should be socially significant.” They wanted to change instead “the way art functions in society.”11 Many of the original mural painters sought to do both: to create relevant social content and to demystify art in order to bring it closer to the lives of the Mexican people. Mural painting was only one means to this end; printmaking, teaching, and activism were the other tactics by which these artists attempted to change the status of art in post-Revolutionary Mexico.12  

 

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The greatest difficulty in reconciling muralism to avant-garde theory relates to patronage. Mural painting was a government-sponsored activity that formed part of the post-Revolutionary cultural policy of creating a national art; it was not a purely autonomous practice. The government’s broader project was to instill in all the peoples of Mexico the idea of a unified nation. The major advocate of Mexican nationalism was the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, who published Forjando patria (“Forging a Fatherland”) in 1916. In this work, Gamio lamented that Latin American countries lacked the “characteristics inherent in a defined and integrated nationality, either a single concept or a unanimous feeling of what the Nation is.”13 His explanations for this absence of national sentiment in Mexico included racial and cultural differences, social inequalities, and the country’s vast geography; and he recommended the creation of a national art, free of foreign influences, as one way to achieve national unity.14 Benedict Anderson, in his landmark study on nationalism, argues persuasively for the nation as a “cultural artifact,” defining “nation” as “an imagined political community.”15 No one was more aware of the nation as a construct than the Mexican intellectuals who occupied positions of power in the post-Revolutionary government. Profoundly aware that ethnic, social, and cultural diversity had contributed to the outbreak of the Revolution and continued to imperil the stability of the country and the government, men such as Vasconcelos and President Alvaro Obregón struggled to create national unity. Under their leadership, that project became an effort to impose order by controlling the territory of the nation and thus to prevent further social upheaval. In that process, the effort threatened to eradicate Mexico’s regional differences.16 The government, however, promised great social improvements, such as redistributing lands to peasant communities and making education accessible to all. Mural painters, conscious of these great contradictions, were caught between the government’s nationalist and educational project and that of an avant-garde whose models for making art were primarily European. In such a complex cultural context, Bürger’s theory is unable to account for the specificities of the post-Revolutionary moment. A more precise approach is to recognize the Mexican avant-garde’s enterprise as inherently contradictory, oscillating between the search for new, expressive languages inspired by European art and a profound sense of responsibility and the obligation to make art socially relevant. Contradictions pervade Maples Arce’s writings. In Actual No. 1, he presents nationalism and the avant-garde as antithetical, urging readers to become cosmopolitan and proclaiming, “It is no longer possible to contain ourselves in conventional chapters on national art.”17 The manifesto itself, however, is full of local references. The poet addresses a literate audience of city dwellers and pedestrians, employing diction and rhetorical strategies that directly relate to their surroundings and experience. Although he affirms that avant-garde art erases borders because “[t]he medium transforms itself, and its influence changes everything,”18 he also calls on artists to “[f]ix aesthetic limits. Make art, with its proper and innate elements conceived in its own environment.”19

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These conflicting views, however, do not necessarily add up to nationalism, which in Mexico was a specifically articulated post-Revolutionary government project. Where Maples Arce’s early writings could be said to parallel official politics is in their utopic belief in progress and development, a belief not always shared by the early muralists. The first murals of Fernando Leal, Jean Charlot, and Fermín Revueltas similarly reflect the affinities of official ideology and avant-garde aesthetics as well as the contradictions between them, offering complex meditations on modernity in post-Revolutionary Mexico.

F e r n a n d o L e a l , T h e F e a s t o f t h e Lo r d o f C h a lm a ( 19 2 2 – 2 3)  

Before executing his first mural in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City, Fernando Leal created an unfinished portrait of Manuel Maples Arce (1922, figure 6.2), with the painting Indian of the Tunas (figure 6.3) on its verso.20 Thus on a single canvas, Leal depicted Mexican society from the peasant to the intelligentsia. These two works on a shared support demonstrate his early engagement with different avant-garde possibilities, an urban universalist model proposed by Maples Arce and one embracing local culture and social causes. In the unfinished portrait, the poet is dressed as a dandy, wearing an oversize handkerchief in his breast pocket and with his hands on the handle of a cane. The background is a strident yellow, and the portrait itself is rendered in flattened planar forms that recall Maples Arce’s own aesthetic. Curiously, Maples Arce’s skin appears much darker in the portrait than it would have been in life: in this, he resembles an indigenous person. The juxtaposition of his darkened face and city clothes exposes the contradiction of adopting an urban avant-garde model in an essentially rural country, especially with the depiction of the Indian on the reverse. That work, rendered in a volumetric post-impressionist style, depicts an indigenous man seated peacefully on the ground, holding a tuna — the prickly pear fruit of the nopal cactus. The peasant evokes one of the promises of the Revolution: the redistribution of land. The contrasting subjects and conflicting styles of the two works demonstrate Leal’s ambivalence toward Maples Arce’s aesthetics; both paintings, however— despite the social orientation of Indian of the Tunas — make use of Eurocentric forms, betraying a decidedly bourgeois perspective. Thus, they point to social disparities in Mexico and recall Gilbert Joseph’s description of the revolution as “more often than not, made from above and imposed from without upon Mexico’s regions and popular classes.”21 The Feast of the Lord of Chalma (plate 3) also presents a conflicted view of race and class. Leal portrays a group of Indians wearing colorful costumes and ritual masks, dancing in tribute to the Black Christ of the Church of Chalma. Little girls with braids, women in their rebozos, and men with sombreros on their backs make up the crowd.  

 

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Figure 6.2 Fernando Leal. Portrait of Manuel Maples Arce, verso of Indian of the Tunas (1922), oil on canvas, 116 × 116 cm. Courtesy of © Fernando Leal-Audirac, Milan.

The structure and content of the mural reveal the social tensions of contemporary Mexico as well as a deep skepticism of modernization as a utopian project like that envisioned by Maples Arce. According to the artist, I . . . wanted at all costs to paint something . . . genuinely Mexican. So I chose a modern scene of a ritual dance inside a church. . . . I based my interpretation on an anecdote told by my brother. . . . During the course of a religious dance around the statue of the Virgin, the concussion caused the image to fall down in its glass case, leaving exposed a small figurine carved in stone of the goddess of water, which had been hidden since time immemorial under the rich mantle of Our Lady. True or not, this incident became the ideological justification for my picture.22

Leal’s evocation of the “modern” is filled with seeming contradictions. For him, the archaic dance, not the futurist-inspired urban avant-garde, is emblematic of Mexican modernity. Like Courbet in his meticulous study for The Burial at Ornans, Leal observed his subjects with anthropological precision. He witnessed ritual dances in native villages and made numerous preparatory sketches. His ethnographic attitude along with his characterization of his subject as “modern” brings to mind the relationship remarked on by Johannes Fabian between the discipline of anthropology and colonialism. In Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, Fabian observes,

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Figure 6.3 Fernando Leal. Indian of the Tunas (1922), oil on canvas, 116 × 116 cm. Courtesy of © Fernando Leal-Audirac, Milan.

[Anthropology] gave to politics and economics . . . a firm belief in “natural,” i.e., evolutionary Time. It promoted a scheme in terms of which not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time — some upstream, others downstream. Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization . . . are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary Time.23  

Fabian goes on to note that “discourse employing terms such as primitive, savage (but also tribal, traditional, Third World, or whatever euphemism is current) does not think, or observe, or critically study the ‘primitive’; it thinks, observes, studies in terms of the primitive. Primitive being essentially a temporal concept, is a category, not an object, of Western thought.”24 Leal’s mural invokes Mexico’s “primitive” cultures but grounds them in the present day by depicting a self-portrait in one of the dancers, positioned two-thirds of the way from the left and wearing a headdress with three feathers in primary colors, who stares confrontationally out of the composition. Fabian goes on to criticize the modern discipline of anthropology for its “denial of coevalness . . . [,] a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent[s] of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”25 Leal, however, was keenly aware that his subjects were contemporary Mexicans just like him. He reveals himself to be in the uneasy position of being not quite Indian and not quite Western, not quite primitive

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and not quite modern. Underscoring his role as observer, Leal in the mural confronts the viewer as his subaltern subjects never could. He exaggerates his features, lengthening his teeth and widening his lips so that his face appears mask-like and frightening. His look accosts viewers, making them feel self-conscious, like voyeurs. By rendering himself exotic, Leal challenges the category of the “Other” and interrogates the tradition of depicting “primitive” cultures. Whereas the historian Florencia Mallón argues for “the active participation and intellectual creativity of subaltern classes in the process of nation-state formation” in Mexico,26 Leal’s mural takes a pessimistic stance, more like Gayatri Spivak’s position —that the “subaltern cannot speak.”27 Leal’s chaotic composition resists a straightforward reading and resolution, and the artist’s complex portrayal of the lower classes inaugurates a new iconography for muralism. Whereas the first murals by his contemporaries treated allegorical or historical themes, Leal tackles the social problems of post-Revolutionary Mexico. He creates an epic work of art that synthesizes different periods and cultures but is ultimately grounded in contemporary experience. Structurally, then, the mural complicates received notions of modernity as related to progress and development. By rendering the tensions in a post-colonial present, Leal reveals his skepticism about modernization as a utopian project like that envisioned by Maples Arce, and also contests the cultural policy of the post-Revolutionary government. His acknowledgment of uneven temporalities in Mexico critiques both the estridentista leader’s faith in progress and nationalist attempts to define a Mexican identity  

J e a n Ch a r l o t, M a s s a c r e at t h e T e m p lo M ayo r ( 19 2 2 –2 3)

The French painter Jean Charlot also engaged the tensions between historical and present time in his first mural Massacre at the Templo Mayor (figure 6.4), painted directly across from Leal’s. The subject is a gruesome scene of the Conquest: the slaying of the Aztec peoples in their capital city of Tenochtitlan during a religious festival. Charlot portrays the Spanish army as a killing machine. Soldiers thrust their lances from the right, wearing heavy armor, their faces invisible. Their robotic aspect contrasts with the humanity and dignity of the Aztec chiefs, who stand tall on the left. As a preparatory sketch makes clear, Charlot based his composition on simple geometric forms. Leal began with a similar geometric study; in Charlot’s mural, however, the underlying construction is more evident. In The Mexican Mural Renaissance, Charlot noted that his design “showed affinity with the dynamic brand of Cubism —of the cog and piston type— that [he] had practiced in France.”28 The mural’s composition is also clearly based on The Battle of San Romano (ca. 1445) by the Italian Renaissance master Paolo Uccello. In fact, Jean Charlot, more than any of his contemporaries, was tireless in promoting the mural movement as the “Mexican renaissance” —an attitude at odds with the avant-garde objective to stage a rupture with the past but in tune with the rappel à l’ordre ideals of the new classicism that swept over European art after World War I.  

 

 

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Figure 6.4 Jean Charlot. Massacre at the Templo Mayor, fresco, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1923). Courtesy of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

The facture of Charlot’s mural, however— its organization around diagonal lines, its radical spatial compression, and its implied movement — recalls prewar futurist models as well as Maples Arce’s own aesthetic. The composition and flattened forms give Charlot’s mural a sense of simultaneity that is absent from Leal’s Feast of the Lord of Chalma, whose complexity demands sustained looking. Massacre at the Templo Mayor, by contrast, presents visual information that can viewed and understood in an instant. The two sides, Indian and Spanish, clash in the center of the wall, divided by a striped lance that divides the two halves of the composition. On one side stands the indigenous world, depicted in curvilinear forms that may allude to the cyclical conception of time in the Aztec worldview. The Spanish side shows a multitude of diagonal lines, the red lances wielded by the soldiers, which symbolize the inexorable forward march of linear time. Like Leal in his mural, Charlot criticizes the colonial enterprise; but, in contrast to Leal, he presents his message without ambiguity. Leal critiques both indigenous and European Mexicans; Charlot portrays the Spanish warriors as bestial and inhumane and the Aztec lords as courageous and dignified. The clarity of his fresco in identifying the evils of one toward the other makes it possible to comprehend his work immediately, further aligning it with Maples Arce’s aesthetic of instantaneity. Despite all the clearly modernist elements of Massacre at the Templo Mayor, Charlot also demonstrated a great concern with the past and a sense of the historical importance of his work. Whereas Maples Arce emphasizes the present, Charlot, in Massacre at the Templo Mayor, self-consciously testifies to his own historical projection. At the bottom  

 

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Figure 6.5 Jean Charlot. Psychological Portrait of Manuel Maples Arce, woodcut (1922). Reproduced on the cover of Ser, February–March 1923. Courtesy Museo Nacional de Arte, CONACULTA, INBA.

right corner of his mural stands a group of three men: the artist at left, wearing glasses, holding a palette, and pointing at his work; Diego Rivera in the middle, and Fernando Leal on the far right, looking across to his own mural. A blond child accompanies the group, surveying the scene with eyes wide open. Charlot appears to address the child, thus portraying himself as a teacher, educating future generations about the Conquest. Whereas Leal’s self-portrait in The Feast of the Lord of Chalma problematizes the role of the artist in post-Revolutionary society, Charlot depicts the artist as educator. Distant from the events he portrays, he mediates, unlike Leal, between the spectator and the scene. We can look at the self-portraits in Charlot’s and Leal’s murals in relation to Maples Arce’s two portraits of the artist in his manifesto, one visual and the other verbal. The poet’s photograph that adorns Actual No. 1 is independent of the text in a way that is analogous to Charlot’s self-portrait in Massacre at the Templo Mayor. Both portraits visually reinforce the presence of their creators but are not directly linked to the main action of the works. Whereas Maples Arce’s tone is egomaniacal, however, and his photograph asserts his sole authorship, Charlot refuses to take an individualistic attitude and instead presents the production of murals as a collective activity by including the portraits of Leal and Rivera. For him, the role of the artist in post-Revolutionary society is less complicated than it is for Leal, who integrates himself into the scene with no clear

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purpose. Leal’s self-portrait, then, functions more like Maples Arce’s verbal portrait in his manifesto, where the poet describes himself as an antenna, capturing perceptions and observing a rapidly changing world over which he has no control. Similarly, Leal presents his own passivity within a chaotic environment. At the time he worked on the mural, Charlot also made his first direct contribution to estridentismo: his woodcut print Psychological Portrait of Manuel Maples Arce (figure 6.5), published on the cover of the February–March 1923 issue of Ser. Radically modern, the image portrays Maples Arce as a flattened assortment of facial features, letters, and fragments evoking modern objects— a propeller, a smokestack, a microphone — that actively involves the viewer, forcing the eye to travel around the image to decipher meaning. The effect Charlot achieves is similar to that of reading Maples Arce’s prose, whose dizzying rhythms, convoluted phrases, and invented words require an active reader. The dynamic facture of the mural and the print reveal Charlot’s embrace of European prewar avant-garde visual models early in his career; though he continued to collaborate with Maples Arce, his subsequent work exploited more static forms.  

 

F e r m í n R e v u e lta s , All e g o ry o f t h e V i r g i n o f G u a d a lu p e ( 19 2 2 – 2 3)  

Among the mural painters who most closely adhered to Maples Arce’s aesthetic was Fermín Revueltas, whose early landscape paintings began integrating modern referents and adopting flattened modernist forms as a result of the poet’s influence.29 Perhaps unwittingly, in his paintings, by combining rural and urban subjects, Revueltas exposed a fundamental question raised by Maples Arce’s dream: how to achieve a radical avantgarde based on urban models in an essentially rural country. Furthermore, Revueltas, when making the transition from easel to mural painting, developed a heightened social consciousness that led him to question Maples Arce’s vision of an urban utopia. Revueltas’ first mural, the brightly colored Allegory of the Virgin of Guadalupe (figure 6.6), also at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, lacks narrative content. Instead of laying out the elements of the legend, Revueltas created a heavenly hierarchy with the Virgin at the top, surrounded by a crowd of worshippers and flanked by angels. The effect of modernist facture overpowers the subject matter. The mural is rigidly structured as a triangular composition, a significant departure from Revueltas’ landscape paintings, and, like Charlot’s Massacre at the Templo Mayor, lays bare its geometric foundation. The figures form the diagonals of the triangle whose apex is the head of the Virgin. Revueltas also flattens his forms, rendering every face as schematic and mask-like. Allegory of the Virgin of Guadalupe examines the nature of Mexican identity and engages in a critical dialogue with Rivera’s Creation mural. Whereas Creation follows Vasconcelos in claiming the mestizo of mixed Spanish and Indian blood as the “ideal” Mexican, Revueltas acknowledges the African presence in Mexico by depicting several figures with very dark skin and full lips. Furthermore, except for the Virgin and angels,

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Figure 6.6 Fermín Revueltas. Allegory of the Virgin of Guadalupe, encaustic, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria), Mexico City (1922–23). Courtesy of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

his characters are not allegorical like Rivera’s but rather are ordinary people. Confronting the problem of how to depict the Mexican populace, Revueltas gives his subjects generic faces, displays figures from the back, and employs many different shades of brown to call attention to the country’s racial diversity. In his choice of subject and mode of depicting it, he exhibits, for the first time in his work, an engagement with the social and ethnic complexities of Mexico. Radically simplifying his style to attain maximum intelligibility—and in this way further contrasting with Rivera’s erudite subject matter and more refined style—he makes his figures look folk-like and naïve. The critic Renato Molina Enriquez wrote, “The painter simply sought a plastic motif, and executed it . . . with the ingenuous mentality of an artisan, so that it could be understood by the multitudes and would not need intellectual exegesis.”30  

 

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Figure 6.7 Fermín Revueltas. Andamios exteriores (Exterior Scaffolding) (1923), watercolor on paper, 34 × 27.3 cm. Courtesy Museo Nacional de Arte, CONACULTA, INBA.

As the artist explored folkloric elements of Mexican culture, he also experimented with estridentista forms: the flattened planes and colors Maples Arce prescribed in a passage calling for artists to gather inspiration from posters, geometric signs, automobile accessories, and “[f]lat hues: blues, yellows, reds.”31 In a passage very reminiscent of Actual No. 1, an anonymous critic described the mural as follows: “Flat hues without reflections, indivisible colors, pure tones, unblended, resolute contrasts. . . . ” 32 Indeed, the planes of color, the spatial compression, and the radial composition evoke a sensation of simultaneity that also recalls Maples Arce’s writing style and his prescriptions to visual artists. In the mural by Revueltas, however, radical formal innovation based on European modernism contrasts with the artist’s reflections on Mexican race, class, and identity, bringing to light the structural contradictions of Mexican avant-garde art of this period. The heightened sense of social responsibility Revueltas developed while painting Allegory of the Virgin of Guadalupe extended beyond his mural practice. It is clearly evident in Andamios exteriores (Exterior Scaffolding) (figure 6.7), a watercolor of 1923, which refers directly to Maples Arce’s book of poetry Andamios interiores (Interior Scaffolding). In this image, Revueltas creates an urban landscape with human figures: two workmen at a construction site. Telegraph poles and wires overshadow the men, who are further diminished by being shown from the back, their faces hidden from view.

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Despite its reference to Andamios interiores, this work diverges significantly from Maples Arce’s aesthetic. On a formal level, it contains planar elements and spatial compression similar to Revueltas’ other works, yet the insertion of class into an image of the modern city dramatically changes its tone. While Andamios interiores finds beauty in modernization, Andamios exteriores reveals another side of this process: the anonymous workers who make it possible. Formal elements in the composition support this assertion. Color contrasts between the telegraph poles and the simple wooden scaffolding constantly draw the viewer’s focus left, away from the workmen. The scaffolding itself eclipses them, while asymmetrical layers of wires pull attention away from those figures. The block-like, cramped buildings and water tanks in the foreground allude not to an urban utopia but to the lower-class neighborhoods, or vecindades, where many families lived in cramped quarters. The scaffolding connects the work to mural painting, scaffolding being an essential instrument of the practice. In Andamios exteriores, the workmen are surrogates for mural painters. Pictured from the back, they face the wall like muralists at work. Jean Charlot elaborated on the social commitment mural painters felt: “Only the bad muralist may remain immune to the . . . social responsibilities involved in speaking with paint on public walls. Working elbow to elbow with masons stresses the fact that art also is a manual exertion, that wall painting and house painting are twins.”33 In this watercolor, Revueltas implicitly identifies himself with the working class. He takes Maples Arce’s avant-garde vocabulary in a different direction, making it acknowledge local and political concerns. .   .   . The first murals of Leal, Charlot, and Revueltas demonstrate complex attitudes toward the avant-garde, nationalism, and audience in post-Revolutionary Mexico. They ponder the search for a universal artistic language versus the creation of a national art, the role of the artist in the new society, and the problem of how to make art accessible to the general public. The stylistic diversity and structural tensions of these works suggest that artists of this generation had no common vision on the avant-garde or Mexican art in general. Reading them in relation to Actual No. 1 allows us to interpret their works as experimental proposals and meditations on the avant-garde model that would be most relevant to Mexico. In their future murals and mural studies, all three painters would significantly alter their styles, as would Maples Arce himself. Estridentismo underwent radical changes as a result of Maples Arce’s interaction with the first generation of mural painters. When he wrote Actual No. 1, Maples Arce acted independently; with the manifesto, however, he sought to form a collective, united in its commitment to renovating Mexican culture. He eventually came to realize that the urban, individualistic, and internationalist model he had proposed in his first manifesto and early texts was not sustainable in Mexico and shifted his ideas to embrace more socially responsible causes. In 1924 and after, Maples Arce would explicitly ally himself

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to the social revolution in his poetry and public life, and estridentismo would henceforth become known as a revolutionary movement.

Notes

1.  For an in-depth discussion of Actual No. 1, see Tatiana Flores, “Clamoring for Attention in Mexico City: Manuel Maples Arce’s Avant-Garde Manifesto Actual No. 1,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 69 (Fall 2004):208–220. 2.  See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 22. 3.  See Pontus Hulten, Futurism and Futurisms (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986) and El ultraísmo y las artes plásticas (Valencia: Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, 1998). These literary predecessors have led to a general dismissal of estridentismo as “derivative” and of little import. On the negative reception of estridentismo, see Silvia Pappe, “El movimiento estridentista atrapado en los andamios de la historia” (PhD dissertation, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998). 4.  The interrelationship between estridentista art and literature is discussed at length in my doctoral dissertation. See Tatiana Flores, “Estridentismo in Mexico City: Dialogues Between Mexican Avant-Garde Art and Literature, 1921 –1924” (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2003). 5.  On Vasconcelos’ legacy as minister of education, see Claude Fell, José Vasconcelos. Los años del águila (1920–1925) (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1989). 6.  See, for example, “Carta abierta a los obreros del estado de Jalisco” in José Vasconcelos, Discursos, 1920–1950 (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas, 1950), pp. 23–25. 7.  These ideas are first laid out by Vasconcelos in Estudios indostánicos (1920) and later elaborated in La raza cósmica (1925). See José Vasconcelos, Estudio indostánicos (Mexico City: Ediciones México Moderno, 1920) and José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana. Notas de un viaje a la América del Sur (Barcelona, 1925). See also Fell, Los años del águila, pp. 387–89. 8.  El Universal (March 10, 1923), quoted in Jean Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 145 –46. 9.  For an in-depth discussion of the mural, see Charlot, Renaissance, pp. 136 – 37 and Mary K. Coffey, “The ‘Mexican Problem’: Nation and ‘Native’ in Mexican Muralism and Cultural Discourse,” in The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, eds. Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 50–52. 10.  Luis Mario Schneider, El estridentismo: La vanguardia literaria en México (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), 11. This and all subsequent translations from Spanish are my own. “Pulquería” refers to the ubiquitous taverns that sold pulque, a popular, intoxicating beverage made from the maguey cactus. The word “fritanga,” apart from its dissonance, carried a pejorative connotation. 11.  Bürger, p. 49. 12.  The Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors formed in 1922 and consisted primarily of mural painters, including Siqueiros, Rivera, Fermín Revueltas, and  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fernando Leal, who allied themselves with the proletariat. See Charlot, Renaissance, pp. 241–51 and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Me llamaban el coronelazo (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1977), pp. 213– 28. Furthermore, Fernando Leal, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Fermín Revueltas, and José Clemente Orozco also worked as teachers at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. Simultaneous with the production of their first murals, they taught night courses in preparatory drawing open to all members of the community but geared toward manual workers. See “Directorio del personal,” Archivo de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1922, Box #3, Folder #84. 13.  Manuel Gamio, Forjando patria (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1992), p. 7. 14.  See Gamio, Forjando patria, p. 52. 15.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), p. 6. 16.  For an articulation of the nationalist project in relation to defining the “ideal” Indian, see Adriana Zavala, “Constituting the Female/Indian Body in Mexican Painting, Cinema, and Visual Culture, 1900 – 1950” (PhD dissertation, Brown University, 2001), particularly chapter 2, which elaborates Gamio’s influence on post-Revolutionary policy. 17. Schneider, El estridentismo, p. 9. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20.  According to Fernando Leal-Audirac, Leal first painted Indian of the Tunas and then cut out a piece of the canvas to paint the portrait, finally opting to reattach the fragment. Personal conversation with Fernando Leal-Audirac, March 2002. 21.  Gilbert M. Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. xiv. 22.  Quoted in Charlot, Renaissance, pp. 67 –68. Emphasis added. 23.  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 17. 24. Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 17–18. 25. Fabian, Time and the Other, p. 31. 26.  Florencia Mallón, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1995), p. 3. 27.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 308. 28. Charlot, Renaissance, p. 181. 29.  See Manuel Maples Arce, Soberana juventud (Madrid: Editorial Plenitud, 1967), pp. 103–9. 30. Renato Molina Enríquez, “Los nuevos valores de la pintura mexicana: Fermín Revueltas,” El Universal Ilustrado (July 26, 1923):56. 31. Schneider, El estridentismo, p. 7. 32. Anonymous, El Sol (December 17, 1927), reprinted in Fermín Revueltas, colores, trazos y proyectos (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983), p. 15. 33. Charlot, Renaissance, p. 242.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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7 Young Muralists at the Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market Esther Acevedo

In June 1934, the Public Works Department of Mexico City (the Departamento del Distrito Federal, or DDF) contracted a group of young artists to decorate the walls of the new Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market located in a central, working-class barrio of the city. Three painters from the United States — Pablo O’Higgins and Marion and Grace Greenwood—commenced work on the project, along with Mexican artists Miguel Tzab, Antonio Pujol, Angel Bracho, and Ramón Alva Guadarrama; they were later joined by Pedro Rendón, Raúl Gamboa, and the Japanese-American artist, Isamu Noguchi. These artists, raised under the tutelage of Diego Rivera but with varying mural experience, were eager to try their hand at large-scale public painting for the masses. The murals, begun in 1935 at key sites in the sprawling two-story interior of the market and in its annex, the Alvaro Obregón Center, were part of the DDF’s effort to improve the economic, moral, and social situation of both vendors and buyers in the market. Initial themes for the murals focused on the production and distribution of food in the market, as well as health, nutrition, and hygiene, but soon expanded to include themes that would resonate with the Mexican state’s political platform of economic modernization and social revolution. Yet while the contract for the murals gave the artists a certain legal framework for their project, it gave them little aesthetic or ideological guidance. The result was that the content and form of the murals changed considerably during their production in response to the mural movement’s debates during the mid-1930s about its aims. Not only did the Rodríguez Market murals differ widely among themselves in stylistic and  

 

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thematic approaches — ranging from the folkloric influence of pulquería painting, evident in Rendón’s landscape,1 to the social realism of O’Higgins and the Greenwood sisters and the high modernist abstraction of Noguchi’s anti-fascist sculpture-mural — but several of the market artists also modified their murals during the process of painting them, as their own understanding of the goals of muralism altered. Several young muralists began with didactic decorations regarding food and hygiene, but subsequently politicized the walls of the market —a public space attended by the marginal classes — with pictorial analyses of the market-goers’ economic and social class position. Such widely varying interpretations of muralism beg a number of questions. What were the conditions that produced such variations? What did each of these muralists understand to be the goals of muralism? And how is this evident in murals themselves? This chapter answers such questions by arguing that the Rodríguez Market artists, not nearly as secure in their position and stylistic development as their mentor, Rivera, were caught in a network of intersecting forces that affected the final appearance of the murals. Some of these forces pertained directly to the market itself and included contract negotiations, the problematics of DDF patronage, and the technical difficulties of painting in the multiple architectural spaces of the market complex. Others involved political and aesthetic debates carried out at national and international levels. Foremost among these were the highly publicized clashes between two of muralism’s principal leaders, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, over the ideological direction the movement should follow. The young muralists of the Rodríguez Market were torn between their growing commitment to the ideologies of Siqueiros and their stylistic and contractual commitment to Rivera. They were also swayed by wider debates about figuration versus abstraction (and, within figurative aesthetics, what kind of figuration), about conceptualizations of the working class as national versus international, and about the new socialist politics of the Cárdenas regime (1934 – 40). This chapter will situate the Abelardo Rodríguez Market murals generally within the context of their commission and the Rivera-Siqueiros debates, before examining the structure and meaning of individual murals. It will conclude with some conjectures on the tensions between the young muralists and their DDF sponsors that ultimately made continuing the market project impossible.  

 

 

 

 

Th e M a r k e t C o mm i s s i o n

Constructed on the site of a colonial-era religious college, the Abelardo Rodríguez Market was conceived as part of an urban development plan to modernize the densely populated working-class barrio of El Carmen in central Mexico City.2 City officials conceptualized the market as a means of eradicating those aspects of the area they perceived as unhygienic and unmodern, and therefore out of sync with the revolutionary principles proclaimed by the state.3 Complaining that the popular tianguis (traditional open markets held in plazas since pre-colonial times) were outmoded, undisciplined,

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and uncivilized, the officials sought to control the ambulatory sellers who invaded the city’s bourgeois central zone by providing a discrete site for those vendors to set up permanent stalls.4 This simultaneously separated proletarian from bourgeois sectors of the city center, implemented “modern” sanitary measures, and facilitated food distribution between center and city periphery.5 The DDF further added a civic center, a theater, and daycare facilities to the market project, continuing the site’s old educative function. Architecturally, the buildings of the market were a mix of modern functionalism and the colonial cloister of the original religious college. The DDF architect in charge of the project, Antonio Muñoz García, although an ardent proponent of modernism, found himself forced to incorporate the cloister into the market project because of government commitment to Mexico’s national heritage. The market thus exhibits architecturally the contradiction between Mexican nationalism’s investment in the colonial and the preHispanic past, and its need to address the rise of modernist architecture internationally—conditions that affected the style, content, and production of the murals.6 To unify a plurality of forms and functions— the market and daycare center were functionalist whereas the theater was neo-colonial and the Obregón Center retained the old arcaded patio of the cloister—Muñoz García designed a neo-colonial façade. Much like any modern factory, however, the market enclosed the sellers’ stalls in an open-plan space, independent of the façade, covered by a single glass dome supported by iron columns. Six entrances connected the market to the surrounding streets, while several sets of stairs led off the main space to galleries on the second floor. This multi-space complex offered numerous different conditions for the placement of murals, and the young muralists sought to take advantage of them all. The market murals were the first to be commissioned by the state for a commercial location; previous murals had all been painted in public buildings or schools. Muñoz García, having already experimented with murals in other public building projects, wanted the Rodríguez Market complex decorated with that art form associated in Mexico with the modern, the popular, and the revolutionary.7 Rivera, originally approached to complete the murals, refused the commission saying he was too busy with other projects, and suggesting Pablo O’Higgins in his stead.8 O’Higgins set about pulling together a team of muralists, contacting not only Miguel Tzab, Angel Bracho, Ramón Alva Guadarrama, and Antonio Pujol (all former students or aides of Rivera), but also writing to his old friend Marion Greenwood to join the project with her sister, Grace.9 In March 1934, O’Higgins wrote to Marion that “after two or three interviews [with officials at the DDF], things are becoming more definite, and by Monday we’ll know whether or not we can lay [our] hands on the Market.”10 Nevertheless, negotiations between the DDF and the young muralists did not go smoothly. Politics as well as bureaucracy began to intervene. Rivera remained on the project as “artistic guarantor,” whose final approval was necessary on all mural designs before the young artists could officially commence painting; in May 1934, O’Higgins wrote to Marion Greenwood that Rivera had coerced the DDF into agreeing  

 

 

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that O’Higgins should paint two walls and the theater. The letter makes it clear that O’Higgins did not approve of this, as it meant working under Rivera, who had recently allied himself with Trotsky. “It would be much better,” he wrote, “if we had Siqueiros in Diego’s place. Maybe with a couple of months of intriguing we can manage it.”11 By June, O’Higgins was able to send Marion Greenwood a floor plan indicating which artists would be painting where. The plan is full of surprises; Rivera was scheduled to paint both the theater and the entrance portal; José Clemente Orozco, the interior walls of the market; and León Venado, the arches between the market and the Alvaro Obregón Center courtyard. Siqueiros, although indicated in the floor plan, was eventually rejected by the DDF. In the end, O’Higgins’ floor plan changed dramatically, as neither Venado nor Orozco, Siqueiros, or Rivera painted any murals.12 Further surprises come from a letter written in June 1934 by a minor DDF functionary. “Rivera,” the letter remarks, “remains the ‘artistic guarantor’ of the work of the painters, giving his approval of the finished work; and anything referring to the ideology of the painters is left [for approval] to [DDF director, Antonio] Mediz Bolio himself, as supervisor of the sketches before they are put into practice.”13 The letter intriguingly indicates that, as early as June 1934, government officials were questioning the ideology of the painters. Indeed, as described below, the business of mural painting and public art became entangled with governmental policies whose aims often contradicted those of the artists. By the end of June 1934, the DDF had officially agreed that “the five young painters, disciples of Mr. Diego Rivera, may begin work.”14 But a contract revision of January 11, 1935, subjected the painters to new controls. The artists could not change the officially approved sketches, the new contract stipulated, except for purely aesthetic reasons: “by virtue of the artistic nature of the work that is being contracted, the contracted artists will have the freedom to develop the final artistic interpretation of their sketches.”15 This official effort to control the content of the murals, while at the same time allowing artists personal choice over formal visual matters, indicates a vague if growing anxiety on the part of the DDF over its inability to pin down and direct all aspects of the Rodríguez Market project. Indeed, the DDF found itself unable to articulate a clear visual program for the artists to follow. Lacking a language with which to link political ideology to visual form, the DDF resorted to more brutal modes of making its views plain: it refused to renew contracts for any muralist of whose work DDF officials did not approve.16

Th e R i v e r a - S i q u e i r o s D e b at e s

At every stage, the Rodríguez Market contract conceptualized the young muralists in legal terms as a unified group with a common aim. As the project progressed, however, it became clear that the contract’s juridical terminology could accommodate neither a nuanced sense of the aesthetic and political tensions under which the young muralists were working, nor the internal stylistic and ideological distinctions among them. The

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artists also struggled to define themselves as a coherent group, but did so less according to the legal language of the contract than according to the increasingly contentious debates in the mid-1930s over definitions of muralism and its role in national politics. During the early 1920s, muralists of varying tendencies had united in an atmosphere of revolutionary euphoria, but by 1934 muralism had split into factions. One side was government-sponsored, dedicated to institutionalizing the Revolution (Rivera, who had garnered almost all the major painting contracts during the Maximato — the regime headed by Plutarco Elías Calles from 1924 to 1934— led this faction). The other side was opposed to the policies of the post-Revolutionary governments and searching for new patronage (Orozco and Siqueiros, having both clashed with Calles, personified this second faction). The Rodríguez Market muralists gradually separated according to these opposing tendencies. In addition, the young muralists, when confronted with the increasing ideological rigidity of cultural politics during the Calles regime, began to adopt pragmatic positions that reduced the variety of 1920s muralism to an institutionalized discourse combining muralism with national identity or “mexicanidad.” The key to this development came not from abstract discussions about art, but from the political alliances formed by the different groups of artists. In order to understand the Rodríguez Market murals, it is thus necessary to understand the development of these factions, their relationship to the political shifts from the Maximato to the new anti-fascist socialism of the Cárdenas presidency in 1934–35, and their culmination in the public debates about muralism between Rivera and Siqueiros in 1935. Throughout the Maximato, Rivera was in an ideal position to influence the aesthetic and political development of the next generation of muralists. Unlike Siqueiros and Orozco, he remained in Mexico and enough in the good graces of Calles to continue working. By contrast, Siqueiros had been forced into exile because of his political involvement in the Communist Party and in labor union opposition to the Mexican state. Orozco, no longer able to find work in Mexico’s official sector because of his ironyladen criticism of the Revolution, left for the United States to seek work. With his direct competitors gone, Rivera was named Director of the National Fine Arts School (Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, or ENBA) in 1929, and in this capacity organized a plan of study that aimed to “make the artist a true technical worker,” and to “facilitate the aesthetic and artistic education of the urban proletariat.”17 It was at the ENBA, under the guidance of Rivera, that the future muralists of the Rodríguez Market were first formed, both aesthetically and politically. Yet Rivera’s control over the future of muralism did not go unchallenged. Siqueiros, publicly attacking Rivera’s directorship of the ENBA in 1932, argued that Rivera’s program served only to “convert magnificent painters into magnificent bureaucrats.”18 Modern Mexican painting, in Siqueiros’ view, was in crisis because of the loss of muralism’s original social ties to the Mexican Revolution. This, he argued, was the consequence of the development of the private market and its link with “Mexican curios,” which subordinated art to tourism’s demands for the picturesque.19 Enamored of the market,  

 

 

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formerly revolutionary muralists betrayed their principles to become “bourgeois dilettantes.”20 Siqueiros’ 1932 lecture was, however, still not an open attack against Rivera’s painting. This did not come until 1934, when Siqueiros qualified Rivera as an aesthete of imperialism, painter of millionaires. At this point, the Rivera-Siqueiros controversy burst into the open, reaching a large audience. This was precisely the moment when decorations began at the Market. In May 1934, the US–based leftist magazine New Masses published Siqueiros’ article “Rivera’s Counter Revolutionary Road,” in which he called the artist a snob and a folklorist, accusing Rivera of being the painter of official demagoguery.21 Rivera, waving a pistol, publicly confronted Siqueiros the following year at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.22 Throughout the early days of September 1935, Rivera and Siqueiros argued back and forth, with the polemic taking on new dimensions as a struggle between Trotskyists (embodied in Rivera) and Stalinists (represented by Siqueiros). Among those watching the heated discussion were Antonio Pujol, Angel Bracho, and Pablo O’Higgins.23 A member of the Communist Party since 1927, O’Higgins in particular was aware of the potential hazards for the young muralists as they negotiated the struggle between Stalinists and Trotskyists; letters he sent to Marion Greenwood show that the Rodríguez Market artists would have preferred to affiliate themselves with Siqueiros, even though Rivera was their much-admired “artistic director.”24 In part, the young muralists’ preference for Siqueiros over Rivera came out of their participation in the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios, or LEAR). A crucible for Soviet-inspired cultural activism in Mexico from 1933 to 1938, LEAR counted O’Higgins, Pujol, and Bracho among its many members. From 1934 onward, LEAR promoted pragmatic activism in its journal, Frente a Frente. Within LEAR, the “Trotskyist” Rivera represented the paradigmatic counterrevolutionary intellectual.25 From this experience, the young muralists acquired a wider panorama of the cultural politics favored by different sectors of the Mexican political scene. While these arguments over muralism’s path ensued, different sectors continued adapting muralism to their own goals. Minister of Public Education Narciso Bassols underwrote a program for creating didactic murals in schools. Decorating the environment where the civic conscience of the child was shaped, these murals instructed children in the nation’s history. Several of the Rodríguez Market muralists participated in this program.26 At the same time, businessmen, aware of muralism’s new prestige, began to commission murals for banks and hotels.27 To convince tourists that Mexico was a civilized, progressive country, any overt signs of revolutionary struggle were omitted from the works they commissioned. The Rodríguez Market painters, too young to have fought in the Revolution, were also influenced by the new politics of the Cárdenas regime. Cárdenas shifted government politics away from the authoritarianism of the Maximato toward a more socialist platform. At the same time, he reorganized the ruling political party (the Partido  

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Nacional Revolucionario, or PNR) along corporatist lines, tying many labor and peasant unions and other mass organizations directly to the state.28 This emphasis on mass organization as the basis of a renewed revolutionary ideology seemed to promise a return of muralism’s original populist function. Cardenismo offered the chance, the young muralists felt, to link themselves to the Revolution despite not actively having participated in it. In addition, the Cárdenas regime’s coordination of its domestic policies with its anti-fascist foreign policies served to internationalize the second generation of muralists. For them, the Mexican Revolution was not simply the armed struggle inside the country; it was part of a worldwide revolution. Thus the frequent ideological confusion of their images, which charged the representation of the proletariat with the task of saving both national and international culture. These were the political conditions under which the young artists began work on the Rodríguez Market murals in June 1934, as they debated shifting their own political alliances from Rivera to Siqueiros.

Th e M u r a l s

Themes for the market murals at first centered on food production and distribution, as well as on nutrition, health, and hygiene. As the young muralists became more politicized, however, they often expanded the content of their murals to address broader themes of social and economic revolution.29 Antonio Pujol, taking over the Alvaro Obregón Center entrance portal originally assigned to Rivera, commenced work without any previous mural experience. Studying under Rivera at the ENBA, Pujol and his fellow students Bracho and Rendón had closely followed Rivera’s statements regarding the creation of public art, and Pujol would argue, passionately if vaguely, that “the painter must be a factor of progress by scientifically educating the people.”30 In his view, modern rational science, rather than folkloric superstition, necessarily formed the basis for modernizing all aspects of national life, and the Rodríguez Market mural themes were to help both vendors and consumers enrich their knowledge of foods in order to promote healthier, more productive living. For the first two vaults, Pujol selected two plants characteristic of Mexico: corn (plate 4) and maguey, specifying the plagues that infect them and the benefits that can be obtained from the two. Originally, these were to have been followed by coffee and cocoa, continuing the focus on plants to the exclusion of any address of the social conditions under which such plants were processed. But these were never painted. Instead, in the third vault, Pujol sharply changed the program in response to the Rivera-Siqueiros polemic of September 1935, abandoning his previous theme in favor of a highly politicized, realist view of proletarian work conditions. Here, the architecture frames scenes of the arduous life of mine workers (figure 7.1). Taking advantage of the cupola’s panels, Pujol re-creates the tunnels and underground galleries of a mine, to image different stages of a miner’s grueling and dangerous tasks: the miner loading boxcars with metal

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Figure 7.1 Antonio Pujol. Mining Tragedy (detail), fresco, Alvaro Obregón Center entrance portal, Mexico City (1935). © 2011 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

ore; the miner confronted with an explosion; the miner thrown back by the explosion’s force; and finally, the miner emerging from the mine physically disabled. Not only does the subject matter change, but so too do the colors; far from the idyllic vision of the first vaults, with their subtle yellows, grays, and greens against a cool blue background, the third vault is invaded by violent reds and ochers. Pujol’s decision to change both content and form grew out of the consciousness the young muralists gradually gained of the debates over Mexican muralism’s goals. In the eyes of Pujol and his colleagues, the mural movement was bifurcating into two opposing poles between which they had to choose: on the one side, represented by Rivera, was a movement in danger of being ideologically exhausted because of its ties to the official

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cultural policy of revolutionary nationalism.31 These official ties, the young muralists felt, threatened to rob muralism of both its aesthetic vibrancy and its connection to the masses it purported to represent. On the other side, represented by Siqueiros, was a muralism that continued to be dynamic in its support of the masses, confronting such problems of the proletariat as the physical dangers of the mines or the treason of union leaders who betrayed workers to the capitalist factory owners. Pujol, committed to the latter position, decided to paint the problems of the miners, who were experiencing the effects of the Great Depression.32 For him, there was already too much demagoguery, and he wanted to avoid any increase. For that reason he decided to depict the ideals of the Revolution in his murals not as achieved realities, but as ongoing struggles. A similar change to a more partisan political outlook is noticeable in the work of Pablo O’Higgins, who lived only a few blocks from the Rodríguez Market. An experienced muralist, he had painted with Rivera at Chapingo and at the Ministry of Public Education, and had also completed state-sponsored solo projects in Durango (1929) and at the Emiliano Zapata School in Mexico City (1932 – 33). O’Higgins would paint the vaulted arcade of the patio of the Alvaro Obregón Center in a way that served to underscore his alignment with Siqueiros over his original mentor, Rivera. Sketchbook in hand, O’Higgins rendered images of the neighborhood workers he encountered daily on his way from home to the market. With his expressive line, he evoked a world of popular customs and artisanal trades that was vanishing from the modern city. The faces, figures, and postures belong to anonymous laborers whom O’Higgins saw as perpetually marginalized, their lives circumscribed by economic policies beyond their control. In this regard, the post-Revolutionary period made manifest an aspect of the country that few elites understood; the work of artists such as O’Higgins, along with photography, daily papers, journals, and the nascent realm of cinema all revealed a politically and economically disenfranchised side of what the historian Guillermo Bonfil would call “México profundo.”33 O’Higgins began his large mural in a vein similar to Pujol’s, depicting scientific aspects of corn in the mural’s first panel —roots, nutritive elements, a cross-section of a kernel. But the images from left to right along the vaulted arcade of the Alvaro Obregón Center become increasingly politicized as he pictured the exploitation of the peasant by international capitalism and the drama of corn seized by the capitalist while the peasants who cultivated the land receive only a few kernels. In the scene that follows, the overburdened peasant, no longer able to struggle, watches helplessly as a local boss physically tears up the agrarian reform code and hands over money to the monopolist, thus ensuring that the peasantry cannot make a living with its labor. In the first panels, O’Higgins painted his figures in light tones of yellow and blue, following the request of the DDF.34 His peasants, engaged in wresting a meager living from the earth (plate 5), bear a striking resemblance to those of Jean François Millet. Yet both the colors and subject matter change dramatically in the final mural panels. The striking design of the fourth arch shows a man sleeping on a red blanket, dreaming a  

 

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Figure 7.2 Pablo O’Higgins. The Struggle of the Workers Against the Financiers (detail), fresco, Alvaro Obregón Center, Mexico City (1935). © 2011 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

nightmare of war. Armed conflict further polarizes the classes, enriching those who produce the weapons sold to the fascists and impoverishing the workers and peasants. The women working on red sheets and the red blanket on which the man sleeps clearly allude to the Communist Party, of which O’Higgins was a member. The last vault, arching over the patio entrance, is dominated by reds and oranges, underscoring the blood spilled by capitalist entrepreneurs firing cannons (figure 7.2). In the panel just above the cannons, a blinded worker, his eyes covered by bandages, appears as cannon fodder inside a cannonball. Thematically, O’Higgins’ mural cycle related to the other walls of the Rodríguez Market in that all tried to demonstrate to local market-goers key aspects of the process of food production and distribution. Always foregrounded was the idea that, in the modern commercialization of grain production, the labor of farmers and urban workers ended up benefiting the few at the expense of the many — those masses who had expected a more just society after the Mexican Revolution.  

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Angel Bracho was a mere twenty-three years old when he was hired to paint a mural at the entry portal of the Rodríguez Market on Venezuela Street. He had been taking night courses for workers at the ENBA, like other craftsmen who wanted to improve the design of their work. These courses, part of the reforms instituted by Rivera when he was the director of the ENBA, aimed both to make the artist a proletarian and give the workers an aesthetic and artistic education. Since the nineteenth century, night classes had introduced workers to an academic aesthetic. Carpenters, metalworkers, and others who needed sophisticated drawing skills to design their products attended such courses. Art students were to be technically prepared by the time they left the ENBA, so that they could fulfill the role of technical workers. This educational base strongly affected Bracho’s work at the Rodríguez Market and, later, in the misiones culturales sponsored by the Cárdenas government.35 In an effort to teach market-goers how to maintain a balanced diet, his market panels portrayed the benefits of vitamins, along with the illnesses caused by their lack (figure 7.3). His visual vocabulary is simple, yet avant-garde; in borrowing two elements from popular visual images— the lack of perspective in the popular art of comics and the simple narrative history in ex-votos36—Bracho referenced characteristics that muralism brought to avantgarde painting. He used signage to make the message more explicit, and in both content and form painted so that the public could comprehend the images. But because these ideas never became widely accepted, Bracho himself never managed to join the ranks of the most prestigious mural painters. Along with instruction on healthy diet, Bracho offers social critique: in all the panels, the well-fed are white, while those with dark skin and Indian features suffer because they cannot afford vitamin-rich food sources. Race and class are destiny, Bracho tells us, taking up a theme common among the muralists, especially Rivera. In this regard, Bracho follows Rivera more closely than he does Siqueiros. Although Rivera commonly combined class and race, a practice that Bracho followed in first color panels, Bracho’s work changes when he introduces darker colors. Instead of presenting a more purely scientific image of the benefits of certain vitamin-rich food sources, Bracho converts the problem into a social one, in which the exploited are denied the resources to buy the foods they need. Pedro Rendón, in his work in the Rodríguez Market, by contrast resolutely rejected all avant-garde aesthetic influences and chose to follow the tradition of popular murals found in stores, homes, and pulquerías (figure 7.4). Nonetheless, the mural takes up the theme of class struggle and oppression, depicting a public gathering in which the master directs the multitude in their daily work of sowing, gathering, and threshing wheat. The structure of the mural reflects neither traditional perspective nor the deliberate avoidance of it that is associated with cubism; instead, it follows the rules of Mexican naïve painting to depict a space filled with figures engaged in various rural tasks. Rendón’s inclusion in the market project raises questions about our understanding of Mexican muralism.37 Should it be thought of as a synchronic, purely post-Revolution  

 

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Figure 7.3 Angel Bracho. Vitamins (detail), fresco, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935). © 2011 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

movement that used culture as an instrument of revolutionary consciousness? Or as a diachronic movement that includes any painting done on walls from pre-Hispanic times to the present? The Rodríguez Market project attracted the participation of two American women, the Greenwood sisters Grace and Marion, both of whom had significant connections to Mexico. In 1934, Marion had introduced her sister (who began her career as an artist at the age of fifteen) to the difficult technique of fresco painting, and both women completed state-sponsored murals in Morelia, Michoacán.38 The following year, Siqueiros visited Marion’s studio in New York, and O’Higgins, already a close friend, helped the sisters obtain the market commission. Marion Greenwood wrote to friends that she disagreed with the “scientificism” of the murals by Pujol, Bracho, and Guadarrama, and expressed her dislike of their “pamphleteering” attitude toward the problems of workers and peasants.39 That attitude, in

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Figure 7.4 Pedro Rendón. Untitled, fresco, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935). © 2011 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

Marion’s opinion, resulted from too much political dogmatism combined with too little material knowledge of the real conditions of the popular classes, so that these artists had become dupes of the state. O’Higgins believed as she did, writing to her in 1934 that “to paint a victory of the proletariat at present merely serves the demagogic end of the Gov. [sic]. Emphasize local conditions, local struggle and the present day reality of exploitation, misery and social regression.”40 Marion Greenwood’s early murals at the Rodríguez Market thus relied heavily on narrative rather than propagandistic symbolism to explore the themes of markets and the industrialization of agriculture. Her first panels presented benign images of women vendors and the sorting of merchandise to be sent from the newly expanded Jamaica Market, Mexico City’s central market, to the city’s diverse marketplaces (including the Abelardo Rodríguez).41 After this bucolic introduction, similar in style to her Morelia mural, Marion Greenwood turns to the industrialization of sugar cane, one of Mexico’s most important agricultural products. As she painted the murals, however, and came into contact with the increasingly radicalized market muralists, Greenwood ceased idealizing the Mexican peasant as a happy rural figure satisfied with his work. As the staircase rises, the mural’s narrative fades, and new scenes present a critical, partisan vision of peasant labor as it is converted into profit for the sugar mill owners. On the main stairwell wall, the tianguis (indigenous market) gives way to densely packed vignettes of exploitation. Peasants clad in rags struggle to harvest the sugarcane, while blue-smocked workers strain to bundle and process it. A financial baron counts his gains (a reference to the exploitative busi-

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Figure 7.5 Marion Greenwood. Industrialization of the Countryside (detail), fresco, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935). © 2011 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

ness investments in sugar of the then-head of the DDF, Aarón Sáenz),42 while a line of soldiers holds angry laborers at bay (figure 7.5). Marion Greenwood based her critique of capitalism and class exploitation in contemporary realism rather than the folkloric style associated with pulquería painting and popular ex-votos. Her theatrically realistic scenes, painted in somber colors, aimed to represent that exploitation to the daily users of the market, who constantly used the stairway with the walls she painted. Finally, on each side of the window at the top of the stairs, Greenwood painted a worker and peasant raising a banner that reads “Workers of the World Unite.” Marion Greenwood, in painting the banner and its political phrase, may have implied a solution to what she noted in 1934 after finishing her frescoes in Morelia: that in Mexico, unlike New York, “the problem was how to be revolutionary enough.”43 With the triumphal call to workers—in the Communist Manifesto’s famous phrase— Marion Greenwood’s mural ends and that of her sister, Grace, begins. In a formal vocabulary that provocatively gives visual shape to history, Grace Greenwood’s mural recounts the minting of coins, visually linking the mining industry with capitalist imperialism via the repetition of gold throughout. Gold ore extracted by the miners is converted first into purified metal, then into coinage. Grace also shows miners protesting the exploit 

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Figure 7.6 Grace Greenwood. Mining (detail), fresco, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935). © 2011 Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

ative conditions that result in the coins ending up in the hands of bankers and foreign businessmen while the workers are left to suffer and starve (figure 7.6). O’Higgins, in 1934, suggested the mining theme to Marion Greenwood, who passed it on to her sister. “Recently there have been mining and workers’ strikes in Tampico and Puerto Mexico,” O’Higgins wrote. “The English companies were at a loss because the [Mexican] Gov[ernment] indirectly ‘helped’ the strikers, but the Am[erican] companies had every help from the Gov. putting down the strikes. Here it is plain that Am. imperialism is helped by the Gov. — and it is controlled by it — to the loss of English interests.”44 Conflicts about the control of Mexico’s rich mining industry, an urgent subject constantly in the news, provoked debates among the Rodríguez Market muralists. Siqueiros again provided a model of political activism for the young muralists. In 1926 he had joined the Mining Federation Union, spending several years in Jalisco campaigning for miners’ rights.45 Grace, in taking up this highly politicized theme, deliberately identifies proletarian miners as good and capitalists as evil, thus making the mural’s message of class conflict and worker triumph more comprehensible to the everyday public of the market. In doing so, Greenwood, like the majority of the market artists, emphasized that murals are a didactic tool for addressing the largely illiterate population at the market. Her reliance on realism to convey social problems in a com 

 

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plex narrative style nevertheless often verged on the ideologically simplistic, leading her to ignore both conflicts within the miners’ movement about how to relate to the Mexican state as well as the problem of how to finance the technology and infrastructure necessary to keep the mining industry competitive on the international market. Isamu Noguchi, another of the US muralists in the Rodríguez Market project, obtained his contract through Marion Greenwood, a close friend.46 In his extraordinarily innovative sculpture-mural, History as Seen from Mexico in 1936, Noguchi explored combining modernist abstraction with a leftist political commitment to public art in a way that was impossible in the New Deal – era United States (figure 7.7).47 The mural, produced after the sculptor’s revelatory travels to Japan and his apprenticeship with Brancusi in Paris, is the first relief sculpture in Mexico to combine an abstract vocabulary with such modern materials as cement.48 In this experiment, Noguchi not only challenged the Rivera-inspired realism overwhelmingly present in the other market murals, but also echoed Siqueiros’ famous call, in 1932, to apply modern techniques to mural production.49 In a 1936 issue of the leftist US journal Art Front, Noguchi cited his experiences in Mexico as he urged other sculptors to “become familiar with the modern ways of handling plastic and crystalline matter (the spray-gun, pneumatic hammer, etc.). For any given work we should use that precise material best suited to its size, to cost and durability.”50 Noguchi’s bas-relief mural on the market’s second floor spans a wall two meters high and twenty-two meters long, punctuated by several windows. Here, Noguchi embraced the modern medium of cement, an inexpensive alternative to stone or steel for monumental sculpture and an expressive medium capable of uniting the revolutionary formal aesthetics of a Brancusi-inspired modernist abstraction, in which forms are reduced to their geometric essence, with the revolutionary politics of Mexican muralism.51 Noguchi formed the mural from deeply sculpted brick overlaid with colored cement, so that the work surges out from the wall, giving a vigorous three-dimensionality to its monumental image of good and evil irreconcilably opposed. As James Oles has argued, the artist sought less to recount a history or event than to argue against fascism, capitalism, and war.52 As substitutes, Noguchi’s mural proposes science, agriculture, and collective effort by workers and the peasantry. The mural’s modernist vocabulary visually abstracts many of the themes of class struggle on view in the Rodríguez Market’s other murals. The right side images what Noguchi called “the machinery of war, coercion, and bigotry.”53 A Posada-inspired skeleton attacks a “fat ‘capitalist’” over the far right window; behind those two figures are abstractions representing Wall Street and the Church, implicitly the twin sources of capitalism’s power.54 In front of them, an enormous bourgeois hand, frock-coated and white-sleeved, wields a red-skeined whip that lashes out over a scene of tumult and war. Bayonets, mimicking the black and white of the bourgeois hand, signal the march of a dark menacing army, advancing under the giant sign of the swastika. At the bottom edge, gray-bodied miners defend themselves with pickaxes against the fascist incursion.  

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Figure 7.7 Isamu Noguchi. History as Seen from Mexico in 1936 (detail), sculpture-mural, Abelardo Rodríguez Market, Mexico City (1935–36). © 2011 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk

A white, emaciated man collapses into an open book, signaling the demise of learning and reason. A huge crucifix falls to the ground, crushing bodies beneath it.55 Above and to the left, a thin ghost figure sweeps upward next to a bull’s head and a coffin. These symbols of war’s sacrificial victims crowd against the massive body of a fallen worker being lifted up by a comrade as the two face the future represented in the left side of the mural. The images of this future, in contrast to the dark images of war, are marked by symbols of abundant agriculture, science industry, motherly care, and workers’ triumph. Framed on the right edge by the two workers wrapped in a surging red flag, and on the left by a kouros-style indigenous youth, this section of Noguchi’s mural images a peaceful but dynamic utopia. Tractors plow fields in geometric patterns; red oil derricks, a towering factory, and an enormous clenched red fist symbolize the growing power of the proletariat and looming debates about nationalizing Mexico’s all-important oil industry.56 Farming tools are paired visually with the paraphernalia of chemistry, biology, and physics—all set within a series of geometric planes that flattens these objects into abstract, universal symbols. Above these, a mother reclines in a pose reminiscent of Noguchi’s contentious 1934 sculpture, Birth, her baby the joyful fruit of humanity’s scientific and social progress.57 The visual boldness of Noguchi’s forms represents an unprecedented use of abstraction in Mexico that also makes evident the artist’s deep engagement in the debates throughout the Americas between abstractionists and social realists about the visual language appropriate to social struggle.58 “I wanted,” wrote Noguchi, “to find a way of sculpture that was humanly meaningful without being realistic, at once abstract and socially relevant.”59 His effort to break free of realism while expressing support for the aesthetics and politics of Mexican muralism laid the groundwork for his use of abstraction as a socially committed language during World War II.60 Indeed, unlike all the  

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other Rodríguez Market murals, which remain focused on Mexico, History as seen from Mexico in 1936 deliberately sought to internationalize these debates outside the purely national context.

E n ta n g l e m e n t s o f t h e C o n t r a c t o r C e n s o r s h i p ?

At the beginning of October 1935, General Director of Urban Services and Public Works José L. Favela publicly voiced his concern about the ideology of the Abelardo Rodríguez Market murals.61 As a result, none of the young Market muralists’ contracts were renewed. At a meeting of the Artists’ Congress in Mexico City in January 1936, the artists voiced their complaints, convincing the renowned art critic Fernando Gamboa, the artist Carlos Mérida, and eighty-five other notables to sign an open letter to President Cárdenas asking him to intervene so that the muralists could continue their work.62 Although Cárdenas responded favorably to the letter, he turned the matter over to the new head of the DDF, Cosme Hinojosa, who refused to recommission the LEAR artists.63 Alarmed, the muralists published a protest against Hinojosa in the March 1936 issue of the LEAR journal Frente a Frente, but could not force the mayor to obey the president.64 We do not know precisely why Cosme Hinojosa refused to renew the artists’ contracts. We can only point to the probable uneasiness and displeasure of the administrators faced with the ideological (and in Noguchi’s case, aesthetic) radicalization of the mural movement. The government, it can be assumed, did not want to see critiques on the walls of public buildings, especially one like the Abelardo Rodríguez Market, whose clientele were among those most exploited. Clearly, however, because of the Market project, muralism became much more diverse and social activism moved on to fronts — especially print and poster production —that relied less heavily on official support.65  

 

—Translated by Alejandro Anreus Edited by Robin Adèle Greeley

Notes

1.  Pulquería bars serving pulque, the traditional fermented alcoholic drink, were often decorated with murals of country landscapes. 2. The building, named after interim president Abelardo L. Rodríguez (1932 – 34), is bounded by Del Carmen Street, Girón Alley, and Rodríguez Puebla Street, and has its main entrance on Venezuela Street. The lot on which the market was constructed originally belonged to the Jesuits, who founded the Nuevo Colegio de San Gregorio on the site in 1612, to teach indigenous peoples catechism and basic literacy. The site managed to remain a religious college through the eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms, eventually transforming into a school for proletarian children in the late nineteenth century. See Sonia Lombardo,  

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La Plaza de Loreto (Mexico: Departamento de Monumentos Coloniales, INAH, 1971); and El Socialista (August 10, 1873). 3.  The purpose of the market was to better “the economic, moral and social situation of the vendors” and to provide “a nursery for the [vendors’] children.” As such, it was meant to complement the function of city schools for proletarian children such as the Centro Escolar Revolución that sought to “modify the customs [of the children], their ideology and mode of living” such that “the Revolution will have fulfilled one of its goals for the people of Mexico City.” Memoria del Departamento Central del Distrito Federal, Periodo Administrativo 1933– 1934 (Mexico City, 1934), pp. 50, 89. 4.  “El problema de los mercados,” Nuestra Ciudad (June 1930):27. 5.  Memoria del Departamento Central del Distrito Federal, Periodo Administrativo 1933– 1934, p. 50. 6.  In a December 1934 report, for example, the artists explained that it was “necessary to begin painting in the vaults because the architecture demanded it” and that the work was going very slowly, in part because the walls were not in any condition to begin painting in fresco immediately, and in part because work was interrupted by a government-sponsored market fair. The report ends with a complaint that, if the DDF was going to judge the work by meters painted (only 170 of the 2,733 meters had been painted by December), the artists could not be held responsible for interruptions beyond their control. Unnumbered document, Archivo de Obras Públicas, Departamento del Distrito Federal (December 14, 1934). 7.  Muñoz García had just designed the Centro Escolar Revolución public school in Mexico City (1932) and had commissioned both painted and stained-glass murals for it. 8.  Mary Randolph asserts that Rivera “was given the contract to do the walls of the market by the Central Department of Education. Owing to bad health and other jobs, he couldn’t complete it in the allotted time, so he called upon a group of unemployed left-wing artists.” Mary Randolph, “Rivera’s Monopoly (Conclusion),” Art Front (December 1935):12. Other versions of how the mural team was put together claim that Antonio Mediz Bolio, civic director of the DDF, directly proposed O’Higgins. Interview of the author with Miguel Tzab (1978). 9.  Pedro Rendón, Raúl Gamboa, and the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi were not added until later. 10.  James Oles, “Walls to Paint On: American Muralists in Mexico, 1933 – 1936” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1995), p. 230. 11. Oles, Walls to Paint On, p. 233. 12. Oles, Walls to Paint On, p. 236. 13.  Héctor Melo to Enrique Aragón Echegaray, Archive of Public Works, DDF, June 5, 1934. Rivera was named the “artistic guarantor” [ fiador artístico] because in effect he paid a security fee of 2,000 pesos [number 1412257E expedited by Securities of Mexico, S.A., located at 21 Gante Street, Mexico City. The president of the company was Cosme Hinojosa, who in June 1935 became Head of the DDF, replacing Aarón Sáenz.] 14.  Pedro Torres, Head of the DDF Office of Control, in Documento U 1 2286 415 5/1. Archivo de Obras Públicas, Departamento del Distrito Federal, June 19, 1934. 15.  Document 339, Archive of Public Works. DDF, January 1, 1935. 16.  The result of this was that many of the Market walls remained unpainted.  

 

 

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17.  Diego Rivera, “Exposición de motivos para la formación del plan de estudios de la Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas de México,” (1929); republished in Arte y política, ed. Raquel Tibol (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1978), p. 88. The Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes was the former Academia de San Carlos. Once in office, Rivera renamed it the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas de México. 18.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Rectificaciones sobre las artes plásticas en México,” (1932); republished in Raquel Tibol, ed. Documentación sobre el arte mexicano (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974), p. 39. 19.  Siqueiros, “Rectificaciones,” p. 43. 20.  Siqueiros, “Rectificaciones,” p. 60. 21.  Siqueiros, “Rivera’s Counter Revolutionary Road,” New Masses (New York: May 29, 1934); republished as “El Camino contrarrevolucionario de Rivera,” in Raquel Tibol, ed., Palabras de Siqueiros (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), pp. 113–23. 22.  See Maricela González Cruz Manjarrez, La polémica Siqueiros-Rivera: Planteamientos estético-políticos 1934– 1935 (Mexico City: Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño, 1996). Rivera published his heated response, “Defensa y ataque contra los stalinistas,” first as a pamphlet in late 1935, and later in Claridad no. 298 (Buenos Aires, February 1936). 23.  Raquel Tibol, Siqueiros, vida y obra (Mexico: Colección Metro, 1973), p. 90. 24.  O’Higgins’ letter to Marion Greenwood, May 1934. Cited in Oles, Walls to Paint On, p. 233. 25.  Francisco Reyes Palma, “Introduction,” Frente a Frente, 1934 – 38, Facsimile Edition (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios del Movimiento Obrero Socialista, A.C., 1994), p. 6. 26.  For example, Pablo O’Higgins painted murals in the Escuela Estado de Michoacán in Mexico City. See “Pablo O’Higgins: Arte mural para las escuelas,” in Eduardo Espinosa Campos, La pintura mural en los centros de educación en México (Mexico City: Pinacoteca, 2003). 27.  The hotels Del Prado, Reforma, and Ritz were decorated in this way. 28. See Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994):73 –107. Cárdenas changed the ruling party’s name from Partido Nacional Revolucionario to Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM). 29.  For reasons of space and argument, detailed analysis of the murals will be limited to those of Pujol, O’Higgins, Bracho, Rendón, the Greenwood sisters, and Noguchi. 30.  “[E]l pintor debía ser un factor de progreso al contribuir a educar a la gente en una forma científica.” Author’s interview with Antonio Pujol in 1979. 31.  On state policies of “revolutionary nationalism,” see Greeley, this volume. 32. In 1928, 90,000 workers labored in the mining industry. By 1932, half of these (45,000) found themselves unemployed, while those who continued to be employed were forced to accept shorter work hours and less pay. Lorenzo Meyer, Historia de la Revolución Mexicana, periodo 1928–1931 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1971), p. 48. 33. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, México profundo: una civilización negada (Mexico City: Grijalbo/CONACULTA, 1990). The post –World War II period would see the rise of another elite vision—that of the so-called Mexican miracle —but one that would obscure, rather than alleviate, the state’s failure to fulfill the promises of the Revolution.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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34.  Archivo de Obras Públicas, Departamento del Distrito Federal, Mercado Abelardo L. Rodríguez, México, April 23, 1934. 35.  In 1936, after his Market contract had not been renewed, Angel Bracho joined the misiones culturales of the Ministry of Public Education, traveling to many rural areas of the country including Oaxaca, Sinaloa, Nayarit, and Baja California. That year he made a series of lithographs on the customs of the Huichole Indians. 36.  On the history of comics in Mexico, see Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea and Armando Bartra, Puros cuentos, La historia de la Historieta en México (Mexico City: Grijalbo/ CONACULTA, 1994). On popular ex-votos, see Roberto Montenegro, Retablos de México (Mexico City: Ediciones Mexicanas, 1950); Rosa María Sánchez Lara, Los retablos populares: exvotos pintados (Mexico City: UNAM/IEE, 1990). 37.  The same is the case of Ramón Alva Guadarrama, who assisted Rivera in Chapingo (1926– 27) and later O’Higgins at the Emiliano Zapata School (1933). In 1923, Alva Guadarrama was among the signers of the manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors of Mexico, which “repudiate[d] so-called easel painting and all ultraintellectual art because it is aristocratic” and “exult[ed] the manifestations of monumental art because of its public utility.” Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. Written on December 9th, 1923, and published in El Machete, No. 7 (June 1924), Mexico City. The mural belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of hacienda murals, in which the lives of the hacienda workers are portrayed in an idyllic manner, and class tensions between peons and hacienda owners are suppressed. 38.  Marion painted in the Universidad San Nicolás Hidalgo; Grace in the Municipal Museum. The commission came directly from the Michoacán state government. 39.  Marion Greenwood’s letters in late 1934 to her mother and her friend Josephine Herbst. See Oles, Walls to Paint On, pp. 270 –75. 40.  Letter of Pablo O’Higgins to Marion Greenwood March 29, 1934. Cited in Oles, Walls to Paint On, p. 237. 41.  The Jamaica market was expanded by the DDF during the Aarón Sáenz administration. 42.  Although Sáenz himself is not pictured, his investment role in sugar-processing plants was much in the news while Marion Greenwood was painting her mural. 43.  Marion Greenwood paraphrased by her close friend, artist Edward Biberman (24 September 1934) quoted in Oles, Walls to Paint On, p. 225. Italics in the original. This in spite of her political illustrations of 1934 for a New Masses article by Ilya Ehrenburg on the Nazi invasion of Austria (reproduced in Oles, Walls to Paint On, p. 404). 44.  Letter of Pablo O’Higgins to Marion Greenwood, March 29, 1934. Cited in Oles, Walls to Paint On, p. 237. 45. Siqueiros had obtained some improvements for the miners. See Jaime Tamayo, “Siqueiros y los orígenes del movimiento rojo en Jalisco. El movimiento minero,” Estudios sociales V. 1, No. 1 (July–October 1984):29–41. 46.  Noguchi was offered one of the walls at the Market for a salary of 13.50 pesos per square meter, the same salary given to the other muralists. 47.  As James Oles notes, New Deal arts agencies in the United States were too conservative, and leftist patrons too lacking, to foster the kind of environment for leftist monumental  

 

 

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public artworks Noguchi was able to find in Mexico. Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico: International Themes for a Working-Class Market,” American Art V. 15, No. 2 (Summer 2001):12. On Noguchi’s experience of racism in the USA and its affect on his art, see Amy Lyford, “Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American Internment,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March 2003):140. Although Noguchi later played down his leftist affiliations, he was active during the 1930s in such leftist events as the call for an American Artists’ Congress, as a collective response to the threat posed by fascism. The title used here is Noguchi’s original title for the mural. 48.  Noguchi described the process he used as follows: “First, the sketch was enlarged onto the brick wall. Then bricks built in where thickness was required, then carved in and out. This took about two months. After this, cement, large marble aggregate, and lime was thrown on and the forms defined. The final coat contained fine aggregate color and cement mixed dry to assume accurate color when applied with a trowel and polished.” Noguchi, “What’s the Matter with Sculpture,” Art Front 2 (September–October 1936):14, quoted in Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico,” p. 18. 49.  Siqueiros, speech at the John Reed Club in Los Angeles, September 2, 1932. 50.  Noguchi, “What’s the Matter with Sculpture,” p. 14. 51.  The mural’s patron was the Cementos Tolteca company, which had been supporting artistic production since 1931. Cementos Tolteca presented the artistic world with different ways to use cement, one of which was to use color panels, calling this the technical future of art. On the company’s patronage of avant-garde artists, see James Oles, “La nueva fotografía y cementos Tolteca: una alianza utópica,” in María Casanova, ed., Mexicana: fotografía moderna en México, 1923–1940 (Valencia: IVAM/Generalitat Valenciana, 1998), pp. 139 –51. 52.  Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico,” p. 12. 53.  Noguchi, “Cement,” New Masses (September 15, 1936): 10; quoted in Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico,” p. 23. 54.  Noguchi, “Cement,” New Masses (September 15, 1936): 10; quoted in Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico,” p. 23. Noguchi himself notes the influence of José Gaudalupe Posada’s famous calavera imagery. 55.  James Oles notes the connection between this image of religious oppression and Orozco’s famous image of Christ chopping down his own cross in the Dartmouth College murals of 1932–34. Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico,” p. 24. 56.  President Cárdenas would nationalize the oil industry two years later, in 1938. 57.  On the debates over Noguchi’s sculpture, Birth, see Lyford, “Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American Internment,” op. cit. 58.  See Gabriel Peluffo Linari, this volume. See also Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, eds., The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); and Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926– 56 (London: Yale University Press, 2002). 59. Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, p. 21; quoted in Oles, “Noguchi in Mexico,” p. 13. 60. On Noguchi’s experience in the World War II Japanese American internment camps, see Lyford, “Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American Internment,” op.cit.  

 

 

 

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61.  Archivo de Obras Públicas, DDF, December 30, 1935. 62.  Document 8498, Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo de Presidentes, January 27, 1936. 63. Document 26334, Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo de Presidentes, April 11, 1936. Cosme Hinojosa, having been appointed to replace Aarón Sáenz, held the post of head of the DDF from 1935 to 1938. 64.  Frente a Frente no. 2 (March 5, 1936); cited in Reyes Palma, “Introduction,” Frente a Frente, 1934–38, p. 6. 65.  O’Higgins, in particular, became a leading member of the Taller de Gráfica Popular.  

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8 Nietzsche contra Marx in Mexico The Contemporáneos, Muralism, and Debates over “Revolutionary” Art in 1930s Mexico

Robin Adèle Greeley I’ll tell you why the devil and the work of art are inseparable, why revolution and poetry are inseparable. There is no poetry other than revolutionary. That is to say, there is none without the collaboration of the devil.  

— Jorge Cuesta, “El diablo en la poesía” (1934)1

In June 1928, a new journal titled Contemporáneos opened its first issue with a convoluted but urgent call for a new “hero” for the new post-Revolutionary era at hand in Mexico. “The hero can be . . . a warrior, a man of science, a writer, artist, or politician,” but had to aim for a “new ethical sensibility.”2 In a period full of military, populist, and cultural heroes, such a call was a calculated challenge to the status quo. Indeed, that same issue of Contemporáneos published a long attack by Gabriel García Maroto on the premier icon of Mexico’s developing state culture: Diego Rivera. It so infuriated the painter that he publicly threatened the magazine’s editors, setting the tone for a faceoff between the Contemporáneos and Mexican muralism that would last more than a decade.3 While praising Rivera as a masterful “técnico,” García Maroto damned his work for its “facile melody,” arguing that Rivera sacrificed true Mexican feeling, reducing “art [to] a political-social instrument, a mechanical instrument, mechanizing, unrefined.”4 In 1928 Rivera was just completing his murals for the Ministry of Public Education (the Secretaría de Educación Pública) and had already begun to define a standard for judging state-sponsored cultural nationalism. In attacking the most famous cultural avatar of the state, the Contemporáneos—the famous “grupo sin grupo” (“group without a group”) that coalesced around the journal —had two intentions.5 The first was to resist what they perceived as increasing political, religious, and — especially— artistic inflex 

 

 

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ibility at the national level. Citing a range of writers —from Gide, Benda, and Bergson to Ortega y Gasset and Nietzsche —the Contemporáneos criticized what seemed to them to be the reductivism of muralism’s socialist realist premises, as well as its nationalist focus on the popular classes. They argued, moreover, that muralism’s interpretations of indigenous culture were propagandistic and had little to do with the reality of rural existence. And in light of Mexico’s long European heritage, they criticized as ludicrous and unrealistic the muralists’ bombastic rejection of European aesthetic influences. In defining a modern Mexican identity, the Contemporáneos by contrast sought to mediate between a politicized art and a more autonomous arte puro. In sponsoring artists such as Agustín Lazo, María Izquierdo, Julio Castellanos, and Rufino Tamayo they supported powerful alternatives to the muralists’ efforts, and sought to eliminate “all picturesque, decorative and . . . folkloric elements” in favor of a more complex, “universal” vision of the Mexican “race and spirit.”6 In response, the muralists reviled the Contemporáneos as unmanly “foreignizing” queers— a telling, if odd, mix of slanders. José Clemente Orozco caricatured their fey dandyism; Rivera, while at the Ministry of Public Education, painted himself as a soldier kicking a prostrate Salvador Novo, with donkey ears, who personified the effete influence of foreign cultures. (Novo responded with a long satirical poem, “La Diegada.”) The journal’s editors were repeatedly condemned as anti-muralist, anti-nationalist, anti-Mexican sissies. In 1924, Julio Jiménez Rueda of El Universal ridiculed the Contemporáneos as “effeminate,” equating patriotism with masculine virility.7 In 1928, El Universal Ilustrado continued the moral lynching of the “artepuristas,” violently attacking the Contemporáneos for the “antinaturalist,” cryptic language of their writing.8 In 1932, Jorge Cuesta and others faced spurious legal charges of “outrage to public morality” for having published “pornographic” chapters of a novel; the scandal that ensued forced all the Contemporáneos out of their government posts in education.9 In 1937, they were again attacked, this time from within Cárdenas’ leftist government.10 The Contemporáneos were nonetheless fervent patriots, passionately concerned about the nation’s future. Thus their second, more general, concern was to enter the pool of intellectuals attempting to use their official positions to shape state policy on mexicanidad.11 Octavio Paz remarked that it was wrong to accuse the Contemporáneos—as many did—of indifference to public affairs:12 Torres Bodet served as Minister of Education (twice) and Director of UNESCO; José Gorostiza served as Minister of Foreign Relations; Novo was prominent in efforts by the Ministry of Public Education to bring education to the Mexican countryside (hiring Villaurrutia to help him), and later emerged as Mexico’s foremost public chronicler.13 And so on. Thus to call the Contemporáneos reactionary anti-nationalists is to misunderstand their project and to misrepresent their profound influence on both arts and public life in Mexico. Indeed, the ferocity of the debates between the two camps raises questions about the construction and function of nationalism in Mexico’s post-Revolution period. On the one hand, it reveals the utopian conviction of an emerging intellectual elite — includ 

 

 

 

 

 

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ing both muralists and the Contemporáneos— that it could instigate an authentically Mexican culture. Works of art would provide alternatives to older historical narratives, thereby initiating a new historical period. This new national culture, an “aesthetic statism” forged in alliances between intellectuals and the state, 14 would function as a model for the political and social life of the nation at all levels. On the other hand, the debates point up the lack of consensus during the 1920s and early 1930s on what mexicanidad would entail or how alliances of intellectual and the state were to be managed. This chapter treats three broad elements of the debates between the Contemporáneos and muralists. First, the Contemporáneos, like the muralists, were situated at the heart of the crisis of formulating Mexico as a modern nation state in the 1920s and 1930s. They astutely interrogated the state’s efforts to align itself with the concept of “nation,” believing that these efforts flirted dangerously with fascism. Second, against muralism’s tendency to racialize and masculinize national identity around tropes of the indiocampesino and the worker-soldier, the Contemporáneos promoted a national identity based on melding cosmopolitan modernism with the national, the avant-garde with the traditional, and the urban with the rural to effect a “universalism.”15 They further attacked the gendered concept of the political that equated revolution with virility. And third, the Contemporáneos advocated a deliberately depoliticized arte puro as a bulwark against the excesses of art in the service of politics, particularly muralism. In so doing, they offered a psychological, existentialist definition of mexicanidad that had strong repercussions throughout the rest of the century.16  

Th e C o n t e mp o r á n e o s : A C r i t i c a l N at i o n a l i s m

The Contemporáneos, too young to have participated in the Revolution, did not share the idealism of first-generation muralists.17 Indeed, in Cuesta’s assessment, what held the grupo sin grupo together was precisely their “critical attitude,” their “distrust (and) skepticism.”18 They came of age in the late 1920s and 1930s, during a time of fragile hope but also of great national and cultural instability. They watched firsthand both the rise of a nationalist discourse and the coincident failure of José Vasconcelos and the Ateneo de la Juventud intellectuals to impose Vasconcelos’ model, inspired by Uruguayan philosopher José Enrique Rodó, of a continental, pan-Latin American culture.19 The journal itself was founded under the shadow of the multiple political shocks of 1928–29: the assassination of General Obregón as he tried to return to the presidency; the subsequent rigged presidential elections that resulted in the defeat of Vasconcelos; and Calles’ formation of Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), which obviated the need to negotiate political alliances and gave Calles personal control over key state decisions.20 In this period, moreover, the government failed to quell widespread peasant rebellion (the Cristiada); the country also faced an economic shock following the crash of Wall Street in 1929. The Contemporáneos, while still young, observed the corruption  

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of former revolutionaries and their transformation into what Paz called “a greedy and crude plutocracy”21— an experience that prompted them to begin defining a crucial separation between nation and state.22 Opportunities for doing so at the national level were increasingly limited. The state had co-opted many of the means needed to establish such a distinction; in the later 1930s, President Cárdenas would further corporatize the relationship among the state, intellectuals, and the masses by institutionalizing ties that subordinated peasant and labor unions, along with intellectuals as their spokespeople, to state control.23 Nevertheless, the Contemporáneos, recognizing the lack of a developed civil sector from which to launch their platform, chose to remain tied to the state. From this position, they made a three-pronged attack on the growing entrenchment of the nationalist model and its cultural component: first, against social realism and its ethos of revolutionary masculine virility; second, against indigenismo as a basis for mexicanidad; and third, against Marxism, especially as embodied in the Cardenista state (1934 –40). Each part of the attack critiqued the dangerous collapse of nation into state. In 1924, the Contemporáneos were shocked by the wild popularity of Mariano Azuela’s realist novel of the Mexican Revolution, Los de abajo (The Underdogs). Enthusiastic critics equated Azuela’s realist style with transparent legibility aimed at the uneducated masses; here was “revolutionary” art that produced a direct “reflection of reality” and conjured up an “exact” picture “made of the flesh, the pain and the calamitous destiny of the Revolution.”24 Los de abajo, along with muralism, helped cement the Mexican Revolution as the “privileged horizon” by which all social and cultural achievements and all historical progress were judged, 25 and confirmed the realist narrative as the revolution’s appropriate cultural embodiment. “Revolutionary” realism was interwoven with calls from prominent intellectuals, such as anthropologist Manuel Gamio, for a “national” culture that would “reflect . . . in intensified and beautified form the pleasures, pains, life, and soul of the people.”26 For Gamio, “the people” meant the rural and indigenous populations, and if Mexico was to develop a superior national culture, artists needed to reject Europeanized “elitist tastes” in favor of home-grown aesthetic sources “forged” out of Mexico’s complex racial heritage.27 No truly national culture would “flourish so long as we continue to cultivate only foreign modalities of art in place of creating from what is ours.”28 The emphasis on Mexico’s popular classes— the indigenous as well as the peasant and working classes— as the site of national cultural renovation (and the concomitant rejection of European models) was central to the Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, published the same year as Azuela’s Los de abajo.29 Written by Siqueiros and signed by Rivera, Orozco, Xavier Guerrero, Fermín Revueltas, Ramón Alva Guadarrama, Germán Cueto, and Carlos Mérida, the Manifesto associated the national “soul” with the Indian and the popular. The Revolution replaced the nineteenth-century Reforma and Porfiriato as the nation’s key historical event, while Aztec  

 

 

 

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replaced colonial as Mexico’s primary cultural heritage. The Manifesto also exhibited the stridently militant attitude adopted by the muralists to elaborate their connections with the popular classes; this was the concept of artist as heroic proletarian/campesino/ soldier that not only worked well with Azuela’s realist narrative style, which so alarmed the Contemporáneos, but also fueled the condemnation of the Contemporáneos as Frenchified “mariquitas” for their insistence on recognizing Mexico’s European heritage.30 Anti-Contemporáneos often couched their hostility in gendered and moralistic terms. The polemic of 1925 equated “escapist” literature with “sexual eccentricity” and covertly linked “feminization” to a suspicion of anti-nationalist foreign influence in veiled accusations of homosexuality against Salvador Novo and others. They identified “revolutionary” literature and art, by analogy, with virility.31 The Contemporáneos, in turn, criticized muralism for rejecting Mexico’s European heritage, and for conceiving modernity solely in relation to a politics of the masses. This critique, however, stemmed less from an anti-nationalist Eurocentrism than from a concern about the dangers hidden in the “facile path” of constructing a national identity from “picturesque, decorative, even folkloric” legacies.32 Against what they saw as the muralists’ parochial nationalism, the Contemporáneos argued that national culture should serve as a means of entry into the world community. In addition, they recognized that to elaborate Mexico purely as a rejection of Europe was, in effect, to reinstall Europe as the arbiter of Mexico’s destiny by placing it at the center of the endeavor —something all the more dangerous for being unacknowledged rather than out in the open. Furthermore, muralism risked the danger of subordinating aesthetic issues to politics to the point of lapsing into propaganda. “Painting finds itself here,” wrote Villaurrutia with refined irony, “as Rivera wishes, at the service of social and political ideas.”33 The Contemporáneos also criticized the politics of class hidden in the aesthetics of “revolutionary nationalism.”34 The country’s elite, they argued, deployed the concepts of nationalism and anti-imperialism to obscure power inequalities in Mexico. Gorostiza criticized social realist art for hiding class conflict under a veneer of national unity, and the urban elite’s enthusiasm for it as narcissistic charity to relieve bourgeois guilt over the despicable conditions of the poor.35 And against muralism’s—especially Rivera’s— powerful denial that the indio as a nationalist symbol differed from the indio as a historical entity, Tamayo would remark acidly that “the only place where the peasants and Indians ever triumphed was in the scenario of Mexican muralism.”36 Yet this harsh criticism was calculated not to offend nationalist sensibilities but to respond to the social complexity of the period. The Contemporáneos recognized that the Revolution had not shifted power relations nearly as much as the idealized worker-peasant aesthetic of Rivera’s late 1920s murals proclaimed.37 Samuel Ramos, in his influential 1931 essay “La cultura criolla,” argued that, like it or not, high culture remained largely in the hands of the elite minority. Nevertheless, the Revolution had forced that minority to recognize the need for wider cultural inclusion. Because of historical circumstances, Ramos contended, Mexico could neither reject its European  

 

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heritage outright (as hardline nationalists wanted) nor indulge in “artificial Europeanism” that ignored local histories (as the Porfiriato had done). “What has been lacking,” he wrote, “is the wisdom to develop that European spirit in harmony with the new conditions in which it finds itself.”38 Ramos’ 1930 essay on Rivera applies these theories to Mexico’s premier artist.39 Rivera, according to Ramos, represented the highest achievements of Mexican national culture, but not for the reasons most (including Rivera himself) claimed. Ramos argued that Rivera’s genius lay in his absorption of European influences —especially cubism— and his use of them to revitalize an authentically Mexican indigenous culture long marginalized and moribund: “Diego discovered an important aspect of our reality, which no one had seen before even though it was in plain sight. The primitive existence of Mexico, of which the Indian is the protagonist, appears suddenly in the painter’s frescoes as if emerging from the depths of the earth.” Yet Rivera produced this “new vision of Mexican life” not because he repudiated all things European, but because he united “cultivated European man with the barbarous man of the Mexican jungle” to construct a “universal” aesthetics. For both Ramos and the Contemporáneos, Rivera’s modernist universalism gained its power from the painter’s close attention to “the plastic form of things”40— that is to say, to the formal procedures of modernist painting, not from subordinating aesthetics to a political message, and not from a fidelity to an imagined pre-Conquest past. Ramos’ critique belonged to the Contemporáneos’ condemnation of rigid political positions, whether right or left. This critique was most acute in Cuesta’s 1935 harangue against Marxism: “Marx was not intelligent or revolutionary; neither was he socialist, but rather counter-revolutionary and mystical.”41 The ranting title of the essay, published the year of the famous Rivera-Siqueiros debates, echoes Cuesta’s frustration with the failure of post-revolutionary Marxism as it came increasingly under the combined influence of Stalinism and the Cardenista state. It also reveals Cuesta’s perceptive insights into Mexican Marxism’s distinctive relationship to Catholicism.42 Particularly alarming, Cuesta argued, were Marxism’s totalizing vision and its religious, anti-rational character: “Marxism wants a world founded in Marxism, not in objective evidence; it wants an ethics founded in Marxism, not in objective moral judgment; it wants an education founded in Marxism, not in the nature of objective understanding.”43 Far from rejecting either Christianity’s ritualized character or its doctrine of blind faith in a supreme power, Cuesta argued, Marxism merely transferred those sentiments to the concept of proletarian revolution. In his view, Marxism was merely religious mysticism disguised as secular rationalism; rather than liberating the populace from the binds of irrational thinking and superstition, Marxism reinforced them. To comprehend Cuesta’s fears, it is important to recognize how much he was interpreting Marx through the lens of Cardenismo and its attempts to corporatize the masses. Rather than foster political discourse independent of the state, Cárdenas institutionalized policies — from the implementation of socialist education and the restructuring  

 

 

 

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of PNR to the subordination of peasant and worker unions to the state— to tie public life and discourse to the state.44 These policies helped the state to wrest many of the ritual functions away from the church and, in turn, ritualize political life in Mexico.45 It was this “religious consecration of power,” promoted by the Cardenista state through influential Marxists such as powerful union leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano, that alarmed Cuesta.46 He thus identified three interconnected dangers in Mexican Marxism: the rise of a national socialism disturbingly similar to that of the Nazis; a continuation of Christianity’s emphasis on blind faith, shifted in attachment from God to the Mexican state; and the subjugation of cultural production to the exigencies of the state. Cardenista Marxism seemed to threaten the concept of individual creativity at the heart of the Contemporáneos’ ideology; in Cuesta’s view, Cardenismo’s “política de las masas” served only to institutionalize this anti-individualism, reinforce the ritual nature of public politics, and diminish the separation between nation and state.47 Although historians have shown that Cárdenas Mexico was far from following the Nazi example,48 Cuesta’s fears, at the time he expressed them, might have seemed justified. He was responding in part to the polarizing effects in Mexico of heated international debates about socially committed art by proponents of fascism, communism, and liberal capitalism. This polarization was evident not only in the 1935 Rivera-Siqueiros debates and the vagaries of Vasconcelos’ right-wing politics, but also in the growing ideological dogmatism of cultural organizations such as the Soviet-influenced League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers (LEAR), composed of artists and intellectuals such as Siqueiros and the second-generation muralist Pablo O’Higgins.49 And in the wake of the polemic against the Contemporáneos in 1932, a Committee of Public Health was proposed to make sure no one of “dubious” revolutionary quality was given a government post.50 The proposal—a further step in the widespread leftist equation of revolution with heterosexual virility that the Contemporáneos heavily criticized — eventually resulted in the founding, under Cárdenas, of the Autonomous Department of Publicity and Propaganda (DAPP), a Mussolini-inspired shadow institution to the Ministry of Public Education, charged with overseeing all forms of “social communication,” from the mass media to public events and the arts.51 In DAPP’s homophobic tendencies, aimed at the Contemporáneos, the state dangerously mimicked Charles Maurras’ protofascist dictum: “It is nationalism’s obligation to defend the nation from foreigners of the interior.”52 Yet while Cuesta and the Contemporáneos rejected Cardenista Marxism, they did not advocate any return to the Ateneo de la Juventud’s elitist repudiation of the popular.53 They realized that the Ateneo, despite its historical importance, had missed its mark. Vasconcelos was criticized for his irrational mysticism; Alfonso Caso for his outmoded and aristocratic academicism; and even their mentor, Alfonso Reyes, for stagnating.54 The Ateneo (particularly Vasconcelos) was also criticized for its superficial — and thus right-wing — reading of Nietzsche.55 As Horacio Legrás has argued, the Ateneo read  

 

 

 

 

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Nietzsche for solutions to the urgent question of “incorporat(ing) the politically volatile and inexperienced masses into the representational logic of the modern state.”56 In sharp contrast to the Contemporáneos, the Ateneo intellectuals interpreted the German philosopher according to their interest in using art to integrate Mexico’s diverse cultures into a unified state project. As Minister of Public Education, Vasconcelos institutionalized the Ateneo commitment to using art — most notably muralism — as a means of educating the masses in the values of citizenship. Indeed, despite their claims to be above politics, the Ateneo intellectuals sided with the state, seeking to bring to it their conviction about the unifying function of culture.57  

 

N at i o n v e r s u s S tat e : Th e P o l i t i c s o f A e s t h e t i c s

Against both muralism and the Ateneo models, the Contemporáneos proposed a third paradigm for the nation—one that separated the concept of nation from that of state.58 In this model, the nation was the repository of complex and ambiguous moral, spiritual, psychological, and cultural values, whereas the state was the pragmatic, institutional structure subject to the laws of history. “Unlike Caso and Vasconcelos,” Christopher Domínguez argues, “Cuesta could separate history from morality (and morality from philosophy)” and thus could critique the politics of the state without confusing this with the “nation.”59 The Contemporáneos— especially Cuesta and Ramos — elaborated this paradigm in part from reading Nietzsche for his philosophical investigations of the morality of ambiguity, rather than (like the Ateneo intellectuals) reading him as an apologist for totalitarianism.60 Cuesta saw that, for Nietzsche, human thought “lives in search of its opposite; not to annihilate it, but rather to reconcile with it,” and Nietzsche “deliberately inspired himself with opposing passions” so as to investigate a moral philosophy of uncertainty and doubt.61 Nietzsche showed the Contemporáneos how to characterize truth and knowledge as provisional rather than absolute —an understanding that shaped their concept of statecraft. For them, Nietzsche served as a counterpoint to the authoritarianism the Contemporáneos detected in the political program of the Mexican state. They were particularly impressed by the German philosopher’s deliberate avoidance of instrumental reason. Cuesta, writing to retrieve Nietzsche from the Nazis in 1939, noted approvingly that “Reason, for (Nietzsche), is not man, but rather that which triumphs over man.”62 Ramos expounded upon the Apollonian-Dionysian paradigm of Nietzsche as analogous to social and aesthetic organization; Dionysian emotional “deliriums” provided a necessary counterbalance to Apollonian rationalist “imagination.”63 Nietzsche thus gave Cuesta, Ramos, and the Contemporáneos tools with which they could confront the deep-seated problems of Mexican national culture. Like Vasconcelos and the early muralists, the Contemporáneos conceived artistic creation as a model for the political will of the nation. But unlike either the Ateneo or the muralists, the  

 

 

 

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Contemporáneos argued that the national spirit, like art, would result not from confusing nation with the pragmatics of state governance, but rather from a “momentary liberation from the imperatives of reality and logic” that would give rise to new concepts of being.64 Reading Nietzsche allowed the Contemporáneos to think how artistic formgiving might be brought together with political will to strengthen the public sphere as a space for vigorous political debate.65 In this way, the Contemporáneos used Nietzsche to appropriate the concept of virility embodied in revolutionary nationalism, redirecting it away from ideological dogmatism toward rigorous independent thinking. Rather than emphasizing Nietzsche’s authoritarian übermensch, the Contemporáneos stressed his “will to power” as aggressively mobilizing the human will against conformity to break down existing homogeneous structures of power. This mobilization would take place, the Contemporáneos contended, primarily in the realm of aesthetics. To this end, they conceived aesthetics as a deeply moral enterprise, a militant antidote to the ideological insensitivity of revolutionary nationalism. Gorostiza, for example, argued that the only way to produce literature that “analyzed” rather than simply “recounted” the profundity of Mexico’s history was through rigorous attention to the “resolution of aesthetic problems.” The “severe discipline” such an exercise required built a strength of character that could subvert the masculinist rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism and resist the “false nationalists” who produced “Mexico for exportation” to write a truly Mexican literature.66 But aesthetics for the Contemporáneos was more than simply an answer to the cultural dogmatism of the muralists and other revolutionary nationalists. It was, in and of itself, political— not in the sense of the mechanics of governing, but in the sense of an ethical practice. In this regard, Pellicer and Cuesta were especially perceptive. Unlike Villaurrutia (who professed to shun politics altogether),67 Cuesta recognized the Faustian nature of aesthetics conceptualized as an ethical — and therefore political— venture. Art itself was resolutely political, fostering an “ethics of responsibility” born of the intellectual endeavor.68 Yet Cuesta realized the impossibility of disentangling the mechanics of politics from ethics, and he regarded political engagement as the “devil” that dragged all artists and intellectuals away from that ethics. Art subsumed under the rhetoric of nationalist politics, the Contemporáneos maintained, lost its essential freedom of expression. The Contemporáneos instead upheld artistic and intellectual freedom as a universal value, and their cosmopolitanism—often falsely labeled Eurocentrism—must be understood in this framework. Gorostiza, for example, advocated a vigorous literary movement that would consolidate national and universal values, integrate popular culture with avant-garde modernity, and consider art to be an end in itself rather than a means of justifying other ends.69 Thus the Contemporáneos’ strong commitment to French avant-garde culture, evinced in the journal’s repeated references to such examples as Proust, Gide, Picasso, and the surrealists, signified their search for a universal aesthetics rather than a singular attachment to France. “What indeed is indisputable,” writes  

 

 

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Paz, siding with the Contemporáneos, “is that for them Frenchness was a profession of universalist faith. For this reason it could coexist with their patriotism.” 70

M u r a l i s m s C o mpa r e d : C o n t e mp o r á n e o s versus Mur alists

Yet relations between the two camps over time were far from static, and the Contemporáneos took care to recognize tensions and differences within muralism. Villaurrutia praised Siqueiros and Orozco for their “discontent” with the “externalizing model that Mexican painters, from Diego Rivera to the most humble, have so abused.” 71 Novo, in his capacity as Undersecretary of Education in 1932, helped organize Siqueiros’ first solo exhibition.72 Siqueiros, in return, soft-pedaled his standard productionist rhetoric, claiming at the exhibition’s conference: I am a partisan of the idea that [the arts] serve the proletariat in its revolutionary class struggle; but I consider the theory of “arte puro” as the supreme aesthetic goal. . . . I fight for the advent of [communist society] because in doing so I fight for pure art. Equally, I am of the opinion that [the artist] must not subordinate his aesthetic sense to the tastes of the revolutionary proletarian masses, as [those masses] have been poisoned by the degraded aesthetic sensibilities of the capitalist class.73

The following month, the Frente Único de Lucha Contra la Reacción Estética (FULCRE) published a manifesto, written by Siqueiros, against academicism in painting.74 Among FULCRE’s members were Contemporáneos affiliates Novo, Villaurrutia, Tamayo, and Castellanos. The Contemporáneos thus continually sought support on a variety of fronts for their notion of arte puro— a concept that linked aesthetic individualism to national political freedom. Against art or intellectual production subordinated to political engagement, the Contemporáneos collectively argued a different relationship between aesthetics and liberatory politics: “Art is not revolutionary simply because it speaks or exhibits material phenomena of the Revolution: art is revolutionary in and of itself.” 75 Artistic practice, uncompromised by subservience to any other medium, thus became an allegory for political freedom.76 Yet the Contemporáneos insisted on this model as more than a personal one guaranteeing an individual’s liberty; it needed to be instituted at the state level, to produce an aesthetic statism different from what the Contemporáneos saw developing around them.77 In seeking to define this relationship of art and politics, Cuesta tackled muralism’s conundrum head-on in his essay on Rivera. Here he attempted to separate the muralist from the aura surrounding him in order to open a serious dialogue on the nationalist aesthetics being institutionalized by state. Cuesta argued that Rivera marked a new Mexican “academy” born of the revolution. Yet Rivera’s “classicism” was the result not  

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of his bolshevism, according to Cuesta, but of his use of French cubist forms. Indeed, Cuesta continued, Rivera’s bolshevism was irrelevant, a mere “convention,” a trap into which both Rivera’s supporters and detractors fell. The real power of Rivera’s work lay in its essential “skepticism,” derived from his immersion in cubism. Cuesta defined this as “a skepticism of painting,” understood as “a precise consciousness of the relativity of all perspective, whether moral, political, or religious.” 78 Cuesta thus saw in Rivera’s work an effort, like that of cubism, to interrogate the ethics of Western pictorial convention. For Cuesta, what legitimated this “skepticism” as ethical critique was its firm basis in a uniquely modernist attention to an autonomous, self-referential artistic practice; only such a rigorous self-critique could stand as a model for ethical conduct in the socio-political realm. Cuesta called up the works of Picasso and Stravinsky as examples of this model of avant-garde cultural production, which, familiar to us now, found itself embattled in 1930s Mexico. The meaning of their works, he wrote, “does not depend on certain local and temporal conditions [ . . . ]; their value does not depend on the political and religious convictions of those who contemplate or listen.” Instead, he argued, they generate a meaning that registers the same for anyone from an “Israelite” to a “Mason.” 79 Cuesta reserved his most insightful analysis for Orozco, a favorite of the Contemporáneos. In his essay of 1934 he detected certain similarities between Orozco and the Contemporáneos, arguing that both chose the most difficult route, the “most sterile of territories,” in order to move beyond facile political ideologies.80 Cuesta’s “Nietzschean” Orozco (like Cuesta himself) used art to expose dilemmas or contradictions, to elaborate them, to push them to their limits.81 In 1938, while Orozco was in the midst of producing his most existentially anguished work — the Hospicio de Cabañas murals (figure 8.1), Cuesta described Orozco’s painting as encompassing the very essence of art itself, the ability to embody humanity’s essential moral torment: “Man carries within himself the enemy of man. And what must be discerned is the art and effect of that rivalry. It must be noted that there is as much ruin for art in the suppression of an enemy as in [the suppression of] the other. The ruin of art is in the suspension of this struggle. Art needs its enemy.”82 Nevertheless, Cuesta’s fascination with Orozco was double-edged. The artist’s powerful reliance on mysticism and symbolism ran against Cuesta’s preference for classicism and threatened to undo his concept of aesthetic modernism. “The originality of Orozco [unlike that of Picasso] does not correspond to the modern concept of originality, based in an idea of progress according to which each era is accompanied by a fatal expression of its . . . gradual unraveling.” Rather, his genius was an “absolute radicalism” but “barren,” so that the younger generation of painters could not assimilate it. Orozco, in Cuesta’s eyes, belonged more to Quattrocento Italy than to post-revolution Mexico, where he was forced to live “artificially.” Yet this internal tension was precisely the source of Orozco’s greatness, in that it mirrored history’s “internal conflicts.”83 Tamayo also figured centrally in the Contemporáneos’ effort to address those “inter 

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Figure 8.1 José Clemente Orozco. Man of Fire, Hospicio de Cabañas, Guadalajara (1938– 39). © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Photograph: Art Resource

nal conflicts” of history that gave rise to Mexico’s crisis of identity. Foreshadowing Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude (and his key 1951 text on Tamayo), the Contemporáneos returned to the long-standing problem of how mexicanidad might, in Benedict Anderson’s term, be “imagined” so as to confront — rather than deny— the inherent instability wrought upon Mexican identity by the Conquest. The Contemporáneos strove to counteract the adoption after the revolution of a triumphalist ideology of indigenismo, which they felt ignored, rather than resolved, the recurrent existential crisis of a nation continually torn between its indigenous and European heritages.84 To this end, Tamayo offered a psychic model, different from muralism’s socialist realism, of how to suture Mexico’s ancient  

 

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Figure 8.2 José Clemente Orozco. Cortés, Hospicio de Cabañas, Guadalajara (1939). © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Photograph: Art Resource

past to its modern present. Capitalizing on the Oaxacan painter’s purported indigenous status, the Contemporáneos framed Tamayo as simultaneously primitive and modern in a public image that emphasized his “instinctual,” psychological mexicanidad.85 He was able, they argued, to conjure visually the aura of the past, not as revival but rather as a mode of confronting the uncertainty of the present.86 Tamayo’s primitivism rejected Rivera’s anecdotal, folkloric pre-Conquest arcadias as well as the European avant-garde’s penchant for alien cultures. Instead, he envisioned the past and its recurrence in the present as terrifying symptoms of a culture-wide psychic anguish. Mexico’s crisis of modernity, unlike that of Europe, was not the terror of the new unhinged from the past,

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Figure 8.3 Rufino Tamayo. Landscape in the Night (1933). © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/México/2009/ Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, A.C.

but rather the pathological resurgence of the ancient in the guise of the modern.87 What Orozco, throughout the 1930s, envisioned as apocalyptic histories (figure 8.2), Tamayo imaged as psychic dramas, “at once refined and savage,”88 in which the modern turned on the uneasy dream memories of previous historical trauma (figure 8.3). By choosing a psychic, rather than historical, model, Tamayo allied himself with the Contemporáneos against the muralists, to claim a pure, “universal” attention to aesthetic practice.89 Arte puro, for Tamayo and the Contemporáneos, was thus a practice analogous to, but separate from, politics for exploring the dilemmas and contradictions of modernity.90 This is evident in Tamayo’s first mural, Song and Music, of 1933 (plate 6 and figure 8.4). Painted both to enter into debates on muralism and to influence the direction of public arts, it is situated in the stairwell of the former National School of Music.91 In it, Tamayo amplified the somber color palette, archaizing stiffness, and psychic aura of his easel paintings to monumental scale, to picture a set of massive female allegories. In the center panel, a statuesque, white-robed Music plucks a mandolin, surrounded by soaring figures of Intelligence and Intuition and the seated figure of Humanity. Music, staring solemnly, ignores her surroundings, engrossed in inward contemplation. Song, on the left wall, concentrates on her métier, her rounded mouth mimicked by the cherub floating above her. Two muses of lyric and dramatic song ani-

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Figure 8.4 Rufino Tamayo. Song and Music, right wall, National School of Music (now the Coordinación Nacional de Arqueología), Mexico City (1933). © D. R. Rufino Tamayo/Herederos/México/2009/Fundación Olga y Rufino Tamayo, A.C.

mate the shallow space above her head. On the right wall, allegories of stringed, wind, and percussive instruments float in a compressed, airless space, organized visually by the moon’s full white orb. Song and Music deliberately distinguishes itself from the principal mural models on offer in 1933. Although Tamayo, like Rivera at Chapingo, takes up the monumental female body as national allegory, his archaizing style deliberately challenges both Rivera’s political narratives and the luxuriant bodies he uses to embody them (figure 8.5). Tamayo’s figures have none of Rivera’s sensuality, nor do they take up Orozco’s mystical anguish. Instead, their monolithic forms suggest a solemn grandeur, while the dark, earthy tones (offset by the cool white of Music’s classical drapery or the mandolin paired

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Figure 8.5 Diego Rivera. Liberated Earth with the Natural Forces Controlled by Man, Autonomous University of Chapingo (1926). © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph: Bob Schalkwijk/Art Resource

with the full moon above) evoke the traditional and the ancient. And while Tamayo’s references to pre-Conquest visual forms might remind us of an early work by Siqueiros, Burial of a Worker, the Oaxacan painter’s figures carry none of the references to contemporary social conflict that we see in the Siqueiros (figure 8.6). Nor does Tamayo indulge in Siqueiros’ growing propensity for defying the restrictions of the architectural surround (see figure 11.4). Song and Music presents a flat, condensed space that adheres to the spatial dictates of the wall with a starkly modernist concentration. Tamayo combines a pre-Conquest visual vocabulary of self-contained, sculptural monumentality with a

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Figure 8.6 David Alfaro Siqueiros. Burial of a Worker, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (formerly Escuela Nacional Preparatoria) (1923–24). © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City. Photograph: Art Resource

stringent economy of form that is entirely modernist, to produce weighty, hieratic figures that bring the severe stylization of Aztec sculpture into the modern era.

Th e L e g a c y o f t h e C o n t e mp o r á n e o s

Both Orozco and Tamayo were key figures for the Contemporáneos as they elaborated their ethics of individual creative freedom as essential to the modern Mexican nation. Against the state’s conception of the nation as a collective defined by a pragmatic logic, into which the individual was subsumed, the Contemporáneos insisted on an aesthetic of the intuitive, the melancholy, and the solitary inner experience of the individual that Villaurrutia would famously describe as a “nostalgia for death.”92 Despite persecution of the Contemporáneos in the 1920s and 1930s, this existentialist model of the national soul would have repercussions after World War II. Paz’s enormously influential book The Labyrinth of Solitude adapted this paradigm to the anxieties of a world seeking explanation for the horrors of the holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the

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gulag. Writing in 1950, Paz extended the Contemporáneos’ concept of anguish, arguing that modern Mexico carried a burden of psychic trauma and repressed rage as a legacy of the Conquest.93 History, rather than offer a means of transcending the emasculation of rape and colonial subjugation, is only repeated endlessly as national destiny, forcing the Mexican male continually to oscillate between despondency and outbursts of rage and random violence. In this model, the political violence of the Revolution and its aftermath resulted from the cyclical psychic violence imposed centuries before, not from social relations, as muralism would have it. Paz, by articulating national identity as a pathology of violence, took the Contemporáneos’ rejection of muralism’s Marxism further, arguing that individual solitude and anguish were more profoundly Mexican than the realm of social conflict. In 1951, Paz linked this view of Mexico’s afflicted nature to the aftermath of world war, when he commented that Tamayo “opens for us the doors of the old sacred universe of myth and images that reveal to us the double condition of man: his atrocious reality and, simultaneously, his no less atrocious irreality. Twentieth-century man suddenly discovers what, by other routes, was already known by all those who had lived a crisis, an end of the world.”94 Paz argued that Tamayo, unlike the muralists, could embody the chaos of the modern precisely because of his intuitive, individualist ability aesthetically to conjure up Mexico’s cataclysmic past.95 The sophistication, impact, and valid criticisms of Paz’s powerful formulation are too complex to analyze fully here. But whereas post-Revolution socialism forced the Contemporáneos into an embattled minority position, Paz’s thoughts took hold after the global failure of socialism’s utopian project. His model reverberated in post-war Mexico as the state “institutionalized” the Revolution, forsaking all but the superficial rhetoric of socialism for a capitalist model of economic growth. In the atmosphere of the cold war, the cultural stereotypes Paz had elaborated entrenched themselves so that even today they remain powerful.

Notes

1.  Jorge Cuesta, Obras reunidas v. II: Ensayos y prosas varias, eds. Jesús R. Martínez Malo, Víctor Peláez Cuesta, and Francisco Segovia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004), p. 245. All translations by author except where noted. 2.  Bernardo J. Gastélum, “Espíritu del héroe,” Contemporáneos V. 1. No. 1 (June 1928):2. 3.  See Ermilo Abreu Gómez in Las revistas literarias de México (Mexico: Ediciones del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1963), p. 171, cited in E. J. Mullen, “Critical Reactions to the Review Contemporáneos,” Hispania, V. 54, No. 1 (March 1971):146. 4. Gabriel García Maroto, “La pintura de Diego Rivera,” Contemporáneos, V. 1, No. 1 (June, 1928):65. 5.  Xavier Villaurrutia, “Carta a un joven (Edmundo Valadés)” Los Contemporáneos por si mismos, pp. xi–xii. Quoted in Guillermo Sheridan, Los Contemporáneos ayer (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985), p. 13– 14. The core group, which had been publishing and working together since the early 1920s, included Jorge Cuesta, Enrique González Rojo,  

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José Gorostiza, Salvador Novo, Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano, Jaime Torres Bodet, Xavier Villaurrutia, and Gilberto Owen. Tangentially affiliated were Samuel Ramos, Bernardo J. Gastélum, and Carlos Pellicer. 6.  Xavier Villaurrutia, Obras: poesía, teatro, prosas varias, crítica, ed. Miguel Capistrán, Alí Chumacero, and Luis Mario Schneider (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1966), pp. 1035, 1036. Karen Cordero Reiman, “Ensueños artísticos: tres estrategias plásticas para configurar la modernidad en México, 1920–1930,” Modernidad y modernización en el arte mexicano, 1920–1960 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1991), p. 62. 7. Julio Jiménez Rueda, “El afeminamiento en la literatura mexicana,” El Universal (December 21, 1924), n.p. See Víctor Díaz Arciniega, Querella por la cultura “revolucionaria” (1925) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989) for documentation. 8.  See Carlos Monsiváis, “La persecución y la mexicanidad viril,” Salvador Novo: Lo marginal en el centro (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2000), pp. 73– 84, for documentation. See also Christopher Domínguez Michael, “Prólogo. La crítica del demonio,” in Cuesta, Obras reunidas v. II 9.  This was Rubén Salazar Mallén’s novel, Cariátide, which contained rough vernacular language. See Guillermo Sheridan, México en 1932: la polémica nacionalista (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), pp. 105–6. 10. Sheridan, México en 1932, p. 106. 11.  Gastélum indicated this in the first issue of Contemporáneos, stating “Hagamos un nuevo país dándole, junto a la conciencia de su articulación, el programa de su existencia.” [“Let us make a new country, giving it, together with a consciousness of its articulation, the program of its existence.”] “Espíritu del héroe,” Contemporáneos V. 1, No. 1 (June 1928): 14. 12.  Octavio Paz, “Contemporáneos: Primer Encuentro,” in Paz and Luis Mario Schneider, eds., México en la obra de Octavio Paz v. II: Generaciones y semblanzas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987), p. 94. 13.  Novo was the first editor of El Maestro Rural, a journal central to the Ministry of Public Education’s rural education program, which sought to bring literacy as well as technical and cultural education to rural peoples. Forced to quit because of the October 1932 polemic, Novo nevertheless remained a powerful public figure, writing his famous chronicles of Mexican life. 14.  David A. Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1999) defines the term “aesthetic statism,” via Schiller, as the unification of the political state with the aesthetic realm, universal rationalism with the individual, and a universal canon with a national culture. See Ana María Alonso, “Conforming Disconformity: ‘Mestizaje, Hybridity, and the Aesthetics of Mexican Nationalism,” Cultural Anthropology V. 19, No. 4 (2004):459–90 for an investigation of aesthetic statism in 1920s Mexico. 15.  My use of the term “cosmopolitan” here and below refers not to the strict political sense of abolishing all existing states, or to the Kantian sense of a moral and legal obligation, or to economic cosmpolitanism, which advocates a single global market. Rather, I use it in a looser cultural sense to indicate the Contemporáneos’ conviction that national culture should serve as a means of entry into the world community. As I argue below, the Contemporáneos saw both a slavish devotion to European models and an exclusive adhesion  

 

 

 

 

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to parochial culture as detrimental. While this concept of national culture as a means to full and equal participation in the world community had its contradictions, it still can usefully be characterized as cosmopolitan. My thanks to Joaquín Terrones and José Falconi for help in articulating this point. See also Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, “Cosmopolitanism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2006 edition) Edward N. Zalta, ed., URL: ; and Timothy Brennan, “Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism,” in Daniele Archibugi, ed., Debating Cosmopolitanism (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 41 –42. 16.  As will become clear below, I use the term “existentialist” here not in the full Sartrean sense of freedom as the “dislocation of consciousness from its object,” but in the more limited sense of “the estrangement of the self both from the world and from itself,” that sense of alienation and precarity prompted by the “modern experience of a meaningless universe.” Nevertheless, the Contemporáneos’ invocation of Nietzsche, which I discuss below, resonates strongly with existentialism’s understanding of Nietzschean nihilism as potentially liberating. Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2010 edition) Edward N. Zalta, ed., URL: . 17.  Carlos Monsiváis, Jorge Cuesta (Mexico City: Crea, 1985), p. 11; Paz, “Contemporáneos,” p. 94. 18. Jorge Cuesta, “¿Existe una crisis en nuestra literatura de vanguardia?” quoted in Sheridan, Los Contemporáneos ayer, p. 12. 19. Before becoming Minister of Public Education under Obregón, Vasconcelos was a prominent member of the influential Ateneo de la Juventud. On Vasconcelos and panLatinamericanism, see Rick López, “Institutionalizing the Cultural Nationalist Project” in Crafters of Nationhood: How Intellectuals, Artisans and the State Created an Ethnicized Mexican National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 20.  The PNR, changing its name in 1946 to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), would remain in power until the end of the century. See Nora Hamilton on the successes and failures of Calles to centralize control under his command. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 21.  Paz, “Contemporáneos,” p. 94. 22.  Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America (London: Verso, 1999), p. 151. 23.  On Cárdenas’ corporatization of the masses, see Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994):73–107. 24.  Carlos Noriega Hope, “‘Los de abajo’: El Doctor Mariano Azuela y la crítica del punto y coma,” El Universal (February 10, 1925), quoted in Díaz Arciniega, Querella, p. 90. That Los de abajo was co-opted for use against the Contemporáneos in these debates is ironic, given Azuela’s long history of trenchant criticism of the hypocrisy of politicos who used the Revolution to gain personal power. See Jorge Ruffinelli, “La recepción crítica de Los de abajo,” in Mariano Azuela, Los de abajo, Edición crítica, coordinador, J. Ruffinelli (Mexico City: Colección Archivos, 1988), especially pp. 204 –9. 25. Sheridan, México en 1932, p. 28. 26.  Manuel Gamio, “The Education of the Indo-Hispanic Peoples,” in Aspects of Mexican  

 

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Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926), p. 52. Translation modified from López, Crafters of Nationhood, Chapter 4. 27.  Gamio, “The Education of the Indo-Hispanic Peoples,” p. 52, quoted in López, Crafters of Nationhood; Manuel Gamio, Forjando patria (Mexico City: Porrúa Hermanos, 1916). As Basave Benítez and Ana María Alonso note, Gamio represented the “indigenist pole” of mestizo nationalism (Basave Benítez, paraphrased in, “Conforming Disconformity,” p. 465). That is to say, Gamio argued not for a purely indio nation, but for a national ethos that “forged” both the Latin and the indigenous races into one. 28.  Gamio, “The Education of the Indo-Hispanic Peoples,” p. 52, quoted in López, Crafters of Nationhood. 29.  See the appendix in this volume. 30.  Sheridan paraphrasing the position of El Universal Ilustrado during the 1925 polemic. Sheridan, México en 1932, p. 36. 31.  El Universal Ilustrado, quoted in Sheridan, México en 1932, p. 35. 32. Villaurrutia, Obras, p. 1035. “Folkloric” in this sense refers to the traditional, rural, and local, or regional (versus the modern, urban, international, and cosmopolitan). 33. Villaurrutia, Obras, p. 1025. 34.  On “revolutionary nationalism,” see my chapter, “Muralism and the State in PostRevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1970,” this volume. 35. José Gorostiza, “Clásicos para niños,” Excélsior (March 22, 1925), quoted in Díaz Arciniega, Querella, p. 92. 36.  Rufino Tamayo, paraphrased in Rita Eder, “El muralismo mexicano: modernismo y modernidad,” in Modernidad y modernización en el arte mexicano, 1920– 1960 (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 1991), p. 70. 37.  In this regard, it should be noted that the Contemporáneos distinguished Orozco and early Siqueiros from Rivera’s utopian idealism, at least until events of 1932. 38.  Samuel Ramos, “La cultura criolla,” Contemporáneos Nos. 38–39 (July–August, 1931): 64, 63. 39.  Samuel Ramos, “El sueño de México– Diego,” Contemporáneos V. VI, No. 21 (February 1930):113–26. 40.  Ramos, “Diego,” pp. 118, 119, 121, 124. 41.  Cuesta, “Marx no era inteligente, ni revolucionario; tampoco socialista, sino contrarrevolucionario y místico,” (1935), in Cuesta, Obras, pp. 324 –40. 42.  Mexican Marxism’s relationship to Catholicism is a complex issue deeply entwined with Mexico’s colonial past, its contemporary nationalism, and the development of its party politics throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps most compelling in this regard is the communist militant and writer, José Revueltas, whose conflicts with the Mexican Communist Party in the 1940s, belief in the revolutionary potential of the common man, and rejection of Leninism for a more existentialist Marxism were intimately bound up with his Catholicism. To a degree, Revueltas could be said to have bridged the opposition between the muralists and the Contemporáneos; he criticized the Party’s dogmatism and its willingness to participate in the Mexican state’s “institutionalization” of the revolution, but without forsaking Marxism. In turn, he emphasized the importance of inner experience to any concept of social revolution, often couching this experience in religious symbolism.  

 

 

 

 

 

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Octavio Paz sympathetically described the “paradoxical character” of Revueltas’ writing as “a vision of Christianity within his Marxist atheism. Revueltas lived Marxism as a Christian and because of that he lived it . . . as agony, doubt and negation.” Paz, “Cristianismo y revolución: José Revueltas,” in Paz and Luis Mario Schneider, eds., México en la obra de Octavio Paz v. II: Generaciones y semblanzas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987), p. 575. Nevertheless, against the Contemporáneos’ Nietzscheanism, Revueltas was clearly committed to the young Marx’s Hegelian emphasis on alienation and reappopriation of our human essence. See Bruno Bosteels, “Hegel in Mexico: Memory and Alienation in the Posthumous Writings by José Revueltas,” South Central Review 21.3 (Fall 2004):48–49. The uproar caused by the 1949 publication of Revueltas’ Los días terrenales, a severe critique of the Mexican Communist Party, reveals how contentious the Marxism-Catholicism issue is not just in Mexico, but throughout Latin America. See Edith Negrín, “Los días terrenales a través del prisma intertexual,” and “Recepción crítica y polémica en torno a Los días terrenales y El cuadrante de la soledad,” in José Revueltas, Los días terrenales, edición crítica de Evodio Escalante (Nanterre: ALLCA XX, 1991), pp. 276–91; Roger Bartra, “¿Lombardo o Revueltas?” Nexos No. 54 (Mexico, June 1982). I thank José Falconi for helping me articulate this issue. 43.  Cuesta, “Marx no era inteligente . . .” p. 325. 44.  How successful Cárdenas was, and the degree of independent agency allowed workers and peasants, is an open debate. See Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy; Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930 –1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Kevin J. Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism in Mexico (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Ben Fallaw, Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) for a variety of assessments. 45.  Claudio Lomnitz, “Ritual, Rumor, and Corruption in the Formation of Mexican Polities,” in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico. An Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 151. 46.  Cuesta, “El marxismo en el poder,” Obras reunidas v. II. p. 342. A Marxist intellectual, Lombardo Toledano was leader of the powerful Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), closely allied with Cárdenas. Although never a member of the Mexican Communist Party, he was nevertheless a strong supporter of Stalin, especially after his 1935 visit to the Soviet Union. Bartra notes “the almost religious” character of Lombardo’s nationalist adhesion to the state, which differed so dramatically both from the Contemporáneos and from Revueltas’ faith in the redemptive power of Marxism as an expression of popular will. Bartra, “¿Lombardo o Revueltas?” n.p. 47.  Domínguez, “Prólogo,” p. 31. 48. See Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 26 (1994):73–107. When Cuesta was writing, the Spanish Civil War had not yet started, and Cárdenas had not yet embarked on his pronounced anti-fascist foreign policy, which included aid to Republican Spain. 49. On Vasconcelos’ fascism, see Claude Fell, José Vasconcelos: Los años del águila (Mexico: UNAM, 1989) and Nicolás Cárdenas and Mauricio Tenorio, “Mexico 1920s –1940s: Revolutionary Government, Reactionary Politics,” in Fascism outside Europe: The European Impulse against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism, Stein Ugelvik Larsen,  

 

 

 

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ed., (Boulder: Social Science Monographs; New York: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2001). On LEAR, see Lourdes Quintanilla, Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) (Mexico City: UNAM, 1980). 50.  The ¡30-30! group, quoted in Carlos Monsiváis, Salvador Novo. Lo marginal en el centro (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2000), pp. 75 –76. 51. Sheridan, México en 1932, p. 62. 52. Charles Maurras, quoted in Sheridan, México en 1932, pp. 71– 72. Italics in the original. 53.  On the Ateneo de la Juventud, see Horacio Legrás, “El Ateneo y los orígenes del estado ético en México,” Latin American Research Review, V. 38, No. 2, (2003):34 – 60; Juan Hernández Luna, ed. Conferencias del Ateneo de la Juventud (Mexico City: UNAM, 1984). 54.  See Cuesta, “Ulises criollo,” “Réplica a Ifegenia cruel,” and “La enseñanza de Ulises,” collected in Cuesta, Obras vols. I and II. See also Domínguez, “Prólogo,” pp. 16 –17. Despite Cuesta’s criticism, however, Reyes continued to act as mentor and collaborator with the Contemporáneos, publishing important essays in the journal. See Sheridan, México en 1932, pp. 49–55. 55.  For example, see Cuesta’s critique, “Nietzsche y las psicología,” Obras, p. 484. Vasconcelos’ unnuanced reading of Nietzsche’s concept of the “übermensch” affected both his deprecation of indigenous and popular culture and his later turn toward fascism. 56.  Legrás, “El Ateneo y los orígenes del estado ético en México,” pp. 49 –50. 57.  Carlos Monsiváis, “La toma de partido de Alfonso Reyes,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 37, No. 2 (1989):516, quoted in Legrás, “El Ateneo y los orígenes del estado ético en México,” p. 51. 58. Sheridan, in México en 1932, p. 76, argues that Cuesta proposes differentiating between a “national sentiment” and a “national conscience,” the first being romantic and reductive, the second being open to the exterior and congruent with Mexico’s mestizo and pluralistic culture. See also José Emilio Pacheco, “Jorge Cuesta y el clasicismo mexicano,” Revista de la Universidad de México (April, 1965); Domínguez, “Prólogo.” 59.  Domínguez, “Prólogo,” p. 19. 60.  Jorge Cuesta, “Nietzsche y el nazismo” (1939), Obras. I am indebted to Domínguez, “Prólogo,” for this argument. See also Samuel Ramos’ discussion of the Apolonian and Dionysian in Nietzsche. Ramos, Filosofía de la vida artística (Mexico City: Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, 1950). 61.  Cuesta, “Nietzsche y el nazismo,” p. 481; “Nietzsche y la psicología” (1939), Obras, p. 484. 62.  Cuesta, “Nietzsche y el nazismo,” p. 481. 63. Ramos, Filosofía de la vida artística, p. 27. 64. Ramos, Filosofía de la vida artística, p. 28. Stated this way, the Contemporáneos would seem to have much in common with André Breton’s surrealism and also with aspects of existentialism. The Contemporáneos certainly read Breton (and indeed, in his Filosofía Ramos ties liberatory release from logic to two surrealist favorites: dreams and drunkenness); nevertheless, their notion of human psychology was based much more in Ortega y Gasset, Bergson, and Nietzsche than in Freud; and, in contrast to the surrealists, they  

 

 

 

 

 

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resolutely separated all these from Marx. On existentialism in the context of this chapter, see note 15 above. 65.  The Contemporáneos’ reading of Nietzsche, of course, brings up the notorious problem of the “aestheticization of politics” in which Nietzsche has constantly been linked by critics to Nazism. Martin Jay teases out some of the pros and cons of this issue in “‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology: Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?” Cultural Critique N. 21 (Spring, 1992):41– 61. It should be said that Cuesta and Ramos were by far the most sophisticated of the Contemporáneos in understanding both the benefits and the dangers of Nietzsche’s thought. See also note 14 above, especially Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism, on the concept of aesthetic statism. 66. José Gorostiza, “Morfología de La rueca de aire,” Contemporáneos, No. 25, (June 1930): 243, 245, 242, 247, 248. 67.  Paz, “Contemporáneos,” p. 101. 68.  Domínguez, “Prólogo,” p. 27. 69.  My paraphrase of Díaz Arciniega, Querella, p. 92, note 114. Cuesta also attacked nationalism predicated not on “Man, but on the Mexican; not on Nature, but on Mexico; not on History, but on its local anecdote.” He further argued for the necessity of cultural graft and transplant as a necessary part of any strengthening of national character. “La literatura y el nacionalismo,” Obras, p. 135. 70.  Paz, “Contemporáneos,” p. 100. 71. Villaurrutia, Obras, p. 1032. 72.  In the Galería del Casino Español. Siqueiros, Palabras de Siqueiros, ed. Raquel Tibol, (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), p. 48. 73. Siqueiros, “Rectificaciones sobre las artes plásticas en México,” in Palabras de Siqueiros, p. 61. In this somewhat convoluted argument, Siqueiros used this opportunity to court the Contemporáneos for support in his growing differences with Rivera. 74. Published as an unsigned document: “Intelectuales de vanguardia invitan a los retrógrados a una lucha ideológica a campo raso,” El Nacional (March 26, 1932):6. Other FULCRE members included Silvestre Revueltas, Germán List Arzubide, Carlos Chávez, and Luis Sandi. Ortiz de Montellano, Héctor Pérez Martínez, Agustín Yáñez, Gorostiza, Pellicer, Barreda, and Cuesta also expressed support of FULCRE’s manifesto. 75.  Marcial Rojas [a pseudonymn used by various members of the Contemporáneos] “Notas de conversación,” Contemporáneos, 18 (November 1929):335. Quoted in Sheridan, Los Contemporáneos ayer, p. 353. 76.  Tamayo, in particular, would capitalize on this equation of arte puro with individual freedom during the cold war, in which he allied himself with the anti-communist rhetoric surrounding the abstract expressionists. See James Oles, “The Howl and the Flame: Tamayo’s Wartime Allegories,” in Diana Du Pont, ed., Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, (Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 2007), pp. 291 –315. By the cold war, however, Tamayo had drifted very far from any (doubtful) attachment he may earlier have had to the Contemporáneos aesthetic statism project. See Olivier Debroise, “Reaching Out to the Audience: Tamayo and the Debate on Modernism,” in Du Pont, Tamayo: A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, pp. 379–91, for a sharp assessment of the artist’s fashioning of his reputation.  

 

 

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77.  Ignacio Sánchez Prado argues similarly that the Contemporáneos sought to “articulate a cultural practice that could simultaneously operate from an institutionalized structure and claim intellectual autonomy.” Sánchez Prado, “Claiming Liberalism: Enrique Krauze, Vuelta, Letras Libres, and the Reconfigurations of the Mexican Intellectual Class,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos V. 26, No. 1 (Winter, 2010):52. 78. Cuesta, “Un mural de Diego Rivera” (no date), Obras, pp. 549 – 51. Domínguez (“Prólogo,” p. 57) notes that the essay was not published during Cuesta’s lifetime. 79.  Cuesta, “Un mural de Diego Rivera,” p. 549. 80.  Cuesta, “La pintura de José Clemente Orozco” (1934), Obras, p. 230. 81.  Domínguez argues that Cuesta viewed Orozco as closest to his own Nietzschean paradigm. Domínguez, “Prólogo,” p. 60. 82.  Cuesta, “José Clemente Orozco: ¿clásico o romántico?” (no date), Obras, p. 556. 83.  Cuesta, “La pintura de José Clemente Orozco,” pp. 229, 230. 84.  As is well known, this problem had already produced a century of political and cultural turmoil, as Mexico tried to define itself after its independence from Spain. See, for example, Tomás Pérez Vejo, España en el debate público mexicano (1836 – 1867): Aportaciones para una historia de la nación (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2008). On my use of “existential,” see note 16 above. 85.  Xavier Villaurrutia, “La pintura mexicana actual,” Nuestro México (November 1932): 76. Only in 1985 did Tamayo finally refute the myth of his indigenous origins. See Diana Du Pont, “‘Realistic, Never Descriptive’: Tamayo and the Art of Abstract Figuration,” in Du Pont, ed., Tamayo. A Modern Icon Reinterpreted, pp. 48–50. 86.  Xavier Villaurrutia, “Un cuadro de la pintura mexicana,” Ulises V. 1, No. 6 (February, 1928):5– 12; Celestino Gorostiza, “Una exposición de pintura moderna,” Revista de revistas (27 October 1929):n.p.; Ortiz de Montellano, “La obra expresiva de Rufino Tamayo,” Revista de revistas (1926). 87.  Cuauhtémoc Medina argues this point in relation to both Tamayo and Octavio Paz, although he doesn’t mention the influence of the Contemporáneos. Medina, “‘La oscilación entre el mito y la crítica’: Octavio Paz entre Duchamp y Tamayo,” unpublished paper delivered at The Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio (November 2003):8. 88.  Paz, “Repaso en forma de preámbulo” (1986) in Paz and Luis Mario Schneider, eds., México en la obra de Octavio Paz v. III: Los privilegios de la vista, (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987), p. 28. 89.  See Tamayo “El nacionalismo y el movimiento pictórico,” Crisol V. 9, No. 53 (May 1, 1933):275–81. 90.  See Anthony Stanton, “Los Contemporáneos y el debate en torno a la poesía pura,” in Rafael Olea Franco and Anthony Stanton, eds., Los Contemporáneos en el laberinto de la crítica (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1994), pp 27–44. 91.  Juan Carlos Pereda, “Rufino Tamayo: El canto y la música, 1933,” in Miguel Angel Echegaray, ed., La pintura mural en los centros de educación de México (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 2003): 83. Pereda documents the discontent Tamayo’s mural at first provoked among the students of the National School of Music (now the Coordinación Nacional de Arqueología). 92.  Xavier Villaurrutia, Nostalgia de la muerte (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1938).  

 

 

 

 

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93.  Literary scholar Joaquín Terrones argues, however, for a fundamental distinction between Paz and the Contemporáneos; unlike Paz, the latter almost always resolve anguish through melancholy and humor. Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin, for example, begins with existential angst and the anxiety of drowning within one’s skin but ends with a biting “Oh well, let’s all go to hell then!” Author’s personal communication with Terrones, July 5, 2010. 94.  Paz, “Rufino Tamayo en la pintura mexicana,” México en la cultura No. 103 (January 21, 1951), quoted in Medina, “Octavio Paz entre Duchamp y Tamayo,” pp. 6 –7. 95.  As Cuauhtémoc Medina notes, however, for Paz, reactivation of the “sacred” in art was not an invitation to restore ancient civilizations, but rather a chance to share in the sense of abandonment provoked by the failure of the communist project. Medina, “Octavio Paz entre Duchamp y Tamayo,” p. 7.  

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Part 2

Muralism’s Hemispheric Influences

9 Siqueiros’ Travels and “Alternative Muralisms” in Argentina and Cuba Alejandro Anreus Painters and sculptors, we are working to create in Argentina and in Uruguay (perhaps in all of South America) the bases of a monumental pictorial movement, open and multi-exemplary for the great popular masses.  

— David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Call to Argentinean Artists,” Crítica, June 2, 1933

David Alfaro Siqueiros was without a doubt the most vociferous and militant among the first generation of Mexican muralists; he was the movement’s theoretician and evangelist, spreading muralism throughout his travels in the Americas. In 1933 he visited Buenos Aires and painted a mural there. Ten years later Siqueiros found himself in Havana, where he also painted a mural. On both occasions he came into close contact with local painters (Antonio Berni in Argentina, Mario Carreño in Cuba) who assisted him, and who were in turn influenced by his work. This chapter explores the Mexican’s activities during his travels and the “alternative muralisms” developed by Berni and Carreño.

B u e n o s A i r e s , 1933

In 1932 Siqueiros arrived in California, where he taught and lectured. While there, he executed three murals. The following year, his US visa was not renewed because of his communist politics, even though he had been officially expelled from the Mexican Communist Party. He left the United States and traveled in South America, publishing llamamientos to artists in both Uruguay and Argentina, calling for a socially engaged art expressed through mural painting. In the 1930s Argentina experienced the worldwide economic crisis as well as social and political turmoil. The decade began with a mili-

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tary coup that deposed the liberal president Hipólito Yrigoyen, and shortly thereafter immigration was stopped, by order of the government. At the same time, the anarchosyndicalist labor union Confederación General del Trabajo was founded, and protofascist groups organized themselves into the Legión Cívica Argentina.1 In a tunnel-shaped bar in a private residence in Don Torcuato, a province of Buenos Aires, Siqueiros painted Plastic Exercise (plate 7) using innovative techniques of overhead projection (which replaced the traditional mural cartoon), airbrush, and stencils, and working on a black fresco surface. He was assisted in executing this mural by the painters Antonio Berni (1905–81), Lino Enea Spilimbergo (1896–1964), and Juan Carlos Castagnino (1908–71), among others. By the time Berni worked with Siqueiros, he had been back in Buenos Aires from Paris for three years, having studied there with André Lhõte and Othon Friesz, experimented with surrealism, and befriended the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. When he was back in Argentina Berni had briefly joined the Communist Party, but resigned because he wanted to preserve his independent Marxism and keep his distance from Party dogma.2 Plastic Exercise represents variations on the female nude, as if reflected through a prism. The overall effect of the work is one of voluptuous delight, designed for the male viewer who is enjoying a cocktail. Siqueiros and his team deliberately omitted specific political content because they wanted this mural project to be a purely experimental work, focused on technique and form. The female theme undoubtedly reflected the bon vivant personality of the patron, the newspaper publisher Natalio Botana. After the mural was completed, the team wrote and published a text on the work discussing it as “a monumental dynamic painting for a dynamic spectator” as well as “a many-faceted painting, spectacular, scenographic, in action.”3 The text discusses the innovative technique and use of technology in addition to the dynamic image and the engaged spectator. The erotic content of the work is ignored. Plastic Exercise was Antonio Berni’s first mural, and his first painted work in fresco with a team of artists using air brush. The collaboration prompted him, in April 1934, to found the school/workshop Mutualidad Popular de Estudiantes y Artistas Plásticos, in Rosario. However, the workshop failed to secure mural commissions, and Berni had to re-evaluate his thinking about muralism and its use as a social art form. Siqueiros returned to Mexico in 1934 and began his attacks against Diego Rivera’s anti-Stalinism and his acceptance of government patronage. In 1935, Berni took a position different from Siqueiros on the nature of governmental patronage for murals, insisting in a journal article that “[m]ural painting cannot be more than one of the many forms of expressions of popular art. To make the mural movement a battle horse for the art of the masses in a bourgeois society is to condemn the movement to passivity or opportunism.”4 Berni argued that because Argentina lacked a social revolution comparable to Mexico’s, the conservative and military government in power would not offer public build 

 

 

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ings to potential muralists. Berni insisted on an “alternative muralism,” adapted to the reality of time and place, one allied with the need for “groups capable in all the forms of graphic arts: in easel painting, drawing, newspapers, walls, posters, aquatints, paintings for both individual and collective salons, photography, film, and so forth, mediums that bring our aesthetic ideas to the great masses.”5 In the mid-1930s, this alternative for Berni meant temporary murals or mural-sized easel paintings, executed with tempera on burlap (the most readily available media for the artist), which would document the problems of the moment: unemployment, strikes, and political repression. In the late 1970s, Berni would recall the 1930s as a time when “I did nothing but engage with the country. An artist must live with eyes wideopen, and at that time the dictatorship, unemployment, misery, strikes, labor struggles, hunger, and demonstrations were a stark reality that hurt the eyes.”6 In 1932 Berni began to use his Leica camera to document the brothels of Rosario for the journalist Rodolfo Puiggrós.7 For the rest of the decade his photography of the unemployed, labor demonstrations, and social conditions would become an important resource for his paintings. Berni approached photography as a visual aid for his painting, like a preparatory sketch. He was not pursuing photographic realism or reproducing his photographs. It is significant that his use of photography predates his contact with Siqueiros. Three monumental works— Unemployed, Demonstration, and Tenant Farmers— all painted in 1934– 35, demonstrate Berni’s concept of an alternative muralism. The surface of the works says much about their content. All were painted on bags of sugar cut and sewn together by Berni’s wife, Paule Cazenave. The artist stretched and prepared the fabric on a homemade wood stretcher.8 The sugar industry in Argentina at this time had an organized and radical labor force, and tensions were deep between small, familyowned mills and the centralized monopoly administered by the military from Buenos Aires. Berni’s use of recycled burlap as the surface for his paintings thus evokes a social moment fraught with turmoil. Many of the faces in the crowd of Demonstration (figure 9.1) are based on Berni’s own photographs. The painting depicts a crowd of unemployed men (and two women, one holding up a child) marching down the main street of a provincial town. In the background, a hand-painted sign above the crowd demands bread and work. These words suggest an iconographic and conceptual foundation for Berni in the painting Without Bread or Work by Ernesto de la Cárcova of 1894, which depicts a bleak interior where an enraged unemployed worker looks out the window at a defunct factory while his emaciated wife and baby look on.9 Berni’s crowd, however, breaks the isolation and helplessness of de la Cárcova’s worker. Ten faces of men of varying ages, as well as the two women and the child, are depicted in the foreground of Berni’s picture. These faces press on the picture plane and pull the viewer into the crowd to join them — an effect emphasized by the work’s size, 180 × 249.5 centimeters. Berni paints the faces and the  

 

 

 

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Figure 9.1 Antonio Berni. Demonstration, MALBA Fundación Eduardo F. Constantini, Buenos Aires (1934). Tempera on burlap. Courtesy of Lily and José Antonio Berni.

receding crowd in a sculptural manner, using a dramatic chiaroscuro and an abundance of detail in the individual faces. Even the faces of the exhausted express defiance. A clenched fist emerges from the crowd; a child holds a piece of bread; one of the women and two men open their mouths to utter a protest. Several faces look upward, possibly at policemen on horseback: the painting captures the moment when the crowd is about to be attacked. The painting has an abundance of yellows, reds, oranges, balanced by a few areas of blue and green. In the background, the buildings are drab ocher, brown, and brick colors, and the sky is an oppressive dark blue-gray. These individuals are united in a crowd, powerful as a unit, their weather-beaten faces portrayed with all their wrinkles and grime. They are not idealized or falsely heroic, or represented in the style of socialist realism or fascist classicism. The power of this demonstration lies in the solidarity of the dispossessed, expressed in their weary yet resistant faces, their callused and worn hands—their humanity. They are about to be assaulted, but together they will resist and rebel. In this painting, as in his other two monumental works of this period, Berni gives form to his idea of a broader context for the work of art:  

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We yearned to be given the opportunity of taking our work outside of the reduced frame in which we are constrained. The clubs, the schools, in the end all of the places that can be given mural paintings, would be the most direct way to realize the full aspiration of the work, ours and everyone’s. We are not asking for unreasonable fees but would ask for wages commensurate with those of workers.10

If a military government will not offer the walls of its public buildings to potential muralists, if the national salons and the commercial galleries are not places to exhibit socially charged art, then, Berni argues, movable mural-size paintings can be exhibited in schools, clubs, labor union halls, and so forth. What socializes art is the place of exhibition and the viewer, not the mural technique in and of itself. In 1935, Berni participated in the XIV Autumn Salon in Rosario, showing the monumental, 320 × 200 centimeters, wood panel, Wounded Man (figure 9.2). The work (no longer extant) was a collaboration with Anselmo Piccoli, who aided Berni in its execution. Painted with lacquer using the airbrush technique,11 the panel depicts four faces from Berni’s photographs. Scholars have found this work to be Berni’s closest to the work of Siqueiros. The commonalities are evident, given that it is a collaborative work produced by mechanical means. Yet the Argentinean’s vision is more austere and stark than the Mexican’s and Berni’s sense of form has a more palpable reality; Siqueiros’ works made use of an increasingly grandiloquent and histrionic pictorial rhetoric. Wounded Man secularizes and transforms traditional iconography of the dead Christ exemplified in works by Mantegna and Holbein. Berni used Roman Catholic visual culture as a reference point to communicate with an audience that was culturally Roman Catholic.12 The panel consists of the semi-nude body of an older man (we recognize his face from Demonstration) being laid on what looks like a tile floor. On his left and right we see the partial faces and arms of the two men holding the body. A woman immediately behind the wounded man looks up with an expression of grief. The men on the sides recall Saints John and Nicodemus, and the grieving woman, the Pietà. No background is visible in the surviving photograph of the painting. It is tightly composed, cropping the three figures on the sides and back, emphasizing the broken body that extends from top to bottom. This is a painting of death as oppression in a concrete, social sense, not a metaphysical one. For Berni, only a devastating reference to universal grief—symbolized by the death of God made man —can evoke the brutality of the ruling class toward the workers. This wounded man is of the people. He might be a labor leader who has been attacked, or an ordinary worker who has fallen from a scaffold or has been injured at work. Wounded Man was not well received by the critics:  

 

We shall say: gigantism, systematic distortion, lack of color, and the emotional removal of the artist “produces monsters,” as stated by the glorious author of the “Caprichos.” We must ask ourselves, why do the painters from Rosario like Berni, Sívori, and Pedro

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Figure 9.2 Antonio Berni. The Wounded Man (1935), airbrushed lacquer on wood (destroyed). Courtesy of Lily and José Antonio Berni.

Hermenegildo contemplate life by exaggeration, transplanting social conflicts and racial tensions that are endemic only to the Russian tundra or the Mexican jungle into the optimistic environment of their rich province? The purely visual trickery Alfaro Siqueiros brought to Buenos Aires in an evil hour has had a negative impact on the innocent openness of the new artistic generations of the country.13

The critic confirmed what Berni probably already knew: a traditional salon was not the place to present his alternative muralism. In that context, the art world would find his work openly political and grotesque. Wounded Man was destined for the Teachers

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Union building in Rosario, where it would be destroyed by the end of the 1940s during the Perón regime.14 In 1936, Berni defined both his aesthetic style and his position as an artist in a piece called “El nuevo realismo,” published in the August issue of Forma magazine: “Since the end of the last century, the painter has delved into his own art, deliberately moving away from all the social and psychological problems of the moment. . . . Life in the tower of pure aesthetics is uncomfortable and unsustainable.”15 He proposed a new modern realism, characterized not by “a simplistic imitation of the style of a Cézanne or Picasso, but an interpretation of one’s own era with its new phenomena and realities, the spirit and originality of the moment.”16 Although a socially engaged painting is at the core of this proposal, Berni barely mentions mural painting. His concept of public art does not insist on muralism as central, but instead he advocates a more socially and historically flexible approach to medium, content, and social context. In 1939, Berni and Spilimbergo painted decorative panels titled Agriculture and Livestock for the Argentinean pavilion at the World’s Fair in New York City. In 1940, Berni painted a mural for the Teatro del Pueblo in Buenos Aires. Both murals were later destroyed and no preparatory studies for either project have survived. Berni published “La pintura mural en Argentina” in 1942, again in Forma magazine. This sobering article assesses the limited success of socially engaged mural painting in his country, concluding that only in the socialist society of the future will a politically charged muralism be possible.17 Two years later, Berni, Spilimbergo, Castagnino, Manuel Colmeiro, and Demetrio Urruchúa created the muralist cooperative Taller de Arte Mural; in 1946 they received the commission for the murals of the department store Galería Pacifico. These are allegorical and decorative, evidently in response to the demands of the patron. Berni painted the panel Love or the Germination of the Earth, a sensual and fantastic scene that fails both as alternative muralism and new realism. The late 1940s and 1950s were not easy years for Berni. He opposed the fascist regime of Juan Domingo Perón, who persecuted artists and leftists of every variety. While others emigrated to escape persecution, Berni remained in Argentina and chose to paint traditional “safe” works, such as portraits and genre scenes. Three exceptions were his political easel pictures Massacre, The Dead Worker, and Meeting, painted in 1949–50, the height of Perón’s authoritarianism. But in general Berni’s depictions of the marginalized and oppressed of society during these years grew simplistic, even sentimental. His colors became dull, his forms flat, the compositions mannered, the themes repetitive. By 1960, however, social agency and formal innovation returned with full force to his work in the powerful Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel series. These monumental multi-media works of recycled detritus parodied abstract expressionism and pop art.18 Projecting a vision of humanity and society renewed by a critical Marxism, they are humorous and even erotic. Berni’s neo-figuration of the 1960s adapted visual strategies of both abstract expressionism and pop but evolved from the new realism of 1936. In  

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his new massive multi-panel portable works —monumental and defiantly political —he reworked his earlier alternative muralism.19 In 1976 a military coup ended civilian rule in Argentina. For the next seven years the military regime would carry out a dirty war against the civilian population. In 1980 Berni painted several easel pictures (Christ in the Garage, Christ in the Apartment, Magdalene) that evoked the brutality of the government toward its citizens. A few months before his death in October 1981, Berni completed what was to be his last mural project: two large panels painted in acrylic for the chapel of the Jesuit school San Luis Gonzaga. The subjects were the Crucifixion and the apocalypse; if in the past he had secularized the dead Christ to make a social statement, in these murals he humanized the religious to evoke a period of military oppression and horror that would end, two years after his death, in 1983.20 Forty-three years after working with Siqueiros, Berni recalled the Mexican painter’s Argentinean experience: “To execute a mural painting, Siqueiros had to hold on to the flotsam that the bourgeoisie offered him, only that way could he avoid drowning in nothingness all of his theoretical meaning.”21  

 

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On May 24, 1940, a little past three in the morning, David Alfaro Siqueiros and a handful of conspirators attempted to assassinate the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who was living at 19 Viena Street, Coyoacán, in Mexico City. After fleeing the city, Siqueiros hid in Jalisco, where he was captured and imprisoned by the Mexican police. The poet Pablo Neruda wrote of Siqueiros’ imprisonment: David Alfaro Siqueiros was in jail then. Someone had misled him into an armed incursion to Trotsky’s house. I got to know him while he was in prison, but truth be told, also outside of prison, because we used to go out with commander Pérez Rulfo, the prison’s warden, and we would go and have a few drinks around the prison, where we would not be seen. Later, when it was evening, we would return and I would say goodbye with an embrace to David, who returned to prison. During these clandestine temporary leaves from prison and conversations about everything under the sun, Siqueiros and I planned his definitive release. Provided with a visa that I myself stamped in his passport, he went to Chile with his wife Angélica Arenal. Mexico had constructed a school, which had been destroyed by earthquake in the city of Chillán, and in that “Mexico School” Siqueiros painted one of his extraordinary murals.22

In 1941 the Mexican government asked Siqueiros to leave the country because of his suspected involvement in Trotsky’s assassination on August 20 of the preceding year.23 Neruda, then the Chilean consul in Mexico, facilitated the artist’s departure for Chile. While in Chile (1941–42) Siqueiros continued to develop his mural technique, painting  

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Death to the Invader in the library of the Mexico School in Chillán. Siqueiros altered the architecture of the room by adding a curved surface of plywood and Masonite, creating a vault with an uninterrupted surface of 360 meters that in effect unites the front (north) and back (south) walls. Using polyangular perspective, he depicted significant historical figures of both Chile and Mexico fighting for independence and freedom from Spain. In 1943 Siqueiros, accompanied by his wife, Angélica, and their daughter Adriana (from Angélica’s first marriage) traveled to Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, and Cuba. In all of these countries, he lectured and proselytized for mural painting and promoted his organizations, Art against Fascism and an American Art at the Service of the Victory of the Democracies.24 Siqueiros and his family arrived in Havana in early April 1943.25 Cuba was in the third year of the constitutional presidency of Colonel Fulgencio Batista (1901– 73), whose cabinet included for the first time members of the legalized (in 1938) Communist Party of Cuba.26 Ten years after the failed revolution of 1933 and the rule of the “puppet presidents” behind whom Batista ruled (1934–39), the island had begun to achieve a semblance of stability and democracy. In 1940 a constitutional convention was called, an essentially social-democratic constitution was written and ratified, and Batista was legally elected president for the first and only time in his career.27 Cuba had had an active and significant visual avant-garde since the late 1920s,28 yet murals had been commissioned only twice, in 1937, under the Federico Laredo Brú/Fulgencio Batista government. The works were not well received and they were destroyed by the early 1950s.29 Siqueiros was hoping that the communist participation in the Batista government would result in a mural commission for him, but this was not to be.30 The Siqueiros family settled at the Sevilla-Biltmore Hotel in Havana, which was owned by Amleto Battisti. To cover the expenses of his stay, the artist painted a panel titled Day of the New Democracy for the hotel’s restaurant. Still in debt, however, Siqueiros secured the help of the Cuban painter Mario Carreño (1913 –99),31 through the intervention of one of Cuba’s leading communist intellectuals, the author and political activist Juan Marinello (1898–1979). A leading member of the second generation of avant-garde painters in Cuba, Carreño was married to the Cuban heiress María Luisa Gómez Mena (1907–59) from 1942 to 1944; for the first time in his life he was well off.32 Carreño paid Siqueiros’ hotel bill and brought the family to live with him and Gómez Mena at their modern home in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana. While there, Siqueiros offered to paint a mural in the home’s foyer.33 He constructed a wood panel structure, creating an artificial conch shell, and painted the mural with Duco.34 Titled Allegory of Racial Equality and Confraternity of the White and Black Races in Cuba (figure 9.3), the full panel depicted two nudes, one Caucasian, the other Afro-Cuban, sitting on either side of the composition, while a Promethean figure descends, bringing the torch of enlightenment and fraternity. Carreño assisted Siqueiros, who was more than willing to introduce the Cuban to the use of an overhead projector, Duco, and airbrush.35 Carreño’s wife disliked the mural:  

 

 

 

 

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Figure 9.3 Siqueiros in front of detail of Allegory of Racial Equality and Confraternity of the White and Black Races in Cuba (1943), Duco on wood (destroyed), Havana. Courtesy of the Archivo Fotográfico José Gómez Sicre.

Catastrophe has arrived at my home: Siqueiros and that witch of a wife of his. With this illustrious couple I am sweating a small death. All of his theories are new and fantastic, but it is pure Cantinflas.36 He is painting a mural here, and he and Mario, even though I do not see anything, are going crazy with any effect produced with the air brush. For more than a month I have been in this unexpected situation. I do not know what it will be: we shall see in the end, but I do not believe it will be good.37

The art critic José Gómez Sicre, who was present at the execution of the mural, described the start of the process:

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In Carreño’s studio Siqueiros took a loose sheet of paper and laid it flat on a table, he then took a thick pencil and started making perspectival lines and ovals in the air, before you knew it, the pencil was touching the paper lightly drawing the lines that defined the composition, followed by the ovals that became the faces of the women, then their breasts, legs, arms, and so forth, were added. The pencil moved to the top of the paper where he drew a descending allegorical figure. He stopped, returning to the drawing with vigor, delineating the contours of the composition. And then he was finished. Later that day he placed the drawing in an overhead projector and began the mural on a dark background, this time using string to draw perspective and composition lines on the wall panel.38

The completed work, as far as we can tell from the existing photographs, captured a transitional moment in Siqueiros’ oeuvre— this was a time when the solidly modeled forms and dramatic palette of the previous decade yielded to more agitated shapes and bombastic composition. The reality of the work having been painted in the private home of a patron depoliticized the subject and emphasized the technique. By the time Carreño divorced Gómez Mena, the heiress had had the mural dismantled, cut into sections and discarded. She had disliked it from the moment the artist completed it:  

Siqueiros completed his horrible mural. . . . He attacked me by printing and distributing a repugnant flyer. . . . As a work of art it does not exist; as for the technique, it is awful: the theme too well known to be interesting. A black woman and a white woman shaking hands: something we have been doing in Cuba since pre-Columbian times.39 . . . His wife is a scorpion, so tacky and repulsively hypocritical.40

During his stay in Havana, Siqueiros also painted the panel Two Mountains of America,41 and he delivered some ten lectures as well, on subjects ranging from art and the struggle against fascism to mural painting, his own work, and the work of the Cuban artists he was encountering. He delivered these in a variety of places, such as the private cultural club Lyceum and the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts.42 His most memorable talk was titled “Open Letter to the Painters and Sculptors of Cuba,” which he read at the opening of the National Salon in Havana at the end of September 1943.43 In it he made his familiar call for government patronage of murals, and expressed his preference for both the paintings of older modernists such as Fidelio Ponce and Carlos Enríquez and, oddly, for the more formalist work of painters Amelia Peláez and René Portocarrero. He also mentioned Mario Carreño, asking if “this painter of good pictures thought his inclination toward large proportions and heavy, almost architectonic frames, signified the beginning of his non-conformity with elegant easel paintings destined for elegant living rooms?”44 Carreño had executed a handful of easel paintings between the summer and the end of 1943. Works such as Sugar Cane Cutters, Afro-Cuban Dance, Fire in the Batey, and Portrait of María Luisa were all painted with Duco on wood, while

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Figure 9.4 Mario Carreño. Sugar Cane Cutters (1943), Duco on wood. Private Collection, Dominican Republic. Courtesy of Ida González de Carreño, Santiago, Chile.

Allegory of the Cuban Landscape was on canvas. Technically, in using pourings, airbrush, and a reworked, heavy surface, Carreño was borrowing from Siqueiros. Beyond technique, there was the issue of style. From the late 1930s to the spring of 1943, Carreño had worked in a Picasso-derived neoclassical style painting tropical and sensual themes. After his Havana encounter with Siqueiros, his sense of form became more sculptural and heavy and his colors more intense, at times strident. For the first time, the scale of his easel pictures became consistently monumental: Sugar Cane Cutters and Afro-Cuban Dance measure 165 × 125 centimeters; Fire in the Batey, 125 × 165 centimeters.45 Sugar Cane Cutters (figure 9.4) and Afro-Cuban Dance (figure 9.5) are Carreño’s most

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Figure 9.5 Mario Carreño. Afro-Cuban Dance (1943), Duco on wood. Private Collection, Miami, Florida. Courtesy of Ida González de Carreño, Santiago, Chile.

convincing attempts to absorb and transform Siqueiros’ teachings. Yet they are failures as alternative muralist works. Carreño’s transformation stays literally and conceptually on the surface; he adapted Siqueiros’ technique and style and very little else. Carreño’s subjects reflect a commitment to a Cuban national ethos in their depiction of peasants, the countryside, and Afro-Cuban subjects. For him and his Cuban contemporaries, the pictorial definition of national identity had to be multi-faceted (not monolithic or parochial), occasionally social, and rarely political.46 In these compositions, Carreño avoided depicting the harshness of labor, the squalor of poverty, or the resistant quality of Afro-Cuban culture. Instead, we get the heroics of Siqueiros in figures charged with

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movement, a more tropical sensuality, and little semblance of an inner life of political struggle. Although Carreño was politically a man of the left, he was no theorist. Nor was he like Berni, who was deeply engaged with the social turmoil of his time. Carreño knew that it was impossible for mural painting to flourish under the Batista regime of the early 1940s, and he chose not to think about or attempt to create an alternative muralism like that in Argentina. The venues for his own paintings were not labor union halls or schools but the national salon or the gallery at the Lyceum. Shortly before his death, in 1999, Carreño remembered his 1943 “muralist” experience: After Siqueiros left Cuba, I was enthusiastic about continuing to paint with synthetic lacquer. . . . I decided to paint on transportable wooden panels, large pictures of dimensions comparable to murals. . . . In New York (in 1944) I attended the exhibition of Cuban painting at the Museum of Modern Art. . . . In that exhibition at the New York museum, I became aware of how important the movement of painting in the Caribbean was in Latin America, in that determining moment in our history, in which most of the art had been overtaken by Mexican “muralism.” It was refreshing to stand in front of a painting without political pressure, something intrinsically artistic.47

By the late 1940s, Carreño’s style had evolved into a figuration that synthesized geometric and organic elements; in the 1950s his work entered a hard-edge abstract phase that lasted until the next decade. In 1960, Carreño completed the first of the only two murals he ever painted —a geometric mosaic titled Homage to Fra Angelico.48 Siqueiros’ teasing question proved itself right in Carreño’s work: he was never more than a painter of “elegant easel paintings destined for elegant living rooms.” He did not understand the possibilities of an alternative muralism.  

Conclusion

Siqueiros’ travels and his proselytizing on behalf of muralism had a substantial impact in Argentina and a superficial effect in Cuba. He was a powerful personality and an artist with a hemispheric reputation. Yet his theoretical dogmatism kept him from understanding patronage and the shifting political realities of the countries he visited. Antonio Berni and Mario Carreño offer case studies of alternative muralism that responds or reacts to Siqueiros’ presence. Berni, an independent Marxist, developed and practiced an alternative muralism grounded in a rigorous understanding of the social reality of his nation. His powerful and original style emerged from this critical engagement. Carreño, a somewhat undefined leftist, absorbed a style and technique and proposed a non-political sensual alternative grounded in the sensibility of his time and culture. When Siqueiros died in 1974, Berni recalled his promise as a muralist and his failure as a revolutionary artist:

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In those years there were few of us who, like Siqueiros, had overcome the formalist changes and had a vision wide enough, from an Americanist and political perspective,49 to analyze and discuss his muralist orthodoxy, the product of a revolution that began forcefully, but ultimately failed economically and politically. Although Siqueiros’s was popular with the left, which endorsed his work, he could not find the walls to manifest the practice of his ideas: “The only avant-garde painting is the public mural of proletarianpeasant revolutionary content.” In response to Siqueiros’s extreme position I stated: To believe that it is possible to do revolutionary painting on public murals leads us, within our socio-economic reality, either to opportunism or to inactivity, because the walls, which belong to the capitalists, will never be surrendered so that we may attack their system with images. Siqueiros could not save himself from this consequence. His final work, regardless of his phraseology, is a “camouflaged” adaptation of the new reality of Mexico, which ceased being revolutionary.50

Siqueiros was undoubtedly the evangelist of muralism, but in his zeal he preached dogma instead of promoting a critical interpretation of reality.

Notes

1.  See Charles Berquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); and Alistair Hennessy, “Fascism and Populism in Latin America,” in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, Analyses, Interpretation, Bibliography, edited by Walter Z. Laqueur (London: Pelican Books, 1976). 2.  Lily Berni (Antonio’s daughter), interview by author, May 26, 1997, New York. Lily Berni is not sure if her father joined the Communist Party of Argentina in 1931 or 1932. If he joined it in 1932, it is possible that he was introduced to the Party by the journalist Rodolfo Puiggrós, himself a member. Lily Berni recalled her father stating that he was a Party member for less than two years; he left to keep his independence and maintain his distance from the organization’s dogma. This and all translations from the Spanish are by the author. 3.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Juan C. Castagnino, and Enrique Lázaro, Qué es Ejercicio Plástico y cómo fue realizado (Buenos Aires, 1933), unpaginated. A photocopy of the pamphlet was generously given to me by Lily Berni. 4.  Antonio Berni, “Siqueiros y el arte de masas,” Nueva Revista Política, Arte, economía 1, Buenos Aires (January 1935), p. 14. 5. Ibid. 6.  José Viñals, Berni: Palabra e imagen (Buenos Aires: Galería Imagen, 1976), unpaginated. 7.  Lily Berni, interview by author, May 26, 1997, New York. Rodolfo Puiggrós was sent to Rosario to organize in his father’s business of managing tenant farms. Instead he joined the Communist Party and became a freelance journalist. In the process of writing an article on prostitution and organized crime in Rosario, he asked Berni to document brothel life. The article and photographs were published anonymously in the magazine Rosario Gráfico. In time, Rodolfo Puiggrós would become one of the leading Marxist historians of Argentina.

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Berni’s photographs of brothels would serve as sources for his Ramona Montiel series in the 1960s. 8.  Lily Berni, interview by the author, May 26, 1997, New York. 9.  Ernesto De la Cárcova (1866 – 1927) was a leading nineteenth-century Argentinean naturalist painter. His painting Sin pan y sin trabajo is his best-known work, and a seminal work in Argentinean painting. The painting, which Berni knew and admired, was exhibited in the 1904 World’s Fair in Saint Louis. 10.  Antonio Berni, “From Berni to the solitary passer-by,” undated manuscript in the collection of the Museo Castagnino, Rosario. 11.  Sources differ on the technique of this destroyed work. Berni’s daughter believes it was lacquer. 12.  Berni will secularize the subject of the dead Christ in his 1936 oil Midnight in the World, and again in The Dead Worker or The Wake in 1949, a work of ground pigment with water on canvas. 13.  “El XIV Salón de Otoño de Rosario,” La Prensa, Rosario (May 1935), p. 14. 14.  Lily Berni, interview by the author, May 26, 1997, New York. 15.  Antonio Berni, “El nuevo realismo,” Forma, Buenos Aires (August 1936), pp. 8, 14. The magazine was the official organ of the Argentinean Association of Visual Artists. 16.  Ibid, p. 14. 17.  Antonio Berni, “La pintura mural en la Argentina,” Forma, Buenos Aires (November 1942), p. 3. 18.  Berni technically and formally employed strategies of these two New York – based styles such as broad areas of color, extreme textures, advertisements and signs from popular culture, all sorts of found objects that reflected consumerism, and so on. This was done with a tongue-in-cheek critical approach that parodied the innovative supremacy of US artistic styles and satirized capitalist development in the Americas. 19.  The Juanito Laguna and Ramona Montiel series extend roughly from 1958 through to the artist’s death in 1981. They consist of massive multi-media paintings, assemblage, Xylo prints, and installations. 20.  Beginning with the military coup of March 1976 through the election of Raúl Alfonsín in 1983, Argentina suffered one of the worst military dictatorships in Latin America. Over 13,000 persons were abducted, tortured, and executed by the military regime. See Ernesto Sabato, Nunca más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la desaparición de personas (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1984). 21. José Viñals, Berni: Palabra e imagen (Buenos Aires: Galería Imagen, 1976), un­­ paginated. 22.  Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido (Barcelona: Random House Mondadori, 2004), 3rd edition, pp. 190 – 92. First a fellow traveler and then a member of the Chilean Communist Party from 1945 until his death, Neruda makes light of Siqueiros’ attempt against Trotsky. Both men were Stalinists who saw Trotsky as an enemy of the Soviet Union. After the demise of the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) and the opening of the KGB files, proof was found that confirmed Siqueiros’ activities as an agent. 23.  “Memorias del espía Pavel Sudoplatov,” Proceso, No. 912, Mexico (April 25, 1994).  

 

 

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Trotsky was assassinated by agent Ramón Mercader, who was working under the orders of Naum Lacovlevich, who had also given the orders to Siqueiros and his group in May. 24 Carteles, Havana, No. 20 (May 16, 1943), p. 32. 25.  The approximate date of his arrival has been confirmed by informal conversations with the following Cubans: art critic José Gómez Sicre (1916 –91); painter Cundo Bermúdez (1914–2008); and sculptor Roberto Estopiñán (b. 1921), who were all friendly with Siqueiros during his 1943 stay in Havana. 26. Frank Argote-Freyre, Fulgencio Batista: From Revolutionary to Strongman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), p. 256. See also the same author’s entry on Batista in volume I of the Encyclopedia of Cuba (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003), pp. 138–40. 27.  Cuba Bandera, Himno y Escudo (Madrid: Agualarga Editores, S.L., 1997), pp. 65 –158. This booklet includes the complete text of the 1940 Constitution and a brief introduction on its historical context. 28.  See Juan A. Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927– 50 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994). This book remains the authoritative work written in the English language on the subject. 29.  Juan A. Martínez, “Social and Political Commentary in Cuban Modernist Painting of the 1930s,” in Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, Eds., The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (University Park; Pennsylvania State University, 2006), pp. 25 – 36. These murals were painted at the General José Miguel Gómez School in Havana (an institution for low-income students who depend on scholarships) and at the Teachers College in Santa Clara. Painters Fidelio Ponce (1895–1949), Carlos Enríquez (1900–57), Amelia Peláez (1896–1968), Victor Manuel García (1897–1969), and Alberto Peña (1894 –1938) painted the murals in the Gómez School either in fresco secco or oil on plaster. The murals at Teachers College were painted by Domingo Ravenet (1905– 69), Jorge Arche (1905– 56), Eduardo Abela (1889– 1965), and others. It seems that they used a poorly executed fresco technique. The subjects in both of these mural projects ranged from scenes of the Conquest and wars of independence to contemporary life. The only works that seemed to have been political or social were painted by Enríquez and Peña. 30.  Raquel Tibol, interview by the author, June 22, 1995, Mexico City. Tibol, a leading art critic in Mexico, was Siqueiros’ archivist and official biographer from 1955 to around 1960. She recalled Siqueiros telling her of his hopes in 1943 of securing, through his communist contacts in the Batista government, a mural commission in Cuba. 31.  The work Day of the New Democracy is a visual antecedent of the 1945 New Democracy mural in Mexico’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. Day of the New Democracy is in the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional in Havana. Olga María Rodríguez Bolufé’s article, “Siqueiros y Cuba: una relación polémica y entrañable,” published in Crónicas, Mexico, N. 8–9 (March 2001– Feb. 2002), pp. 119 – 34, deals with the artist’s visits to Cuba (1943, 1960, and 1968). Unfortunately the article gets a number of facts wrong. 32.  Mario Carreño, Mario Carreño: cronología del recuerdo (Santiago de Chile: Antártica, 1991), pp. 50, 56. Carreño had studied at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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(1925– 30), in Madrid and Paris, and privately with the Dominican neo-classical painter Jaime Colson. In 1936 he traveled to Mexico to study the work of the muralists. In 1942 he returned to Cuba. His work up to 1943 was a tropical version of neo-classicism that owed much to Picasso. 33.  José Gómez Sicre, interview by the author, November 15, 1990, Washington, DC. Gómez Sicre, one of the leading young art critics and curators in Havana at this time, was a close friend of Carreño and Gómez Mena and was a witness to the execution of Siqueiros’ mural. He went on to help Alfred H. Barr, Jr., organize the 1944 exhibition “Modern Cuban Painters” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and was the chief of the visual arts section at the Organization of American States in Washington, DC, from 1946 to 1983. 34.  Siqueiros began painting with Duco in 1936 while he lived and worked in New York City. Duco is a lacquer paint developed and used by the automobile industry in the 1930s. 35. Carreño, Mario Carreño: cronología del recuerdo, p. 61. 36.  Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” (1911– 93) was a Mexican comedian and film star who developed the persona of an everyman dressed in rags and speaking in a rapid, nonsensical manner. Through his films, he became the most popular Latin American comedian in the 1930s and 1940s. 37.  María Luisa Gómez Mena, letter to the poet Manuel Altolaguirre, dated September 1943, in Manuel Altolaguirre, Epistolario 1925– 1959, James Valender, Ed., (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes, 2006), pp. 452 –53. 38.  Gómez Sicre, interview by the author, November 15, 1990, Washington, DC. According to Gómez Sicre, the drawing was discarded by Siqueiros shortly after using it in the overhead projector. Years later, Siqueiros re-created the drawing from memory in Mexico. 39.  Although racism existed in Cuba, Gómez Mena here compares the greater racial integration existing in the island between blacks and whites to Mexico’s anti-Indian racism. 40.  Gómez Mena, letter to the poet Manuel Altolaguirre, dated mid to late September 1943, in Manuel Altolaguirre, Epistolario 1925– 1959, James Valender, Ed., (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes, 2006), pp. 454 –55. After completing the mural and moving out of the Carreño/Gómez Mena home, Siqueiros printed and distributed a sheet announcing the completion of the work and asking the Cuban public to request of Gómez Mena permission to view it. Siqueiros makes reference of this in his memoirs Me llamaban el Coronelazo (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1987), 3rd edition, p. 425: “[due to] racial prejudices and the innovation, good or bad, of my work, my mural was sequestered by María Luisa Gómez Mena and her chaste friends. The work was never inaugurated, yet because I had mentioned it in various lectures and talks, the majority of the young painters demanded that it be opened to the public. The distinguished Mrs. Gómez Mena used her rights as absolute proprietor and her willingness or unwillingness to show it . . . and she didn’t. My small vengeance consisted in distributing several hundred sheets where I announced the work and asked the public to go see it, as all they had to do was ask permission of Mrs. Gómez Mena.” 41.  Rodríguez Bolufé, “Siqueiros y Cuba,” p. 126. Two Mountains of America is a double portrait of Abraham Lincoln and the Cuban poet and national hero José Martí. According to both Gómez Sicre and the Rodríguez Bolufé article, the work was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller for the Cuban-American Cultural Center in Havana. This was definitely part of  

 

 

 

 

 

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the “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin American nations during World War II. The commissioning of this work is another example of the inconsistency between Siqueiros’ politics and his aesthetics. Although these contradictions are evident in both Orozco and Rivera, in Siqueiros they are more stinging, as he had set up himself as an arbiter of Communist dogma. In the 1950s the panel was installed at the Lincoln Hotel in Havana. It has been in the collection of Casa de las Américas, Havana, since the mid-1960s. 42.  See Raquel Tibol, Ed., Palabras de Siqueiros (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996), pp. 9– 15, 200– 220. This is the most complete compilation of Siqueiros texts. See note 31 for information on the Rodríguez Bolufé article. 43.  Siqueiros, “Carta abierta a los pintores y escultores de Cuba,” in Palabras de Siqueiros, Raquel Tibol, Ed., pp. 200–220. 44.  Ibid, pp. 210–11. 45.  Images and information on these works is to be found in José Gómez Sicre, Carreño (Havana: Ediciones Galería del Prado, 1943), unpaginated. Gómez Sicre, interview by the author, November 15, 1990, Washington, D.C. The first monograph on Carreño was published at the end of 1943 under the imprint of the Galería del Prado, a gallery opened by María Luisa Gómez Mena in October 1942 with the art critic Gómez Sicre acting as codirector with the heiress (he resigned in December 1942). By the autumn of 1944 Gómez Mena would depart for South America and the gallery would close. The creation and opening of the gallery was inspired by the visit of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., (director of MoMA) in the summer of 1942. Barr went to Cuba to see the local art scene and plan an exhibition of modern Cuban paintings for MoMA. The exhibition, “Modern Cuban Painters,” took place at the institution March 17– May 7, 1944. The exhibition reflected the museum’s commitment to the Good Neighbor Policy of the World War II period. 46. Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity, pp. 92– 93. Social content is found in the work of Cuban modernists Carlos Enríquez, Marcelo Pogolotti, Arístidez Fernández, Alberto Peña, and Jorge Arche. A Cuban artist with a critical vision that is socially grounded is Rafael Blanco (1885– 1955); his work needs to be studied in depth. See also the essay by Martínez in Anreus et al., The Social and the Real. 47. Carreño, Mario Carreño, p. 62. 48.  This mural is in the Jesuit Saint Ignatius School in Santiago, Chile. Carreño, whose wife after Gómez Mena was Chilean, moved permanently to Chile in 1957. His second mural, an acrylic on panel, was painted for the Hospital of the Worker in Rancagua, Chile, 1983. Augusto Pinochet was dictator of the country at the time. Neither mural contains political content; they are both essentially decorative. 49.  By “Americanist” Berni meant non-European, and by “political” he means left-wing or Marxist. 50. “Evocación de Antonio Berni: Siqueiros Aquí,” Clarín, Buenos Aires (January 31, 1974).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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10 Social Realism and Constructivist Abstraction The Limits of the Debate on Muralism in the Río de la Plata Region (1930–1950)  

Gabriel Peluffo Linari

In 1947, while on an extended visit to Uruguay, the Brazilian artist Cândido Portinari began painting a large mural in tempera on canvas titled A Primeira Missa no Brasil (The First Mass in Brazil).1 Measuring some 2.5 × 6 meters, it imbues a cubist-inspired social realist figuration with spiritual mysticism to portray the historical scene of the first Catholic mass celebrated on Brazilian soil when the Portuguese arrived there in 1500 (figure 10.1). The mural, which resounds with the religiosity often invoked by Portinari, avoids any sign of violence in narrating the paradigmatic founding act of our South American nations. Complex groupings of Europeans and natives, soldiers, monks, and indigenes kneel in reverent prayer. Painted in crystallized luminous planes, they present an originary ethnic-cultural alliance between Europeans and indigenous Americans meant to contrast with the region’s twentieth-century misery and human exploitation. Arriving in Montevideo, Portinari found an artistic milieu heavily influenced by two powerful opposing views on the relation between art and social critique—the views of the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros and those of the Uruguayan abstractionist Joaquín Torres García.2 Siqueiros’ sojourn in Montevideo, in 1933, had established revolutionary realism as a primary aesthetic model for confronting Latin America’s experience of modernity.3 When Torres García returned to his native country in 1934, after more than four decades in Europe, he found an artistic environment strongly marked by Siqueiros and his vision of the complicity between art and politics. In response, Torres García sought to rethink the abstraction of Mondrian and Kandinsky in light of native Andean aesthetic traditions, to produce a universal abstraction based on principles of a modern classicism (figure 10.2). Portinari, similarly, plotted a route that would respond to the needs of Uru 

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Figure 10.1 Cândido Portinari. A Primeira Missa no Brasil (The First Mass in Brazil) (1947), tempera on canvas, 266 × 598 cm. Private collection, Rio de Janeiro. Reproduced courtesy of the Projeto Portinari, Rio de Janeiro

guay’s particular national situation in the post–World War II period and avoid criticisms leveled at both Siqueiros and Torres García. Although his painting claims a revolutionary content, his figures evince an element of Christian compassion that we might call a realist aesthetic of sacrifice. Portinari thus forms a third point in the debates between the social realism espoused by Siqueiros and the universalizing abstraction of Torres García. This chapter argues that Portinari’s sojourn in Montevideo, and the mural he produced there, allow us compelling insights both into the debates between Siqueiros and Torres García on the merits of realism versus abstraction in addressing modernity in Latin America and into the possibility of transplanting muralism— especially its conceptualization of the proletariat as an international class beyond national boundaries — from Mexico to other national contexts. The debates centered on the two artists’ claims to have constructed a modernism that was not merely a copy of Europe’s but an aesthetics appropriate to the Western hemisphere. Portinari’s mural production defined Uruguayan muralism as unlike either that of Siqueiros or Torres García. He sought instead to unite Uruguay’s resurgent national imaginary with the humanist and universalist ideals that arose out of the ruins of war.  

 

 

P o r t i n a r i i n U r u g uay

Portinari first arrived in Uruguay in 1947, the year in which Luis Batlle Berres was instated as president. Batlle Berres instituted a period of redemocratization after World War II, creating the conditions needed to restore the national imaginary, which had

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Figure 10.2 Joaquín Torres García. Arte Constructivo (1943), oil on canvas, 51 × 68 cm. © Museo Torres García

been fractured in the preceding decade. During the 1930s and early 1940s, the country had endured the dictatorship of Gabriel Terra and the world political crisis of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. In contrast to both Terra and the authoritarian populism of Vargas in Brazil and Perón in Argentina, Batlle Berres sought to shore up democratic and economic institutions, balancing the growth of the bourgeoisie with the rights of the proletariat to implement a nationalist modernization policy of importsubstitution industrialization. In the artistic realm, the urban middle class — newly consolidated under Batlle Berres and already skeptical of Torres García —also began to question Siqueiros’ revolutionary realism of the 1930s. Against both Torres García and Siqueiros, the neorealist project during the 1940s in Uruguay posited a romantic realism that combined melancholia with a moral content. Siqueiros, in the Buenos Aires newspaper Crítica in 1933, attacked this artistic project as one of “foolish contemplation, melancholy sensibility, [and] aesthetic stupor.” 4 As we shall see, Portinari’s social realism, based on an aesthetics of sacrifice, resonated with this Uruguayan romantic realism more than with Siqueiros’ more overtly polemical version.  

 

S o c i a l R e a l i s m v e r s u s Ab s t r a c t i o n

Portinari arrived in Montevideo in August of 1947, at a time of volatile cultural debates. He immediately gained the support of his comrades in the Communist Party and the AIAPE,5 including several artists who practiced social realism. Stridently communist,

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however, he encountered resistance from both his political adversaries and from the Torres García Workshop, whose journal, Removedor, published an attack on his abilities as a mural painter. Portinari’s visit also laid bare the shifts in Uruguay’s culture that had taken place during the years since Siqueiros’ visit in 1933. Siqueiros, expelled from the Mexican Communist Party in 1930, had been welcomed by the Uruguayan Communist Party in Montevideo, but the Uruguayan government did not accede to the Mexican artist’s proposal to produce a mural there. This lack of interest had to do with the differences between the peasantry in Mexico, which constituted a fundamental revolutionary force, and in Uruguay, where the rural workers, although increasingly present in the urban consciousness during the 1930s, were not a transformatory force. An urban middle class dominated the Río de la Plata region and responded only languidly to the needs of the peasants. Moreover, the state promoted eclecticism and a Uruguayan society tolerant of ethnic differences, class differences, and cultural and social differences. This eclecticism, translated into the arts, made it difficult for Siqueiros to insist, as he had in Mexico, on muralism as the “only way.”6 Siqueiros’ principal legacy in the Río de la Plata region thus was not his painting but his creation of a leftist intellectual movement when he directed two Río de la Plata institutions—the Confederation of Intellectual Workers (Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales) in Uruguay, and the Mutual Society of Visual Artists and Students (Mutualidad de Artistas y Estudiantes Plásticos, or MAEP) in Rosario, Argentina7 — and actively supported a third, the Painters Union (Sindicato de Pintores) in Buenos Aires. Whereas Siqueiros was a heroic political figure in Latin American art, Torres García had the aura of an aesthetic prophet. Siquieros advocated rooting politics and culture in a Marxist theory of the proletariat as the vanguard of history; Torres García, on the other hand, was essentially a proponent of art as the foundation of social life. Unlike Siqueiros, who tended to subordinate aesthetics to politics, Torres García sought to use art to question bourgeois society but without renouncing its aesthetic autonomy. He wanted to reintegrate art into the fabric of everyday life. He opposed the utopia of technological progress that had inspired avant-gardes (including Mexican muralism) between the two world wars, and instead advocated a modernist utopia in which art formed the foundation for the construction of the cultural unity and social development of a people. Torres García believed that this unity could be achieved in Uruguay because the country had followed an eccentric path toward modernity, through an Indo-American regionalist aesthetics that possessed a dynamism lacking in Europe. That Indo-American sensibility was based in a deep-rooted ideogrammatic tradition of geometric aesthetics found in ancient Andean cultural artifacts from pictographs and textiles to sacred and secular architecture. For Torres García, it was not an ethnic sensibility with social and political consequences, as it was for Siqueiros, but rather one that belonged to the “grand tradition” of “Abstract Man” inherent in any truly classical culture. From this sensibility he derived not a formal model of aesthetics as much as a metaphysical, “cosmic” model founded on a “constructivist” geometric abstraction.8  

 

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“My art,” he proclaimed in his Manifiesto no. 1 of 1934, “could . . . become a collective, impersonal art, an elemental art, based on order and measure . . . and, just as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, made for the common people.”9 Here he fused an Indo-American visual rhetoric with a discourse of the universal, to envision a collective art based on the principles of constructivist abstraction. On his return to Uruguay, Torres García clashed with the social realists. The famous 1934 debate between him and the painter Norberto Berdía — an admirer of Siquieros and president of the Confederation of Intellectual Workers— sets out the differences between realist art and abstract art in the Río de la Plata before World War II. Berdía criticized Torres García as “a ‘purist-art’ artist, because, when confronted with his inability to focus on the problems of reality, he takes refuge in abstract art.”10 Torres García, in response, wrote in his first manifesto, “I don’t know the reason for this group’s and this man’s animosity toward me. Understand that if the common people don’t like my art, neither does the bourgeoisie. But it is not made with them in mind. And neither is it made for the elite. I follow my own thinking. But this, according to Marxism, is a crime.” He continued: “The common people like Velázquez, who painted kings and popes, because he painted lovely hands and faces and imitated silks and all kinds of things well. I, who want to be a primitive and who create an austere art with the poorest of mediums, please no one. The pure aestheticism of modern art is generally condemned, but in reality what is disturbing is its international, or better, universal aspect. Is there any other reason for Hitler to condemn it?”11 Torres García thus insisted on the socially disruptive possibilities of abstraction, but by preferring the word “universal” to “international” he also subverted Siqueiros’ Marxist concept of an international vanguard. Whereas for Siqueiros and his followers internationalism would unify disparate national proletarian contexts, Torres García’s concept of a vanguard aesthetics relied on a universal and ahistorical humanist “Great Tradition.” If his universalism was metaphysical, however, Torres García nonetheless recognized that it was possible to represent it only from the viewpoint of the historical present. For this reason he defined his painting as a “modern classicism” seeking to express “eternal man” while acknowledging that humanity is inevitably caught in the ebb and flow of contemporary historical events.12 In his Constructivist Universalism of 1944, Torres García defined himself against the critiques of Berdía, Siqueiros, and others, arguing for a concept of “revolutionary” art different from the social realism of communist movements in Latin America and Europe. “I have been accused of working for the bourgeoisie,” he fulminated. “But if my art is universal and ahistorical, how can I be thinking ‘bourgeois’ thoughts? I have always been revolutionary in art. I am free in my thinking because I do not belong to any dogmatic religion. Does Communism frighten me? I am frightened by its positivism, which seeks to eradicate anything metaphysical. Am I individualistic because of that?” For him, “the greatest work of art that any Communist has achieved is this sickle and hammer poorly sketched in paint or charcoal on any wall, because it is a symbol that is  

 

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entirely and uniquely visual, written with the heart.”13 Revolution, in Torres García’s mind, was a matter of free and creative thought, not programmatic politics.

U r u g uaya n C u lt u r a l N at i o n a l i s m

The positions of Siqueiros and Torres García were shaped by earlier debates on Uruguayan cultural nationalism that affected not only their disagreement about abstraction and social realism, but also Portinari’s response to it. The aim of nineteenth-century romanticism to unite society and nature had been reformulated in Uruguay by the early twentieth century as a desire to reconcile urban and rural cultures. Visually, this reconciliation was accomplished by recuperating the rural landscape as iconographic emblem. This appropriation of the image of the rural landscape for city elites was challenged in the 1930s, however, when it was no longer acceptable to characterize barbarity as a natural condition of marginalized rural sectors; it was now a condition the rural poor experienced as a class, because of their miserable social circumstances. This shift accounts for landscape painting’s loss of efficacy as a national unifier. The concept of nature itself in the national imaginary began to change, however, in the late 1930s to incorporate both the natural landscape and the social, cultural, and political landscapes of the nation. The social realist art of this period introduced the change in order to address both natural and social landscapes through a combination of nationalism and critical realism. By the late 1940s, however, the relation of national identity to visual aesthetics had further evolved. One of the problems of this period in Uruguay was to reconstruct the national imaginary in such a way as to align it with the universalist and humanist ideals that emerged globally after World War II. Siqueiros’ ideal of a revolutionary proletariat was unpalatable to a rising Uruguayan middle class in a reformist democracy. But so was the universalism of Torres García, whose mysticism kept him from addressing this situation philosophically. That universalism had been installed as a metaphysical concept that, to many, seemed to have little bearing on regional and local traditions. Torres García’s substitution of his own “universal” ideas in place of traditions rooted in local histories seemed to misread the import of contemporary debates in Latin America on the relationship of art to politics. By contrast, social realism in Uruguay after World War II—nourished by a socialist utopianism and a Marxist ideal based on the post-war French model—was founded on the conjoining of humanism and nationalism. Thus, by the early 1940s, Uruguayan social realists—attracted to neither Torres García’s nor Siqueiros’ ideas—sought a national imagery imbued with a humanist morality. Portinari came to the fore in this moment of historical transition between older forms of social realism and abstraction and the efforts to humanize realist art and incorporate into it elements of post-cubist abstraction. Portinari specifically distanced himself from Siqueiros by painting images of peasants as “men in a state of sacrifice.” This dimension of sacrifice and Christian suffering in Portinari’s images of the working man, seen clearly in his 1945 work Retirantes (Refugees) (figure 10.3), distinguishes his vision from that of  

 

 

 

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Figure 10.3 Cândido Portinari. Retirantes (Refugees) (1945), oil on canvas, 190 × 180 cm. Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Reproduced courtesy of the Projeto Portinari, Rio de Janeiro

Siqueiros. The Mexican muralist, unlike Portinari, glorified the revolutionary combativeness of his figures and deplored shows of lyrical piety or rituals of pain: “The popular voice is one of complaining and supplicating beauty,” Siqueiros said in 1932, “whereas the voice of the proletariat is dialectic, threatening, and tremendously optimistic.”14 Portinari also endured harsh criticism from the Torres García camp for what it called his lack of aesthetic originality—a lack that was attributed not to his party politics but to his relationship to post-war French culture. Guido Castillo, writing in the Torres García Workshop’s journal Removedor, likened Portinari’s work to “the bad modern French painting that is spread throughout the world today.”15 Torres García and his followers in such critiques distinguished their own relationship to Paris and to a particular concept of Latin-ness from what they saw in Portinari. Torres García had long maintained contact with Paris to legitimate his own aesthetic doctrine, until the outbreak of war in 1939 made contact impossible. By 1947, the French School had ceased to be a reference point for him. Portinari, unlike either Torres García or Siqueiros, laid claim to a humanizing Latin 

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ness in France and Latin America as a counter to the German nationalism of wartime and the post-war US cultural hegemony. As Serge Guilbaut has indicated, after 1945 the French Communist Party (PCF) was able to direct the aesthetic discourse about post-war realism, especially in relation to new forms of abstraction such as abstract expressionism, which endorsed individualism, rather than collectivity, as a response to the crisis of modern man.16 Critics from the French left, seeking to counterbalance the emerging strength of North American abstract expressionism and to ally themselves with post-war Latin American nationalisms, lauded Portinari’s particular brand of social realism.17 Its quasi-religious humanism is evident in his A Primeira Missa no Brasil. By avoiding any depiction of violence in the first moment of contact between Europeans and Brazilians, Portinari’s mural broached the idea of the patria’s mystic-religious fecundity. The mural’s theme of an alliance between the two peoples carefully circumvented the issue of European genocide against Brazil’s indigenous peoples, to proclaim the civilizing Latin-ness of the Christian tradition as a bulwark against the barbarity of world war and social injustice. Portinari’s humanizing vision was supported by the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900), which emphasized the cultural identity, based on spirituality, shared by Latin American nations. The intellectual relevance of Portinari’s humanized realist art in the next decade moved farther from the ideals of the proletariat revolution and closer to the promises of the scientific-technological revolution.

A n A n g e l i n t h e T e mp e s t

The debates about social realism and modernity had particular resonance in the cultural and political milieu of Montevideo. Because the Uruguayan Communist Party (PCU) was closely connected to its French counterpart, it is no surprise that the PCU enthusiastically supported Portinari, a communist with strong ties to France.18 Nevertheless, Uruguay’s own national self-conception influenced both the PCU’s reception of Portinari and the more general public response to his work. The gap between figurative and abstract artistic practices was beginning to close at this time. In the mid-1940s, for instance, some abstract-geometric and cubist artists in the Río de la Plata belonged to the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. These affiliations determined the discussion of abstract art in the 1950s, no longer predominantly political but essentially aesthetic. In a talk titled “The Social Sense of Art,” given on September 12, 1947, in Montevideo’s Teatro Verdi, Portinari once again set out his views on the dichotomy between form and content in painting.19 He explained his reformulation of social realism to incorporate the modernist aesthetics of the post-war French model of Marxist humanism: “Painting’s intrinsic quality” was the “means with which the artist transmits his sensibility,” he argued, and “mural painting is best suited” to taking this sensibility to the masses. “Painters who wish to produce a social art and who love the beauty of painting for its own sake are those who will not forget that they exist in this world full of injustice in order to join forces with the people.”20 The excitement that Portinari’s version of

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muralism generated in Uruguay rejected the militant partisanship of Siqueiros and was largely in tune with Portinari’s own humanist sensibility. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Couture wrote that Portinari “has passed through us like an angel in a tempest, bearing sentiments and portents, shouting out his human anguish.”21 Portinari himself emphasized this relation of the artist to anguish in speaking to his Teatro Verdi audience. “We live,” he said, “in a contradictory world where the artist, with his heightened sensibility, suffers intensely.”22 The reception of this master of muralist art in the Río de la Plata region speaks to the romantic hopes of local intellectuals with respect to the avant-garde. The alternation of lyrical figuration and cubist abstraction in A Primeira Missa no Brasil, however, was less a call for social revolution than an expression of middle-class modernizing hopes in the post-war world.23 For his part, Portinari established in Montevideo the possibility of “modernist” realist art—a politicized nationalist art that flaunted its complicity with modernism’s formal suppositions. Portinari’s mysticism, with its pervasive biblical allusions, was highly acclaimed in Montevideo, especially among the art critics and intellectuals of the Communist Party. Many thought that Portinari’s “mystic weakness,” because it eluded the easy criticism of his adversaries, paradoxically strengthened his political strategy: “His exhibition is transcendent and fecund. It moves both his friends and his critics, because its themes are immune to the enemies’ maneuverings; it destroys the underhanded and perverse aggression toward Communist art.”24 The aesthetic opinions of Siqueiros and Torres García proved more similar than those of Siqueiros and Portinari. Both Siqueiros and Torres García preferred an anti-sentimentalist aesthetic truth that would resonate with social circumstances, whether it appeared in the form of social realism or modernist abstraction. Siqueiros, unlike the social realists of the Uruguayan Communist Party in the 1930s who conformed to the Stalinist aesthetics emanating from Moscow, allowed for an abstract art if it could foment a truly revolutionary politics. He did not subject art to politics, but rather approached it the other way around. Writing to Anita Brenner, for example, he urged her: “Don’t lose sight of the fact that what we are searching for is not only the technique and style of an art that sympathizes with the revolution, but an art that is in itself the revolution.”25 And referring to the “melancholic” Río de la Plata social realist painters, Siqueiros complained that “in their ideologically lackluster art, they don’t search for the purely aesthetic equivalence between social reality and the reality of art; neither do they comprehend that one can find this dramatic equivalence, which characterizes our present era, in apparently abstract forms, in formal aesthetics devoid of any overtly political content.”26 Torres García approved of Siqueiros’ ideologically rigorous political message more than he did of Portinari’s eclecticism: “Say what you like about Siqueiros’s work, you have to admit that it will endure . . . because it is based on a faith. We are in agreement on the side of the truth. For this reason I can exclaim ‘Good for Siqueiros!’ without contradicting myself.”27 By contrast, for Torres García and his followers, Portinari’s pictorial emphasis on the pain of the socially dispossessed succumbed to the old problem of the  

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Uruguayan middle class’s purely literary — and therefore false— hand-wringing over the plight of the poor. “Portinari arrived surrounded by beautiful words and hailed by resounding names— Aragon, Cassou, and so forth,” according to Removedor’s account of the Brazilian artist’s arrival in Montevideo: “But the beautiful words and beautiful names pay tribute to the falsehood of his time, which is stronger than they are. Portinari is a man enamored of mankind and distressed by its sorrows. All of this is very important and urgent, but he uses the same speech, as always, that wraps the lies of our era in a superficial coating of legitimation.”28 Of the three artists that I have considered, only Portinari was well received in political and intellectual circles. His social criticism mixed Christian suffering and a spirit of reconciliation, making him palatable to friends but also to his political enemies. Indeed, Portinari fit naturally into the local eclecticism — a principal reason that he received praise from such a wide political spectrum and that he got along with his communist comrades, public figures from the government, artists who had diverse trajectories and ideologies, and even conservative Catholic intellectuals. Carlos Prevosti, one of the artists who admired him most in Montevideo, summarized his aesthetic ecclecticism: “Through his different works Portinari shows us the European schools that have influenced his art, without meaning that he would bind himself to any one of them; so his creative personality emerges more and more strongly once he has taken what he considers necessary from these schools.”29 In the end, Portinari synthesized critical nationalism with universalist humanism in a way as that appealed to a broader audience than either Siqueiros or Torres García could. As a communist, Portinari transformed social realism in Uruguay into critical realism, based on an inclusive humanist spirit. If Siqueiros developed the idea of a pan–Latin Americanism under the sign of revolution, and Torres García the notion of a national urban imaginary based on universal constructivism, Portinari envisioned the Uruguayan national soul as morally purified through the social mystique of sacrifice. A Primeira Missa no Brasil presents us not with the muralism of the trenches practiced by Siqueiros in the 1930s, but with a direct relationship between a realist avant-garde and a revolutionary vanguard (posited by Siqueiros) and a humanist spirit, its tone hopeful rather than messianistic, its inclusive aesthetics tempering its attention to social injustices.  

 

 

 

 

—Translated and edited by Robin Adèle Greeley

 

Notes

1.  The canvas, begun in late 1947 and finished in 1948, was commissioned by the Banco Boavista’s president, Thomaz Saavedra, for the bank’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. 2.  See my essays, “Portinari en Uruguay: centralidad y marginalidad política en el arte realista de los años cuarenta,” in Andrea Giunta, ed., Cândido Portinari y el sentido social del arte, (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005), pp. 209 – 28; “Torres García in Montevideo: Avant 

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Garde Project and Regionalist Discourse,” Art Nexus No. 22 (October–December 1996):72 – 77; and my catalogue, Realismo social en el arte Uruguayo 1930– 1950 (Montevideo: División Cultura IMM/Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes, 1992). 3.  Siqueiros arrived by boat in Montevideo with the Uruguayan Blanca Luz Brum in the first days of February, 1933, from Los Angeles where, on September 2, 1932, he had delivered his famous lecture “Experiencias técnicas del Bloque de Pintores” [“Technical Experiences of the Painters’ Bloc”] at the John Reed club. In May of that year he left for Buenos Aires, where he stayed until November and where he painted the murals on the Quinta de Botana building together with the “Equipo Poligráfico” [“Poligraphic Team”] he established, formed by the Argentine artists Antonio Berni, Lino Spilinbergo, Carlos Castagnino, and the Uruguayan Enrique Lázaro. 4.  David Alfaro Siquieros in Crítica (Buenos Aires, October 21, 1933):n.p. 5.  La Agrupación de Intelectuales, Artistas, Periodistas y Escritores (AIAPE) [the Group of Intellectuals, Artists, Journalists, and Writers] had been created in Montevideo in 1936, soon after their counterpart was founded in Buenos Aires. 6.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, No hay más ruta que la nuestra (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1945). 7.  The MAEP was founded in Argentina by Antonio Berni. 8. Joaquín Torres García, La tradición del hombre abstracto: Doctrina constructivista, (Montevideo: Asociación de Arte Constructivo, 1938). 9.  Joaquín Torres García, Manifiesto no. 1: Contestando a N.B. de la C.T.I.U. (Montevideo: Estudio 1037, 1934). 10.  Norberto Berdía, “El arte de Torres García,” Movimiento no. 7 (Montevideo, June–July 1934):3. 11.  Torres García, Manifiesto no. 1. 12.  It is worth demonstrating as well that his personal attitude was not politically neutral in the lead-up to World War II. In the talk Torres García gave in 1938 in Montevideo’s Ateneo supporting Spain’s Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, he took an actively anti-fascist position without departing from his universalizing philosophical and moral idealism: “Today the Spanish people represent something so large that it exceeds the frame of normal historical happenings. They represent that big moment in which man, Universal Man, rises above the individual. In other words, what could and should really be called a people (and which always supports itself in the universal, which is what is just) rising up to defend what characterizes man above that which he no longer is, seeing as people are also the patrimony of inferior beings. For the Spanish people, today, Humanity again awakens from lethargy to recover its dignity as a superior entity. How could we not help this people . . . ?” Revista AIAPE (Montevideo, December, 1938):19. 13.  Torres García, Universalismo Constructivo: Contribución a la unificación del arte y la cultura de América (1944). Emphasis in original. 14.  Torres García. Stenographic version from the lecture given by Siqueiros at the John Reed of Hollywood on September 2, 1932; typed version in the Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay, Montevideo. Archive Eduardo Pombo. 15.  Guido Castillo, “Cândido Portinari no es un creador,” Removedor No. 19 (September, 1947):4.  

 

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16.  Serge Guilbaut, Sobre la desaparición de ciertas obras de arte (Mexico City: Curare/ FONCA, 1995), pp. 87–141. 17.  Portinari was taken up in different ways by Marxists of different partisan stripes in post-war France. See, for example, Louis Aragon, “Un ejemplo para vencer pequeñas apren­ siones,” Justicia (Montivideo: September 3, 1947), who praised Portinari’s national ethos. Portinari also wrote to his friend, the Uruguayan writer Enrique Amorim, in 1948 about the publication of an article on his mural painting in Lettres Françaises, which that year had shifted under the direction of Georges Pillment from a policy of open eclecticism to a more hard-line social realism. Letter from Portinari to Enrique Amorim, April 12, 1948, Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay, Archivo Amorim. 18. Portinari’s exhibition in Paris in 1946 received widespread accolades from the French intellectual left. 19.  Portinari also gave this talk in Buenos Aires, at the Instituto Francés de Estudios Superiores, July 26, 1947. Portinari, “Sentido social del arte,” translated into Spanish in Andrea Giunta, ed., Cândido Portinari y el sentido social del arte (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005), pp. 309 –17. 20.  Portinari, “Sentido social del arte,” in Giunta, ed., Cândido Portinari, pp. 310, 313. 21. Quoted in Cipriano S. Vitureira, “Portinari en Montevideo,” Alfar (Montevideo, 1949), p. 19. 22.  Portinari, “Sentido social del arte,” in Giunta, ed., Cândido Portinari, pp. 310, 313, 312. 23.  In this regard, it is important to note that, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most eminent cultivators of abstract art was the principal antagonist of Torres García in the 1930s: the painter Norberto Berdía. 24.  Juan Francisco Pazos, “Alcances de la muestra de Portinari,” Justicia (Montevideo, May 7, 1948):n.p. 25.  Siqueiros to Anita Brenner, quoted by Luis Eduardo Pombo, Crítica (Buenos Aires: May 29, 1933):n.p. Emphasis added. 26. Siquieros, Crítica (Buenos Aires, September 20, 1933). Similarly, the Argentine artist Antonio Berni, who, as a member of the Equipo Poligráfico, had worked with Siqueiros in Buenos Aires, argued in his 1936 manifesto, “A New Realism,” that each artist should choose the best formal recourses to effect representations of the most dramatic aspects and changes of reality: “All of the critical, philosophical, and aesthetic digressions over ‘pure art’ are now substituted by Realist reasonings that agree with a collective psychology, with the social situation of the moment. This situation, with its dramatic reality, conquers its right [derecho] in art. No more of pre-established clichés, a true artist is one who is open to the changing conditions of his environment.” Antonio Berni, “Un nuevo realismo,” 1936. 27.  Torres García, “El Arte de Alfaro Siqueiros,” Revista AIAPE, No. 34 (Montevideo, December, 1940):11. 28.  Guido Castillo, Removedor, No. 19 (September, 1947):4. 29.  Carlos Prevosti, “Portinari, un gran maestro,” Justicia (Montevideo, September 12, 1947):n.p.  

 

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11 Mexican Muralism in the United States Controversies, Paradoxes, and Publics

Anna Indych-López

The scandal surrounding Diego Rivera’s 1933 mural cycle at Rockefeller Center in New York, which was destroyed because the artist included a portrait of Lenin, looms large in the history of Mexican muralism and remains the best-known episode of the movement in the United States (figure 11.1). Depression-era politics and activism, Rockefeller patronage, confrontational imagery, artistic censorship, and the artist’s performative persona converged in the early 1930s in a remarkable example of the fortunes of radical public art in this country. The controversy resonated then, and continues to do so now within a broader cultural discourse because of the seeming impossibility of reconciling Marxist politics with capitalist patronage. Yet, as Laurance Hurlburt revealed in 1989, Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller “not only knew of Rivera’s intended use of Marxist subject matter, but even encouraged him in this respect.”1 According to the artist’s assistant Clifford Wight, “Mrs. J. D. Jr. [John D. Rockefeller, Jr.] said that he [Rivera] didn’t give Communism enough importance and asked him to include a portrait of Lenin.”2 The paradoxes of such nuggets of evidence have yet to be considered fully in discussions of the patronage and reception of Mexican muralism in the United States. As a cause célèbre, “the battle of Rockefeller Center” has overshadowed other controversies over the muralists’ projects in the United States, such as those that flared up in

Acknowledgments are due to Harriet F. Senie, Lynda Klich, Anna Jardine, and Carol Krinsky for their helpful suggestions and to the Division of Humanities & the Arts, the City College of New York for substantial funds provided to obtain the images reproduced herein.

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Figure 11.1 Diego Rivera. Man at the Crossroads, partially painted mural at Rockefeller Center. Courtesy Old Stage Studios, Gualala, CA. Photograph: Lucienne Bloch

relation to José Clemente Orozco’s mural at the New School for Social Research (now the New School) in New York in 1930 –31; David Alfaro Siqueiros’ Tropical America at the Plaza Art Center, Olvera Street, Los Angeles in 1932; and Rivera’s Detroit Industry, at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1932 –33. This essay analyzes the debates associated with these other mural cycles, all of which predate the Rockefeller Center scandal. Although monographic studies have addressed the meanings of these projects, bringing analyses of them together provides insights into the intricate relationships among expectations of the Mexican muralists, their cultural prestige, and the claims of a burgeoning hemispheric modernity. Such a framework brings to the fore issues of politics, public space, community formation, and cultural nationalism —all at the heart of the muralists’ production. While popular reception is almost impossible to assess, looking closely at the working of murals in particular environments and the meanings they conveyed to disparate audiences can only shed light on the discursive relations of mural art production. Art produced in the public sphere, by its very nature, leads to controversy. According to Harriet F. Senie, “the issues in public art controversy are always the same”: the tensions among popular, critical, and academic definitions of art; the perceived imposition of taste; the expenditure of public/state resources; and the supposed dangers of threatening subject matter, aesthetics, or politics.3 Controversies over public works reinforce the sense of heterogeneity and instability of places, audiences, and communities. Before  

 

 

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exploring these questions vis-à-vis the work of the muralists in the United States, I want to clarify the paradoxes of muralism in Mexico. Although the common assumption is that muralism as a state-sponsored project was an “authentic” practice in Mexico, readily understood by all audiences, controversy plagued mural painting in Mexico from the early 1920s.4 As Renato González Mello has argued, the work of the muralists did not spring directly from the Mexican Revolution, which had no coherent program. Modernization defined post-Revolutionary culture to a far greater extent than any call to action issued during a social uprising that had produced conflict and tension rather than coherent proposals for reform.5 In this environment, public art inevitably elicited mixed reactions, and works by the three major muralists came under attack.6 Journalists, students, government bureaucrats, teachers, and the urban populations that viewed their murals often responded with hostility, calling at times for their destruction. Rivera was accused of idealizing criminals in his revolutionary propaganda, while his exaltation of Indian culture produced anxiety and vitriolic responses; Orozco’s murals at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City, deemed anticlerical, were vandalized.7 Indeed, Orozco, once in New York, told his gallerist Alma Reed that “if he wished to continue painting in Mexico he would have to ‘live dangerously’ in the vortex of direct action and be prepared, like Siqueiros and other artists of the unstable twenties, to defend his person and his creations from physical violence.” Reed added that “in his own case, the attacks were both from the left and [from] the right.”8 Rather than satisfy social consensus, the murals in Mexico City expressed lived differences and the mutability of social relations in the urban sphere. The unstable political situation in Mexico, the lack of a developed art market, artists’ need for a living wage, and the desire to participate in international aesthetic debates prompted all three muralists to bring their production north of the border. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, all of them spent time living and working in the United States, where they created a variety of murals in nongovernmental contexts. Unlike the monumental cycles that they painted in the grand buildings of Mexico City, their US murals were primarily single panels made for private, capitalist, or relatively inaccessible settings and did not serve a larger decorative scheme or a state agenda. Although every one of their US commissions involved affluent and influential patrons, the murals’ distinct settings— corporate, university, outdoor, and museum contexts— raised questions for patrons, artists, and viewers alike. The US murals by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros under discussion here caused great controversy because they were public, easily accessible, visible, and thus closely scrutinized by a wide audience. They naturally figured in debates about modernity, modernization, and modernism; the future; and the role of public art in community and national identities. The story of Rivera’s mural of 1933 for the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, his fifth mural commission in the United States, caused a well-known scandal in the history of art.9 First censored (covered over with a blank canvas) for that inclusion of the Lenin portrait, before the artist had even completed it, the mural was ultimately destroyed in  

 

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1934 by its patrons, only to be re-created later that year by the artist for Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. The controversy in New York erupted when an image of the Soviet leader that had not been in the original sketch suddenly appeared on a wall of the ground-floor elevator bank in the Great Hall of the RCA Building — one of the more prominent and visible locations in all of Rockefeller Center, where (had it been completed) many workers and visitors would have seen it. The mural’s imagery— and Rivera’s refusal to alter it —signaled the artist’s need to legitimate his precarious position in communist circles.10 Because of his support of Trotsky, Rivera remained vulnerable to attacks from the Stalinist left in the United States, who also criticized him for courting capitalist patrons.11 Rivera’s mural was one of the few Mexican murals in the United States that was to be part of a large and coherent decorative program. As Robert Linsley has argued, the disjunction between Rivera’s vision and the broader program led to the controversy. Rivera’s subject, Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, was dictated by his commission; Rockefeller Center (which officially opened in May of 1933) was a high-profile 1930s building project intended to spur real estate development in midtown Manhattan and serve as the “heart of the culture industry on the east coast.”12 The Rockefellers, in an attempt to coordinate works in a variety of media throughout the Center, called on a philosophy professor, Hartley Burr Alexander, to choose the theme, which cast international capital’s use of emerging technologies (specifically mass media broadcasting) as a spiritual awakening. The vague moral uplift of Rockefeller Center’s “New Frontiers” theme presented civic duty in the language of elite liberalism; Rivera’s “utopian fantasy of the left” conflicted with the capitalist utopianism embodied in the Center itself.13 Rivera’s mural envisions humanity’s relationship with nature, science, the universe, and the machine and affirms the transformative power of science and society’s ability to control technology. In this scene of opposing systems of thought, the organic world is pitted against the inorganic, the visible against the microscopic, and capitalism, socialism, and fascism are backdrops for the uses of technology. Linsley has shown that beyond adding the portrait of Lenin, Rivera presented not only a vision of “technical progress bonded to social change” that threatened the patrons’ ideas about technology, but also, and more significant, a view of the future incompatible with that of the patrons.14 Whereas the Rockefellers and Radio Corporation of America were interested in “maintaining social power” through technology, Rivera publicly contested their right to do so. It remains a mystery, however, why anyone thought that Rivera would do otherwise —why, that is, the patrons believed the final mural deviated from Rivera’s initial intent. The Rockefellers knew that Rivera’s ideas about the future differed from and endangered those of capitalist America. They were familiar with his caricature of the patriarch John D. Rockefeller, featured in a panel of the Ministry of Education in Mexico City, which captured the imagination of the US press.15 Undaunted by Rivera’s Marxism and the controversial themes of his work, Abigail Rockefeller acquired the artist’s May  

 

 

 

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Day sketchbook, sponsored his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1931, purchased several easel paintings, and promoted his work through the Mexican Arts Association. Carol Krinsky has suggested that the paradox of the Rockefeller Center commission resulted from a political and art world stratagem of the capitalists: “As if to show that his anti-capitalist themes meant less than their understanding of fine art, American industrialists commissioned pictures from the irrepressible Mexican painter.”16 Many have argued that the Rockefellers and others in the United States believed they could disabuse Rivera of his communist sympathies with their commissions. Others have suggested that the Rockefeller Center commission embodies the surprising and broader alliance of capitalism and communism in the 1930s.17 The scandal itself arose from the conflicting motives of several patrons— the business interests of the Rockefeller family, RCA, and the development agency — and the aesthetic sympathies of Abigail Rockefeller and her son Nelson, who favored Rivera’s legible yet modern form of politicized realism as a uniquely “American” counter to European variants of modernism. Rivera’s retrospective exhibition —the second one-person show to take place at MoMA —had just broken attendance records. Todd sought an artist with an international reputation. Rivera’s cultural prestige, his ability to execute murals, and his favor with the Rockefellers made him seem a suitable choice to accommodate all the parties involved. Even though his preparation drawing showed no head of Lenin (figure 11.2), it incorporated a May Day parade on Red Square with figures holding flags as they marched past Lenin’s tomb—imagery the Rockefellers would easily have recognized from Rivera’s May Day sketchbook. In addition, Rivera’s accompanying description of the sketch included rhetoric that celebrated the socialist transformation of society in images captured thus: “Workers arriving at a true understanding of their rights in relation to the means of production” and “Workers of the Cities and Country inheriting the earth.” 18 The central motif of man as peasant, worker, and soldier was an archetypal socialist image. How could patrons approve this sketch with its unequivocal description, but be outraged by the painted head of Lenin? The portrait had graphic legibility, which contrasted with the more opaque (but equally contentious) themes of the sketch, but beyond that, the answer lies with a controversy that preceded the Rockefeller scandal. To appease growing xenophobic concerns that no US artists were chosen for the Rockefeller Center commission—rumors had spread that in addition to Rivera, the Spaniard José Maria Sert and the Briton Frank Brangwyn were being considered—Nelson Rockefeller hastily initiated the exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers, which was held at MoMA from May 3 to May 31, 1932.19 Organized by Lincoln Kirstein, the exhibition featured controversial works by Hugo Gellert, William Gropper, and Ben Shahn. Gellert’s submission, Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together (Last Defenses of Capitalism), a portable mural with offensive caricatures of J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and Nelson’s grandfather, proved to be a harbinger of the Rockefeller Center scandal and a testing ground for Nelson Rockefeller.20 As with the mural painted at the Ministry of Education  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 11.2 Diego Rivera. Preparation drawing for Man at the Crossroads (1932), pencil on brown paper, 31 × 71 ¼ in, the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

in Mexico City in 1928, which had satirized the same figures, the art generated controversy in the press, and MoMA and the Rockefellers had to take quick action.21 After much debate, the Rockefellers decided to keep the controversial works in the exhibition, fearing that removing them would generate even more bad publicity.22 The decision to avoid further scandal in 1932 by not censoring the works, which some misconstrued as outright support for the communist beliefs of the artists, determined the fate of Rivera’s mural a year later. Haunted by the specter of tolerating artists who publicly ridiculed them, the Rockefellers had to take a firm stand against the portrait of Lenin once the press reported it, whatever their actual opinions or their tolerance of socialist themes. Any other course of action would have seemed tantamount to capitulation again. Rivera’s intentional provocation buttressed his leftist credentials — and meant that his was the last major private commission for a mural by a Mexican artist in the United States. The uniqueness of the patronage questions at Rockefeller Center are underscored by the response to an earlier (1930 –31) mural cycle painted by Orozco at the New School for Social Research that featured portraits of both Lenin and Stalin — as would have been customary since 1929, with the establishment of an official cult of Stalin23—but caused no immediate outcry (figure 11.3). In a relatively small space that once served as a dining room (it is now a conference room, closed to the general public and open by appointment only), Orozco visualized an allegory of the human social orders by depicting the creative abilities of man, revolutionary unrest, and the concept of human brotherhood. Like Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, the New School mural represents the political possibilities of the future by contrasting opposing systems of thought. As for Orozco’s  

 

 

 

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Figure 11.3 José Clemente Orozco. Struggle in the Occident, fresco (1931). Collection of the New School, New York City. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City and INBA.

murals, both the liberalism of the New School and the comparatively limited public for the painting explain the absence of controversy generated by it. Diane Miliotes, reading the panels as equivalent worldviews or historical options from which to choose, has shown how the mural cycle directly addresses the New School’s intellectual community and its broader program to foster debate and internationalism.24 Orozco’s mural is usually dismissed as atypically optimistic and partisan for an artist who focused predominantly on tragic events and resisted specific political allegiances.25 Set against a patch of light ground, Lenin appears to be surrounded by a secular halo, which has led to the interpretation of this figure as commemorative. Alejandro Anreus, however, suggesting that the Lenin panel may be more critical, points to the leader’s position above the menacing, machine-like soldiers of the Red Army with their threatening bayonets.26 Furthermore, it seems clear that Orozco appropriates his portrait of Lenin from propaganda posters or postcards, therein critically invoking the official cult of representation waged by the Soviet Union. The divergent readings of the New School mural’s iconography relate to Orozco’s broader ideological project. Rather than a reflection of partisan politics, his portrait of Lenin must be seen as one of his many images of rebel leaders. Like his earlier representations of Emiliano Zapata, and like the rebel figures that recur throughout his work, Lenin functions as an ambivalent hero figure. He is neither clearly good nor overtly evil; evoking wider contemporary upheaval and historical turmoil, he stands here for general revolutionary unrest. Orozco’s vision of humanity as an uncontrollable force fosters ambiguous interpretations of his murals, at once turning figures into heroes or anti-heroes. In the context of the New School, the perceived neutrality of the imagery relates to its theme of open debate. The regimented workers to Lenin’s left (among them Stalin), representing the international family of communism, directly engages the central motif of a table of universal brotherhood; by tilting it up toward the viewer, Orozco encourages a response “to the challenges of the future.”27 Contemporaneous critical accounts of the mural barely mention the Lenin imagery and instead focus on the cycle’s failure to conform to the academic tradition of mural decoration. If the ambiguity of the imagery and the insti-

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Figure 11.4 David Alfaro Siqueiros. Tropical America (with Robert Berdecio standing in front). Courtesy Research library, the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.

tutional context allowed it to escape controversy in the 1930s when leftist themes were more broadly tolerated,28 protestors (including alumni groups) during the McCarthy period called for the mural’s destruction.29 Although it is commonly accepted that the place “where art is encountered necessarily conditions its reception,” the “limited communicability”30 of the mural relates to shifting historical conditions and the mutability of audiences, even in a progressive institution such as the New School. The reception of Siqueiros’ Tropical America (figure 11.4)— one of the only outdoor murals in the United States by the Mexican muralists — is informed by its public setting on the exterior second-story side wall of a building in downtown Los Angeles that housed the Plaza Art Center. Obliquely overlooking North Main and Olvera streets, in an area designated part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument,31 the mural, with its political imagery, elicited complaints from some of the city’s civic leaders, especially those who had established the street as a colorful Mexican marketplace only two years before it was painted. Reaction to the mural and censorship of it relate to the district’s development in the early 1930s from urban slum (figure 11.5) into tourist attraction meant to highlight its Spanish and Mexican history. The theme of Tropical America was dictated by Siqueiros’ contract with the Plaza Art Center, but instead of rendering “a continent of happy men, surrounded by palms and parrots,” as prescribed, Siqueiros and his team of assistants painted an image full of conflict.32 Covering the frieze-like expanse of the wall, the mural is composed of three main sections. The central portion is dominated by a squat Maya-esque pyramid, decorated with curvilinear and abstracted shapes. In front of the structure, a partially naked dark-skinned figure hangs from a double cross with his neck broken and his limbs tied  

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Figure 11.5 Olvera Street before 1930 renovation. Courtesy Security Pacific Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

by ropes. According to the critic Arthur Millier, Siqueiros added this figure at the last minute, the night before the unveiling.33 A North American eagle, traditional symbol of the United States, perches aggressively atop the cross, its wings spread. Taking the place of the pelican often included in images of the crucifixion to symbolize sacrifice, it subverts traditional religious iconography. Strewn below the crucified figure are stones and small pre-Columbian sculptures, and at either side stands a large drum, adding to the general ritualistic appearance of the scene. Menacing anthropomorphic branches of large, bare trees dominate the section to the left. The smaller segment to the extreme right shows two armed snipers on the upper part of the wall who look directly at the eagle and crouch in attack positions on the roof of a small enclosure. One figure, whose sombrero and huaraches clearly identify him as a campesino, holds a rifle to his body. The other, barefoot and wearing what looks like a headdress, extends his rifle as if to shoot—an anachronistic, generalized representation of a Maya warrior. The abundance of “pseudo-Maya” imagery and the pastiche of “archaeological clichés” and generalized pre-Columbian references in Tropical America led art historian Olivier Debroise to suggest that Siqueiros courts “his own critique of the popular” by catering to the patron’s demands and creating a touristic image. The central figure is seen as an afterthought— the artist’s last-minute attempt to prop up his leftist credentials.34 It is also possible, however, that Siqueiros anticipated a public outcry and therefore purposefully waited until the last minute to include the provocative imagery.  

 

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Although the imagery departs from the more optimistic and overtly political theme of organized labor in Siqueiros’ earlier Los Angeles mural at the Chouinard School of Art, it is marked nonetheless by the tensions of its theme of destruction and ruin.35 More important, however, the mural represents the artist’s direct response to local politics rather than a denial of his proletarian beliefs. The sight of an ancient American civilization in ruins, overrun by vegetation, armed conflict, and torture, clearly countered the civic aims of stemming urban decay and of giving a street recently revitalized as an essentially fake folkloric market a sense of history. Although Olvera was lined with historic Spanish colonial buildings and was at one time a thriving part of an independent Mexico,36 the ersatz market architecture erected in 1930 served only as a simulacrum of its origins. In romanticizing the redevelopment, the project ignored the site’s long and contested history.37 In this context, Tropical America’s pastiche of pre-Columbian imagery must be read as Siqueiros’ antihistoricist statement. The mural’s anti-imperialist message was an issue in its censoring, yet the aesthetics of urban renewal and historicism, as well as the politics of the site, forced the controversy. Whereas some studies characterize Olvera Street as a Mexican district, the population at that time was a typical urban mix of immigrants from various cultures and countries, including Italy and France; in fact, the Plaza Art Center was housed in “Italian Hall,” a building that originally served as a “social center for the town’s growing Italian community.”38 And the east side of the plaza had become the center of the city’s first Chinatown. The mural was more accessible to Mexicans and Mexican Americans than any other mural by los tres grandes in the United States, but Tropical America’s imagery did not address them. It was instead aimed at those who would turn el pueblo into a folkloricized vision of Mexican culture. The mural should be considered less part of el barrio than a political statement against aestheticizing and commodifying the urban landscape, which, according to some civic leaders, had been ruined by the forces of international migration.39 Although most studies have described Siqueiros’ mural as highly visible from the street, historical photographs and a visit to the site today suggest otherwise. While civic leaders and journalists would have been able to see the mural from the roof of an adjoining building, the offensive imagery is hardly visible from Olvera Street. North Main gives a better perspective, but the mural is effectively concealed by Olvera’s Mexican market and the adjoining buildings. That most historical photographs of Tropical America are aerial views, not images taken from the street, reinforces the notion that it is impossible to view the entire mural from Olvera. The spatial dynamics raise the question of why it was censored. In 1934, only the extreme end of the wall facing Olvera was whitewashed (figure 11.6); the crucified figure and the eagle remained intact for at least a year afterward. It is unclear exactly when the entire mural was whitewashed, but most agree it was during the 1930s. It is conceivable that what today is considered the most controversial section— the crucified figure and the eagle— could not be seen as easily as the sections closest to the street and therefore was not immediately whitewashed.  

 

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Figure 11.6 Tropical America, whitewashed. Copyright 2011, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

The often-overlooked images at the margins —armed Indians, unruly nature, a doomed antiquity— also clashed with Olvera Street’s hopes for commerce and urban renewal. Many Chicano and Chicana artists situate Tropical America in “the cultural nationalism of the Chicano civil rights movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s”; still, its legacy in California and, as radical public art, in the United States entails also Siqueiros’ efforts to reshape the spatial politics of Los Angeles and urban geography in general.40 Conflicts between patron and artist engendered broader public controversies at Rockefeller Center and Olvera Street. But in Detroit, when a mural by Rivera was criticized by multiple publics, censorship was avoided thanks to the sympathetic and supportive patronage of William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company and of the Arts Commission of the City of Detroit. The controversy elicited the ontological instability of the public for Rivera’s social realism, for murals by Mexican artists in the United States, and for radical public art in general; it also anticipated the future battle at Rockefeller Center.  

 

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Figure 11.7 Diego Rivera. Detroit Industry, north wall, Detroit Institute of Arts (1932–33). Gift of Edsel B. Ford. © 2010 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS). Photograph © 2001 the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Detroit Industry (figure 11.7), painted on the four walls of the Beaux-Arts Garden Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts, pictures the repetitive activity of automobile manufacturing, which the artist had observed at Ford’s River Rouge plant. Detailed depictions of assembly-line production and machines are complemented by scenes of various attendant industries and the origins of human life. These dynamic compositions project the “harmonious synthesis of human and mechanical action.”41 Despite the seemingly celebratory content and sympathetic patrons, the public objected to the mural because Rivera was a foreigner, or because the imagery of the cycle was communist, or because the content of the “vaccination” panel was sacrilegious, or because the representation of female nudes seemed “pornographic.” Most critics were clergymen and members of conservative organizations who lambasted the work as “foolishly vulgar,” grotesque, blasphemous—in short, “decadent art.”42 The Catholic Daughters of America, in 1933, considered Rivera’s racialized nudes a “direct insult to American femininity”;43 the Reverend H. Ralph Higgins saw the work as sacrilegious; he was unaware that Rivera’s allusion to the Nativity was an extension of the hybrid visual language he had developed in Mexico, where religious imagery served both aesthetic and didactic purposes. In Detroit, Edsel Ford and museum officials exploited opposition to the mural’s supposed anti-Christian imagery to attract more viewers and the “general public” to the institute. They capitalized on the controversy with a fund-raising effort, temporarily lowering the  

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cost of museum membership. The Institute’s broad-based support of the work allowed it to avoid fiscal crisis during the height of the Depression, when it faced budget cuts.44 The increased attention to the museum as a result of the scandal allowed Ford, who had personally provided funds for the operation of the museum and for Rivera’s mural, to shift temporarily the economic burden to the general public — the working classes— who became new members. Objections to the mural arose, not because Rivera merely described Detroit industry but because his imagery was ambiguous and could thus be manipulated. The local conservative community, represented on the editorial pages of the two major newspapers, the News and the Free Press, believed that Detroit Industry was propaganda—antiAmerican, anticapitalist, or communist.45 Commentators in the papers condemned the representations of the workers as tired, unhealthy, hungry, and unhappy.46 But such imagery suited the interests of the orthodox left no better. The Communist Party in the United States condemned Rivera as “counter-revolutionary” because, in addition to supporting Trotsky and openly criticizing Stalin, he had accepted commissions from US industrialists and because his murals in the United States — in Detroit and in California—were perceived as representing capitalism positively. Rivera’s ambiguous imagery of harmony on the assembly line and a technological utopia seemed to celebrate industry uncritically.47 Moreover, Rivera put so much emphasis on machinery and the labor process in Detroit Industry that he seemed to displace actual human activity and his “laboring man is a rhythmic and almost undifferentiated component of advanced industry.” US industrialists could point to the resulting heroic ballet to suggest the organic and mutually beneficial relationship between man and industry.48 Whereas proletarian or social viewpoint artists in the 1930s made images of workers as muscular and heroic figures engaged in productive labor,49 Rivera’s image of the Ford plant seemed to borrow the machine-age aesthetic of the US painter Charles Sheeler, whom Ford hired to photograph the River Rouge plant for its advertising firm. Sheeler’s iconic painting American Landscape (1930) (figure 11.8), which derived its clean, manicured look from one of those photos, empties the plant of people, labor, and complex economic and social relations.50 Yet because Rivera did render the labor force in his image —no matter how overpowered it was by the machinery — his mural, which some disparaged as too celebratory, could also be read as a condemnation of the dominance of machine over men and the exploitation of workers by industry. Detroit Industry, then, was at once too political for some audiences and “politically wanting” for others.51 Because Detroit lacked a unified left, the critical edge of the murals was “blunted.”52 Anthony Lee has proposed that the conflicting readings result in part from the artist’s “assumption that the iconography of the factory was in itself socialist in intent.”53 We must keep in mind, as we view the mural, that leftist artists in the United States were grappling with Soviet demands and struggling to discover how best to convey socialist ideas through visual representation, and that Rivera himself had a tenuous relationship  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 11.8 Charles Sheeler. American Landscape (1930), oil on canvas, 24 × 31 in. Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (166.1934). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © the Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

to this community. His “willful acceptance of the more celebrated socialist belief in unalienated labor” did not agree with prevailing sentiments in Detroit. There it seemed to the left that Rivera, in “picturing a socialist culture before it had been transformed by social relations,” celebrated capitalism and industry instead of picturing them as one phase of Marx’s dialectical process, whereby the working class takes over advanced capitalist industry. If Rivera purposefully and strategically downplayed the harsh working conditions, fractured relations, racial politics, and general economic severity to represent in purely symbolic terms the tensions in the Detroit automotive community, and thus expose how “race and working-class race relations as . . . actual instrument[s] of change” had failed, that message was altogether too subtle. What Lee rightly terms as Rivera’s knowing fantasy of a unified US left was so obscure that it mystified workers on the factory floor, who became the viewers when they entered the rarefied space of the museum. Rivera’s efforts to politicize immigrant Mexican autoworkers and local organizations, and his involvement with the problematic and failed repatriation of those work-

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ers, alienated him from viewers.54 Although he might have identified with the worker, Rivera claimed that his public was made up of “manual and intellectual workers.”55 The mural’s ambiguity, thus, resulted both from a disunified left and from the disparity between the cultural elite (including Rivera himself) and the laboring classes, as well as between the imaginary space of representation and lived experience. Rivera’s leftist ideas faced a “cool reception” precisely because he never actually lived the idealistic communism he proposed56 and because he never had to confront the hardships of the labor struggle. Perhaps the labor force in Detroit resented the use of their struggles to support an elite institution. By perpetuating the fantasy of a harmonious classless society, the mural inadvertently reified class divisions. Rivera famously said: “I paint what I see. Some society ladies have told me they found the murals cold and hard. I answer that their subject is steel, and steel is both cold and hard.”57 He wittily turned criticism into an argument over realism, yet he also alluded to the divide between content of his murals and their viewers. His statement suggests that even more upsetting than any ugliness of steel was that the mural brought the working classes into the museum. The battle waged in Detroit for the most part had to do with the mural’s metaphorical language, with conservative critics condemning Detroit Industry for the symbolic narratives implicit in its Christian themes, racialized bodies, and so forth. That the allegory of a socialist future elicited multiple interpretations attested to the vagaries of realism. The Detroit controversy was fresh in the mind of the art-viewing public— and in Rivera’s own mind—when he finally arrived in New York in late March 1933 to work on the Rockefeller Center commission.58 The artist’s experiences in Michigan may have encouraged him to shift his aesthetic strategy away from any ambiguity. Thus, once in New York, Rivera had to affirm his Marxism and to make it more transparent than he had in Detroit. While he continued to celebrate the dialectical process and the socialist future, he understood that only propagandistic realism and overt imagery would fortify the politics of his practice. The first sketch for the Rockefeller Center mural indicated a compartmentalized framework similar to that of Detroit Industry, but Rivera altered the composition as he originally conceived it, to distance the New York work from that in Detroit. For example, he added the head of Lenin—a consciously unambiguous portrait. Such imagery had a leftist pedigree in New York —in Orozco’s work at the New School and in Hugo Gellert’s 1928 mural for the cafeteria of the Workers (Communist) Party in Union Square, which featured a full-length life-size portrait of Lenin.59 Though many have interpreted the Rockefeller Center scandal as a result of Rivera’s opportunism — and there is no doubt that he saw an opportunity —the introduction of the portrait must be read as both a provocation to the leadership of the official Communist Party and to his patrons as well as the artist’s response to the demands of public leftist art in the United States. Each of the murals I have discussed here made claims for the future or reinterpreted the past to contest the immediate present —a reflection of the artists’ ability to tap into  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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pressing local and international concerns. Although the controversies must be understood in the context of the contentions and disunities of Marxist politics in the United States, an analysis of the critical reception of these murals reveals how these works resonated with the historical conditions in which they were produced and circulated. Such an analysis affirms the vicissitudes of transhistorical mutability and interpretative mutability, as the case of the New School mural makes evident. A study devoted to scandal, controversy, and popular effects of murals addresses artworks as sets of relations constituting unstable discourses whereby meaning is always being produced. We need to think about the reception of Mexican murals beyond simple oppositions of patron and artist or capitalism and socialism. In Detroit and at Rockefeller Center — where the most vocal controversies erupted —and at the New School, the patrons were sympathetic. If public art is defined by state funding, the publics for these murals have perhaps been ill defined. Both Detroit Industry and Tropical America were semi-private commissions in public spaces; although the New School is famous for its public mission, Orozco’s mural was a private commission in an essentially private space; and Rockefeller Center was a private commission that never reached viewers in the highly visible spaces of the RCA Building. As with many public art projects, the controversies about the Mexican murals in the United States suggest the inadequacy of murals to communicate in certain environments, the extent to which communities are often fragmented, and the inevitability of misreading symbols and imagery not widely shared or broadly understood. Murals that cross geographical and cultural boundaries, conceptual frameworks, political and racial divides, and imagined communities necessarily spark —and may even embrace—discussion and debate.  

 

 

 

Notes

1.  Laurance P. Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), p. 162. 2.  Wight to Ralph Stackpole, December 2, 1932, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, quoted in Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States, p. 162; and in Anthony Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999), p. 245. 3.  Harriet F. Senie, The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. xi. 4.  Jean Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, 1920 –25 (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979), pp. 149 and 283–294. 5.  González Mello, “Orozco in the United States: An Essay on the History of Ideas,” in Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes, eds., José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927– 1934 (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, 2002), p. 25. See also Claudio Lomnitz, “Final Reflections: What Was Mexico’s Cultural Revolution?” in Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds., The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 346 –47.  

 

 

 

 

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6.  Daniel Cosío Villegas, “La Pintura en México,” and El Demócrata, July 5, 1923, cited in Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, p. 149. See also Lynda Klich, chapter four, “Revolution and Utopia: Estridentismo and the Visual Arts (1921 –1927)” (PhD dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, 2007); and El Universal Ilustrado, March 5, 1925. Regarding the attacks on Orozco’s and Siqueiros’ murals in 1924 see El Universal, June 11 and 26, 1924; Excelsior, June 26, 1924, cited in Charlot, The Mexican Mural Renaissance, pp. 283 –85. 7. Ibid. 8.  Alma Reed, Orozco (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 12. 9.  See Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States, 159– 74; Carol Krinsky, Rockefeller Center (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Irene Herner, Paradise Lost (Mexico City: Edicupes, 1987); Robert Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised: Rivera at Rockefeller Center,” Oxford Art Journal 17, No. 2 (1994):48 –62; and Leah Dickerman, “Leftist Circuits,” in Dickerman and Anna Indych-López, Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art, (New York: MoMA, 2011), pp. 36 –42. 10.  Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised: Rivera at Rockefeller Center,” p. 48. Dickerman adds that Rivera’s inclusion of an isolated image of Lenin, unaccompanied by Stalin, posed a direct challenge to the official Communist Parties of the United States and Mexico. “Leftist Circuits,” pp. 38–39. 11.  Evans, Robert [Joseph Freeman], “Painting and Politics: The Case of Diego Rivera,” New Masses (February 1932):22–25. 12.  Linsley, “Utopia Will Not Be Televised,” p. 49. 13.  Ibid., p. 55. 14.  Ibid, pp. 58 and 60. 15.  San Francisco Chronicle, September 25, 1930. According to Bloch, Mrs. Rockefeller supposedly suggested Rivera paint a copy of the “offensive” mural. Bloch, “On Location with Diego Rivera,” Art in America 74 (February 1986):111. 16. Krinsky, Rockefeller Center, p. 145. 17.  Dickerman, “Leftist Circuits,” p. 42. 18. Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States, p. 159. 19.  “The Mural Tempest,” The Art Digest, February 15, 1932. Nelson A. Rockefeller to Abbott Lawrence Lowell, April 28, 1932, folder 197, box 20, RG 2, Cultural Interests, OMR, Rockefeller Family Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (hereafter RAC). See also James Wechsler, “From World War I to the Popular Front: The Art and Activism of Hugo Gellert,” Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 24 (2002):218 –25; and Martin Duberman, “Seeing Red at MoMA,” ARTnews (May 2007):145. 20.  Wechsler, “From World War I to the Popular Front,” p. 220. 21.  Duberman, “Seeing Red at MoMA,” pp. 144 – 47; and Duberman, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 112 –18. 22.  Correspondence between Nelson Rockefeller and Stephen Clark and between John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Thomas M. Debevoise, in folder 197, box 20, RG 2, Cultural Interests, OMR, Rockefeller Family Archives, RAC. 23.  Dickerman, “Leftist Circuits,” p. 38. 24.  Diane Miliotes, “The Murals at the New School for Social Research (1930– 31),” in  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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González Mello and Miliotes, eds., José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927– 1934, pp. 118–41. 25.  Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States, pp. 50–51. 26.  Alejandro Anreus, Orozco in Gringoland (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), p. 106. 27.  Miliotes, “The Murals at the New School for Social Research (1930–31),” p. 141. 28.  Orozco to Jorge Juan Crespo de la Serna, January 21, 1931, published in Luis Cardoza y Aragón, Orozco (Mexico: UNAM, 1959), p. 285. 29.  “New School Keeps Red Mural Hidden.” The New York Times, May 22, 1953; Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 145. See also Miliotes, “The Murals at the New School for Social Research (1930 –31),” p. 343, note 4; and William Hauptman, “Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade,” Artforum 12 (October 1973):48–52. 30.  Pamela M. Lee, “On the Holes of History: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Work in Paris,” October 85 (Summer, 1998):65. 31.  See Jean Bruce Poole and Tevvy Ball, El Pueblo: The Historical Heart of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002). 32.  David Alfaro Siqueiros, La historia de una insidia: Mi respuesta (Mexico City: Ediciones de “Arte Público,” 1960), p. 32. 33.  Arthur Millier to Jack Jones of the Los Angeles Times, May 1970. Cited in Shifra M. Goldman, “Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles,” in Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 93. 34.  Olivier Debroise, “Action Art: David Alfaro Siqueiros and the Artistic and Ideological Strategies of the 1930s,” in Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, exh. cat. (Mexico City: MUNAL/INBA, 1997), p. 47. 35.  Ibid., p. 48; and Goldman, “Siqueiros and Three Early Murals in Los Angeles,” p. 94. 36.  Poole and Ball, El Pueblo: The Historical Heart of Los Angeles, pp. 1 –59. 37.  William Estrada, “Los Angeles’ Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Space,” Western Folklore 58, No. 2 (winter 1999):118. 38.  Poole and Ball, El Pueblo: The Historical Heart of Los Angeles, 120. 39.  Estrada, “Los Angeles’ Old Plaza and Olvera Street: Imagined and Contested Space,” p. 107. See also the following migration studies and histories of Los Angeles: Roberta S. Greenwood, Down by the Station: Los Angeles Chinatown, 1880–1933 (Los Angeles: University of California, 1996); Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769 – 1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Lawrence A. Cardoso, Mexican Immigration to the United States, 1897–1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 40. Mary K. Coffey, review of the film América Tropical (directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño), The Americas 61, No. 3 (2005):559–60. 41. Desmond Rochfort, Mexican Muralists (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), p. 130.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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42.  Detroit News, March 18, 1933; Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1933. 43.  Alicia Azuela, Diego Rivera en Detroit (Mexico City: UNAM, 1985), p. 189. 44.  Linda Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals (Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1999), pp. 175, 177 –79. 45.  Detroit News, March 18, 1933, quoted ibid., p. 174. 46.  Detroit Free Press, March 20 1933, quoted in Azuela, Diego Rivera en Detroit, p. 188. 47.  David Craven, Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist (New York: G. K Hall, 1997), p. 134. 48.  Anthony Lee, “Workers and Painters: Social Realism and Race in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals,” in Alejandro Anreus, Diana L. Linden, and Jonathan Weinberg, eds., The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 207–8. 49.  Helen Langa, Radical Art: Printmaking and the Left in the 1930s (New York and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), p. 4; and Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 50.  David Frankel, MoMA Highlights (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 144. 51. Craven, Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist, pp. 133 –34. 52.  Ibid., p. 134. 53.  This paragraph summarizes Lee, “Workers and Painters,” especially pp. 206 –8, 213, and 220. 54.  See Lee, “Workers and Painters,” pp. 211 – 12; Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in Detroit and the Midwest, 1917–1933 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); and Marietta Baba and Malvina Abonyi, Mexicans of Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979). 55.  “Will Detroit, Like Mohammed II, Whitewash Its Rivera Murals?” The Art Digest 7 (April 1, 1933):6. 56. Vargas, Proletarians of the North, p. 179. Downs, Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals, p. 24. 57.  Rivera quoted in “Will Detroit, Like Mohammed II, Whitewash Its Rivera Murals?” p. 6. 58.  Articles on the controversy appeared in the American Magazine of Art in February 1933 and in The Art Digest in April 1933. 59.  James Wechsler, “Beyond the Border: The Mexican Mural Movement’s Reception in Soviet Russia and the United States,” in Luis Martín Lozano, ed., Mexican Modern Art: 1900 –1950 (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1999), p. 48; and “From World War I to the Popular Front,” pp. 216–17.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Part 3

Contemporary Responses to Muralism

12 Murals and Marginality in Mexico City The Case of Tepito Arte Acá

Leonard Folgarait

Four men sit on a street curb in the early afternoon. Their attention is fixed on the passing of traffic through the intersection of Héroes de Granaditas and Florida, ten blocks north of the old city center in Mexico City. As the vehicles roll to a stop, the four men run into the throng of cars. As they approach the drivers, the men lift short-handled hammers and vigorously pound them through the empty air onto imaginary surfaces. The signal changes to green and the hammer men return to their places on the curb. This is a ritual of signs, which is understood only in the context of this particular intersection in Mexico City. Changing traffic signals are understood worldwide, but here the red light sets off a unique response from the hammer men: they go into motion on the red signal and stop on the green because only when the traffic is stopped can they effect their purpose. The people in the cars understand what the hammering means because it is happening here, in the center of the barrio (ghetto) of Tepito. Were it to happen elsewhere, the same gesture could produce panic. In Tepito, the behavior is a ritual, which, when decoded as a sign operating in the code of this barrio, means something quite particular and harmless. As Florida Street continues north, the first block on the east side is filled with the sound of hammers striking metal. The hammers are the same as those of the hammer men. The wide heads now strike a real surface, that of the bent sheet metal of automobile bodies.

This is a shortened and revised version of an article by the same title published in Art History Vol. 9, No. 1 (March 1986):55 – 72. All translations are by the author. All uses of the present tense refer to 1984.  

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The function of the hammer men is now clear; to advertise the services of car body repair shops in the barrio. The fake hammering represents real work, the advertisement necessary to attract customers. A more careful look at the streetside hammer men reveals their purpose and strategy, for they approach only those cars that need body repair. This chain of signification depends on the location of the body repair shops nearby and on the general knowledge that this place, Tepito, is where one goes for repairs in Mexico City, of car bodies and the entire automotive mechanical system. Tepiteños have a reputation for being able to repair anything. They are described as fixers, who can put things together. The local workshop economy of Tepito, unique to Mexico City, gives it an economic base coupled with a particular form of social and cultural behavior. Standing on the side of the street where the auto shops on Florida are located and looking across to the other side of that street, one sees the single mural painting that covers the surface of a building from top to almost street level and fills its entire width (plate 8). The murals of Tepito are created by the group Arte Acá, which intends them to function in specific ways. The walls of Tepito that the murals cover mark places where professional occupations and distinct segments of social life intersect. There is a mural on the outside wall of a cabinetmaker’s shop (figure 12.1). A single figure, a woman in contemporary dress, stands, almost twice life-size, in a full frontal position, swaying slightly from the waist down. The woman’s arms are held up and palms forward not for reasons of narrative, to suggest an act of surrender, or to serve any other symbolic function. This pose instead asserts the flatness of the wall on which the image rests. It points to the materiality of the mural’s production as a major part of the content. The slight echo of the woman’s right arm cannot exist in any represented space but only on the flat wall, for this secondary form, ghostly and reduced, can be seen only as a part of a process of imaging. The pose of the arms not only denotes the flatness of the wall in general, but the particular flatness of the wall as part of a building and the qualities of this specific section of the wall. The arms, rectilinear and squared-off, define the space between the two doorways by pointing to the height and width of that planar area. The perpendicular configuration of the bent arms is a definite structure that refers to the general rectangularity of architectural structure and also to the grid of the brickwork pattern, which is such a strong aspect of this image. In this manner, the artwork depends on the available structural material and thereby displays its dependence on the physical integrity of Tepito. The brickwork grid is a sign of a wall, which is part of an entire built environment in which people work and live. The woman’s being is as one with the wall because of her pose and her figural attitude. If the wall is about people, then people have to be about the wall. The woman tells us about the wall and the wall tells us about the woman. Here we

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Figure 12.1 Untitled, figure of a woman, arms held up, outside of cabinetmaker’s shop. Photo was taken by Leonard Folgarait with verbal permission by the artists, for inclusion in the first appearance of this essay in Art History. Reprinted with permission.

see both factors of a single sign, where signifier and signified are both present, engaged in a constant exchange of roles as each is both signifier and signified of the other, and unite in image, material, and purpose to form the second-stage signifier of another sign, which has as its signified the entire cultural community of Tepito. In the end, the woman is of the wall, but rather than become a product of the modernist agenda to fuse image and ground, she is sister to the women of the community who walk past her and are of the wall as much as she is.

Tepito’s Defining Marginalit y

To speak of Tepito is to speak of marginality. The barrio has a long and complex history that has given it a sense of otherness vis-à-vis the rest of the city.1 As Cortés began the destruction of the ancient city, Tepito was left intact and allowed to continue as it had before the conquest of 1521. Cortés took little notice of Tepito because of its distance from the city center and its political insignificance. Thus, from the beginning, Tepito has been marginal. As the city grew, urban planning projects changed the built environment. Neighbor-

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hoods disappeared and appeared; many residents were relocated or displaced. Tepito, untouched on the whole by Mexico City’s growth, became a common destination of these newly homeless. Newly arrived migrants to the city also sought out Tepito as their first base of operations or as a permanent home. The barrio became a microcosm of the nation—a crosssection of those seeking shelter, work, and identity. Because all the Tepiteños were different, they were all the same, and this condition of difference and sameness stood as an absolute difference from the rest of the city. Because of this barrio’s unique history, it still has special qualities. It is, for instance, the site of the great flea market of Mexico City. There are other and larger ones in the city, but this one is reputed to have the widest range and greatest availability of common and uncommon articles for sale and trade. The Tepito market overflows with used goods and new goods, both authentic and black market, and with shoppers native or foreign. The market and the repair shops have made the barrio a mecca for those in search of goods and services unavailable elsewhere. Mexico City depends on this marginal place, and the hammer men know it. Daniel Manrique is the mural painter of Arte Acá. His words — “In Mexico there are two worlds: . . . The fictitious world is: THE OFFICIAL WORLD; the true world is: THE ACÁ WORLD”2— address the question at hand. By “THE ACÁ WORLD,” he means Tepito and all that is like Tepito. Manrique has made marginality the point of this announcement, but ironically, for him “THE OFFICIAL WORLD” is marginal; it is “fictitious” to ACÁ. A quality of separation is carried by the word “acá.” It means “here,” or “this place,” but more idiomatically, “over here,” as in “come over here.” That acá implies motion and arrival means that it locates not only a point of arrival, but also another one left behind. Acá is an attitude or a behavior valued for its superiority over the banal. The most closely related English words belong to youth and countercultures: “hip” and “cool” are close to acá in meaning and in spirit. As Alfonso Hernandez, another member of Arte Acá, explains, the term connotes intimate comradeship, intentionally kept hidden from mainstream society. The positions of both Manrique and Hernandez foreground a marginal relationship to the official world. To apply the term “acá” to a group, to one’s own group, is to accept otherness as a cultural strategy. Tepito has long had a reputation for difference, for opposition to conventional society. Through the 1950s and 1960s, it had a “black legend” of desperate violence, a “cave of thieves, prostitutes, [and] drug addicts . . . and a dangerous source of social infection.”3 The carriers of “social infection” have been called Tepiteños by outsiders, but to insiders, they are ñeros. ñero (always in lowercase in Tepiteño usage) is another secret word, a shorthand subversion and disguise of compañero, or companion. For the Tepiteños themselves, “El ñero is a person who was born in 1521 and since then has ridiculed all the attempts by the city-dwellers to deny his existence.”4 This self-definition speaks of only one ñero, a collective reduced to an individual; of a rural condition implied, as opposed  

 

 

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to an urban one; and of a highly complex relationship between these two conditions, marked by ridicule and denial. The motives of Arte Acá are geared to these issues, especially to the ever-present and worsening economic crisis in Mexico today that not only increases the already-wide gap between rich and poor in Mexico, but also, according to Arte Acá, “radicaliz[es] the cultural contradictions between the privileged people and the others.”5 The Tepiteños are “committed to the investigation of strategies for the defense of the barrio and all its forms of work and life.”6 Anthropologists such as Carlos G. Vélez-Ibañez have investigated such issues in another barrio of Mexico City, with results that apply to Tepito.7 Although Vélez-Ibañez is correct in claiming that “the causes of marginalization and the factors preventing such populations from becoming ‘demarginalized’ lie outside of and not within the populations,”8 the Tepiteños have defined themselves as marginal, and that self-definition, in the end, saved them from a recent imposition from THE OFFICIAL WORLD. Another aspect of the self-generated marginality of Tepito is its attitude toward the Spanish language. Tepiteños consider Spanish a foreign language, from another culture within Mexico, that of the mainstream bourgeoisie. They claim to have created a new language, which includes such words as “acá” and “ñero”—or as Arte Acá puts it, “words that are understood only here [acá].”9 A humorous cartoon by Manrique (figure 12.2) shows a Tepito hammer man “fixing” the armor of an exhausted Don Quixote (the Spanish language), who leans on the fender of a car, another object to be repaired.10 This image insists on the congruence of labor and culture in Tepito. The hammer man’s language is full of truncated words whose forms and use slide across and through the rules of conventional Spanish. Other cultural factors separate Tepito from the rest of the city. The most popular music heard in the barrio is either from the Caribbean or from the border between the United States and Mexico. Neither of these musical forms is typical of central Mexico, but Tepiteños have adopted the music of the geographical fringes of the nation, importing one form of marginality into another. That the art work of Arte Acá has gained more attention in countries such as France (an artists-in-residence exchange took place with the group Populart of Oullins, in 1983–84) and Canada (Arte Acá had commissions for murals at several universities) than in Mexico gave the group further cause for a detachment from their immediate national surroundings. As Arte Acá writes, “We Tepiteños are what we are because we have learned how to be that way; nobody else taught us.”11 el ñero, as I have mentioned, refers to the collected population only through an individual. It is never referred to in the plural. Arte Acá makes much of the point that its members, ranging in number from four to six, are many people become one, el ñero. Vélez-Ibañez again suggests why: “The Mexican social system . . . is not closed to individuals, but is closed to groups and to the masses of marginalized populations.”12 This has long been known of mainstream groups also, and most of Mexico’s leaders have followed a similar pattern of breaking out of group identity and asserting power through  

 

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Figure 12.2 Untitled, a man of Tepito fixing the armor of Don Quixote, ink on paper (1983). Photo was taken by Leonard Folgarait with verbal permission by the artists, for inclusion in the first appearance of this essay in Art History. Reprinted with permission.

personal charisma. That this rule applies systematically to all groups in Mexican society is a new finding and is entirely to the point in regard to el ñero. In the Tepiteños’ maneuverings to gain the attention of the regime and to effect their purpose, they have habitually, in their political practice in Mexico, represented their collective interest in the person of the singular ñero. The painter Manrique has said that this barrio is the “consequence” of “Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom),”13 the battle cry of Emiliano Zapata, leader of peasant armies during the Revolution of 1910. The direct connection to Zapata’s demands links Tepito to the tradition of the exalted revolutionary leader’s untarnished heroism and explicitly challenges the “revolutionary” regime currently in power. Manrique can be said to identify with a mass movement embodied in a dynamic individual, an identification so powerful that it labeled Zapata’s every follower a Zapatista. el ñero would attempt to duplicate Zapata’s representation of his followers. Given the nature of Mexican politics, this is the only choice available to the Tepiteños. Most important, however, the Zapata slogan neatly points to Tepito’s two main concerns—its physical environment (the land of Tepito) and its freedom—that are worth identifying and defending. Were it not for the coherence that el ñero as the singular Tepiteño gives the barrio, the official politics that govern this area would splinter its identity as a whole. Tepito is divided geographically into two major political delegations. It is further segmented into  

 

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three electoral districts, each of which has nine candidates per election. This condition of many political mechanisms bearing down on a small population is unique to the city. Tepito, both at the crossroads and at the edges of geo-political divisions, is all the more marginal and expendable to mainstream politics. In the face of powerful forces of fragmentation, the Tepiteños, so talented at repair, have cobbled together a singular politics and culture that bypass official entanglements and that resist official marginalization. Marginality, however, persists as a concept in Tepito. Locals say, for instance, that “Mexico is the Tepito of the world” and refer to the barrio as “the little planet Tepito,”14 in each case enlarging the scope and physical size of Tepito, but always in a context that makes it insignificant and demarcates it from its surroundings.

A r t e A c á a n d t h e D e f e n s e o f C o mm u n i t y

Arte Acá began in 1972 with four members.15 Only Daniel Manrique remains from the original group. The current (in 1984; see note at the beginning of the chapter) roster consists of four core members, including Carlos Placencia, Alfonso Hernandez, and Carlos Ortíz. This group now includes the painter Manrique; Plancencia and Hernandez are writers, organizers, and charged with public relations, and Ortíz is a photodocumenter and sometime painter. The group has no headquarters or formal organization, nor do they have a leadership structure, and there is allegedly no hierarchy of power. Decisions are made according to an unspoken consensus, a process that they claim typifies political behavior in Tepito itself. Group members feel no overriding obligation to official leaders as individuals but trust in the collective political intuition of the barrio. All of the current members of Arte Acá are of working-class origin, with Placencia and Hernandez the only ones to have continued their education beyond grade school. Manrique is the only one who has formally studied his craft, at the Ministry of Public Education School of Painting and Sculpture in Mexico City, popularly known as La Esmeralda. He attended this school’s special Studio for Workers at night. Previous to and concurrently with his Arte Acá activity, he is a lathe operator by trade. The formation of Arte Acá was no chance grouping of “artists” around an aesthetic agenda. It began as part of a strategy by the members to oppose a threat to Tepito’s existence. In the year 1972 city officials announced Plan Tepito, a design to demolish buildings in Tepito and to replace them with high-rise housing. The Tepiteños saw the Plan as an attempt to displace the barrio with the very model of an appropriated and civilly domesticated neighborhood. What was at stake was the loss of a barrio and of a unique culture. Arte Acá was formed in reaction to this threat. The response to Plan Tepito was straightforward. Arte Acá intended to convey to city planners the Tepiteños’ extreme alarm about the Plan, and to propose a counter-plan for the improvement, rather than the destruction, of Tepito. Arte Acá commissioned a study of the barrio and devised a plan by which to restore and improve the existing structures.

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In 1979, this counter-proposal won honorable mention at a UNESCO-juried urban planning competition. The city government shelved its plan, but as of the mid-1980s (and even 2012), the counter-proposal has not been realized. It is fair to say that Tepito is a street culture. Store fronts and workshops spill out the wares, equipment, and activities from the buildings that house them onto the street, blurring the distinction between inside and outside. The street surfaces are encroached upon by this behavior. Only on the major boulevards does this activity stop at the curb, but the hammer men invade even that space. The idea that architecture and the built environment define and compartmentalize people and behavior does not operate in Tepito. Rather, commercial and social behaviors subvert the segregating function of buildings and streets by crossing through them with a singular and unifying effect. Tepiteños consider architecture something that, because of “its use, changes its original physiognomy by force of necessity”16 and strengthens human relations. Buildings are for storage and provide shelter in bad weather. Life and work happen outside whenever possible. Alfonso Hernandez maintains that such a culture resists the alienation produced by a built environment that functions normally. To him, the life of Tepito is “in the street, of the street, and with the street.”17 This is the context in which the Arte Acá murals exist. They attract attention to themselves as images and at times seem to draw attention away from the wall that is their support. Arte Acá has given the walls this flexibility of presence and purpose, more reason to lose their materiality and to become one with the flow of sameness of identity that travels through and in spite of the walls, and, as Ortíz has said, “change[s] the quality of the attention given to the walls.”18 On the other hand, as the buildings were always neutral backgrounds to the street life in Tepito, as ground against which people move, the painted figures in the murals make the wall as supporting ground explicit, in that because these figures are on the walls, they could not exist without them. Many of the painted figures are modeled after recognizable Tepiteños, furthering this fusion of painted life and real life.19 What does Manrique paint and why? Arte Acá answers that question obliquely: “He paints a communication with the people”; “one thing is what can be seen, and another is what one can begin to understand”; “it is not important what was painted, only that it was painted”; and “the significance is the presence of the artistic act.”20 Arte Acá has chosen not to speak of context or theme, unlike other producers of art and culture. When Arte Acá explains what the murals are not about, they distance the question of subject matter but point to a different content, the negation of one cultural position and the protection of another. Hernandez explains that the murals are “not like the work of the great muralists, not about history; they are about presence rather than theme, and they are not located in official places . . . [Arte Acá] is against the House of Culture and for culture in the houses. Manrique wants to demystify the idea of a great work of art and of a master.”21 To Arte Acá, the meaning of the murals is in how the very making of the murals is

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purposeful as cultural strategy, rather than in their subject matter. The question is not, what do the murals depict? but what do the murals do; how do they behave? According to Hernandez: The murals mark a territory, which makes one feel the need and spirit to defend it. The murals . . . are there, interrogating everyone’s level of consciousness, replacing plastic discourse with a dialogue from skin to skin. . . . a superimposed set of skins covering a single heart. . . . The reality of the neighborhood is made into an act of presence. . . . The art is a pretext for social action. There is a correspondence between the skins of walls and the skins of people. The murals have an ephemeral quality, but they direct attention to things more important than art.22

And Carlos Ortíz says, “The mural exists, as does the wall, the space, and the people.”23 Arte Acá does not consider the murals conventional art, art that has a metaphorical relationship to its subject matter, distanced by style. For Arte Acá, the murals, instead of reflecting or repeating the figures they depict, are as one with their subject, sharing the same “skin” because they have a “single heart.” At times, “because Manrique paints so fast, one gets the feeling that the figures were always there and that he is waking them.”24 Here Hernandez explains how Manrique “fixes” the walls, making them look and work as they are intended to, letting them reach their potential. That fixing differs little from the activity of the auto body menders, finding and bringing forth the original perfection of form in the dented and bent steel. For Arte Acá, Manrique is not an artist but a worker who elicits the best from a given situation. Arte Acá intends the murals not to be art at all, but an emphasis on or expansion of the given context. By reducing the importance of content and style they keep art close to the street culture and keep the street from becoming a museum, with its passive and controlled audience. For that reason they do not title the murals, which are known only by their street address, such as Florida 53, assuming an identity given only by designations of a real place in the community, rather than by some grand title. Arte Acá paints murals on buildings at the request of the owners of shops or of housing residents. The group is not paid for its work, except for the cost of materials, but on occasion it accepts goods or services. The murals, as a part of and an extension of Tepito culture, cannot intrude upon or make demands on what they are already a part of; they can only elaborate Tepito on its own terms. They can make more visible or more present what is already there, covering all in a common skin. To Hernandez, muralism has been the group’s “best intervention into the question of cultural space.”25 The Tepiteños have to consider muralism, as a form of culture, in these terms —not as an aesthetic product, but as part of the dynamic of street life. Murals have to be part of the great continuum of the acá world. In 1982, an officer of the Ministry of Culture, noting that the work of Arte Acá “becomes significant in an explicitly political context,”26 recognized the impos 

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sibility of separating the murals’ art from their politics. As Arte Acá has written, “Here we defend the home, the yard, and the street, because the intimate relationship between these gives Tepito its consciousness of neighborhood and community.”27 There is one instance of an Arte Acá mural painted on a wall that crosses the official border with a neighboring barrio. It was located there to link communities otherwise officially and arbitrarily divided within the same cultural geography.

Mur al s in Tepito: Me aning and Necessit y

Two remaining murals represent aspects of contemporary Tepito. In the first (figure 12.3), a mother and father offer a supportive farewell to their son. The narrative is not simple, however, and it is unclear that the son will ever leave the class-determined life of his parents. If we read right to left, from the mother to the son, a different sense of the story unfolds. The arms of the mother reach out and away from her body in expansive gestures, implying strength. The father’s arms define a smaller space and a reduction of motion, his left arm brought in and his right arm downward on his son’s shoulder. Both of the son’s arms are brought in and against his body, making him the figure least capable of assertively presencing himself. There are forces that bring him back to the right, to the family. One is the father’s grip on his shoulder. The son’s own right arm, moreover, directs the viewer’s eye and his own body back to the right. Also, the son’s hands are of particular interest. His own right hand is flexed oddly, almost as if strained unnaturally, and his left one is weighed down by the hammer he holds, anchoring him to the spot on which he stands. The colored bands of the background wrap around his head and pull him back to the right. The fate of the young man is compromised by his condition of vulnerability. His nudity signals his lack of defense against the world. The only item he “wears,” the hammer, carries all the powers of identity needed here. The mural’s pessimistic message is that the class into which the son has been born offers him no preparation to leave it. On the contrary, it leaves him naked and puts into his hands the sign of the hammer men. The heavy tool—and all it represents—pulls his arm down, limits his spatial and class mobility, and fixes him to this time and place. The lettering on this wall reads “TEPITO ARTE ACÁ—EL ÑERO EN LA CULTURA,” the motto of Arte Acá that here also serves as caption for the mural. el ñero is born into this culture and cannot be removed from it. It is known that most Tepiteños never leave the barrio. It is also known that in no other part of the city can carrying such a hammer be as meaningful as it is in Tepito. The worker who puts things together also keeps the social structure together by staying home. The last mural I consider shows several nude male figures in a scene of large machine-like forms (figure 12.4). The subject seems to be, simply, men at work. Steel pipes attached to the wall mark the top of the painted scene. Manrique has extended these real pipes, painting them illusionistically, into the scene of the mural.  

 

 

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Figure 12.3 (left) Untitled, family of three. Photo was taken by Leonard Folgarait with verbal permission by the artists, for inclusion in the first appearance of this essay in Art History. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 12.4 Untitled, male figures at work in a machine environment. Photo was taken by Leonard Folgarait with verbal permission by the artists, for inclusion in the first appearance of this essay in Art History. Reprinted with permission.

Figure 12.5 Detail of Figure 12.4. Photo was taken by Leonard Folgarait with verbal permission by the artists, for inclusion in the first appearance of this essay in Art History. Reprinted with permission.

They connect to parts of the machinery, thereby linking actual objects and systems of functional and material life to the imaged world worked by the nude laborers. Whereas the actual pipes drew no notice on the wall before the mural was painted, the pipes — banal objects of everyday life—are now given a reason to be looked at, rather than simply seen. Now viewers must consider their purpose and follow the pipes to the interior of these buildings, the workshops and living rooms to which they bring light and power. The pipes become meaningful in the mural, but only because they were already there, on and part of the wall. This wall dictated, because of its specific material properties, what could be painted on it. The mural completes and “wakes up” the wall and the people it refers to. For this reason the work performed by the men is abstract. Had it been recognizable work performed on identifiable machines, its specificity would have detracted from the concrete qualities the pipes and the wall had before the mural was painted. The image considers the wall/building/community as a bundled whole. It is there to be looked through rather than looked at, as something whose meaning, separate from the wall, we should not try to figure out; instead we should figure in the image as a supplement to the wall and its larger context. Pipes sometimes enter the bodies of these workers and sometimes the body parts become gray and smoothly machine-like, as in the bowed head of the figure on the right and the fingers of the right hand of the central figure in this detail (figure 12.5). The men, rather than work the machines, are part of the machine system. The pipes that feed the machines feed the workers. As machines wear no clothes, neither do machine 

 

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men. The workers are too much like the objects they work on for viewers to imagine them as separate. Because of this overlap, the machines are humanized and the human workers mechanized. If one or the other part/party were absent, the system would fall apart and neither partner would survive. Only the unity of the two in the image gives them purpose and meaning. The real sheets of metal that are applied to the wall belong to many places at once, both literally and figuratively. They are figuratively part of the imaged workers, part of the illusionary space they occupy, and part of the actual wall. They literally come from a metal factory and figuratively go to, as their destination (in our notions of what they are “really for”), a finished metal structure. They are the end point of an imagined trajectory begun by the real pipes—real material has gone back to real material, sandwiching the imaged space and labor in-between. The final reality of the metal sheets is in the physical manufacture of the mural, the labor of Manrique, who applied the metal to the wall. Manrique is the real worker here, making an image out of wall and paint, and using the material put in place by other workers. In this way Manrique as an artist becomes part of the working-class culture of Tepito. He depicts workers putting together pieces of metal, as he works the metal to produce an object, the mural. He becomes what he always was, an artist/worker.28 And the murals, born there from internal necessity, behave as extensions and assertions of a message that was already there in Tepito.  

Th e T e p i t o M u r a l s : S t r at e g i c P l a n a n d S u r v i va l

Had Plan Tepito been realized, the city planners would have transformed the barrio completely. The Plan included the razing of six square blocks, demolishing 1,400 buildings, and placing 400 families in temporary housing. Only 556 structures would have replaced the old, leaving hundreds of families homeless. Tepito, as a result, would no longer exist. Nor would its cottage industry account for 55 percent of the local economy, or its street merchants for 25 percent, or its storefront shops for 20 percent. Arte Acá was successful in stopping Plan Tepito. What role did their murals play in their strategy? There is law in Mexico that protects any mural painting from destruction. Thus walls bearing mural paintings in Tepito could not have been torn down. In light of Arte Acá’s counter-Plan of Improvement, which was intended to bolster the local economy, improve housing, and encourage community life, the murals can be seen —in style, content, and function—as a strategic contribution. The story of Tepito, Arte Acá, and the murals is one of survival. All the players of this story survived because the artists carefully assessed the crisis at hand and developed a strategy that anticipated every contingency. But Arte Acá went further. Rather than import a foreign theory or behavior or change the habits of their culture, they built upon what they had and expanded the real power of Tepito with the symbolic power of the murals. The murals imaged and expanded upon what was already there, because  

 

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the integrity of the barrio would be protected only if no basic change was made in its socio-cultural structure. As David Adams writes about barrio culture, “The Mexican people . . . will find solutions to survival, and . . . these solutions may not be what the planners . . . had in mind.”29 And, as an Arte Acá poster reads, “tepito sí.”

Notes

1.  Carlos Ortíz, historian of Tepito and member of Arte Acá, in interview with author, May 1984. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the historical material comes from this source. 2.  Daniel Manrique, in his “Ensayo Pa’ Balconear al Mexicano Desde un Punto de Vista muy Acá,” in Raúl Bejar Navarro, El Mexicano— aspectos culturales y psicosociales, 3rd ed. (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983), pp. 201 – 37; quote is from page 233. 3.  el ñero en la cultura, p. 6. Published in Mexico City, no date but probably 1984. Hereafter indicated as el ñero. 4.  el ñero, p. 2. 5.  el ñero, p. 5. 6.  el ñero, p. 5. 7.  Carlos G. Vélez-Ibañez, Rituals of Marginality: Politics, Process and Cultural Change in Urban Central Mexico, 1969–1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 8.  Vélez-Ibañez, p. 18. 9.  el ñero, p. 5. 10.  An illustration for el ñero, p. 1. 11.  el ñero, p. 5. 12.  Vélez-Ibañez, p. 22. 13.  Manrique, p. 232. 14.  el ñero, pp. 5 and 4. 15.  The history of Arte Acá comes from the author’s interviews with Ortíz and Hernandez and from the pages of el ñero. 16.  el ñero, p. 8. 17. Interview. 18. Interview. 19.  Convivir, mimeograph self-published by Populart in Oullins, 1983, p. 11. 20.  Hernandez and Ortíz, interviews. 21. Interview. 22. Interview. 23. Interview. 24.  Hernandez, interview. 25. Interview. 26.  Convivir, p. 1. 27.  Convivir, p. 4. 28.  el ñero, p. 3. 29.  From the foreword to Vélez-Ibañez, p. x.  

 

 

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13 Radical Mestizaje in Chicano/a Murals Holly Barnet-Sanchez

Chicano/a mestizaje has its roots in the historically based and discursively constructed mixture that defined the racial, cultural, and national identity for post-Revolutionary Mexico.1 On the one hand, it connoted conquest, colonization, subjugation, and racism. On the other, it set forth the idea of a new people —la raza de bronze (the bronze people), a term derived from Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’ 1925 essay, La Raza cósmica—with concomitant new ways of being that drew from multiple histories and cultures.2 Chicano/as expanded their own identity as mestizo/a to include in the mixture their many decades of being American in the United States. They extended their own complex identities through an acknowledgment of belonging to the greater American hemisphere.3 As literary scholar Rafael Pérez-Torres notes, mestizaje in the Americas has become “both a metaphor and the precondition for cultural production in the ‘New’ World . . . a thematic and formal marker of identity.”4 Chicano/a mestizaje, however, moved in a counter-direction from that of the Mexican version. In Mexico, the process of encouraging mestizaje as a form of social engineering began in the nineteenth century, in an effort to physically and culturally assimilate the Indian.5 This same process was re-engaged in the 1920s by the post-Revolutionary government, exemplified by the work of Vasconcelos, as Minister of Public Education (1922–24), and in his famous essay (1925). Mestizaje, and its corollary, indigenismo—the theory and practice of privileging ancient indigenous civilizations and traditions in the national foundational imaginary — served to position the Indian securely in the past and the mestizo as the new universal man of the future.6 “If, then, mestizaje in Mexico  

 

 

 

 

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represents a flight from the Indian,” writes Pérez-Torres, “we might think of Chicana[o] mestizaje as a race toward the Indian.” 7 Or, as journalist Ruben Salazar wrote in 1970, “A Chicano is a Mexican American with a non-Anglo image of himself.”8 The whole-hearted embrace of mestizaje as the Chicano identity by activists, artists, educators, and philosophers was a double-barreled attack. It fought against the privilege and power of the Anglo-European mainstream within the United States, and it also rejected the trajectories of their Mexican American elders who chose the route of assimilation into not only an Anglo-American nation, but also its culture. It was an act of profound, if complicated affirmation, moving toward the Indian on the one hand, while often erasing the existence of contemporary Native Americans on the other.9 Furthermore, it served to collapse considerable differences within Chicano/a communities nationwide. Thus on the one hand, in the early, nationalist period of the movimiento (1965– 72), Vasconcelos’ phrase itself— la raza cosmica— rather than the fullness of its implications, became a potent rallying cry for the creation of a vision of a heroic new Chicano nation, and even for a future led by the bronze continent with Chicanos at the forefront.10 On the other hand, most writers, artists, critics, and scholars used mestizaje as a different kind of construct. Rather than providing a focus on a heroic utopian future, it became a strategic mechanism by which they could separate themselves conceptually and practically from the United States mainstream, a means of critical engagement with complexity, and with issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. It also became a quotidian practice of self-presentation, a statement of the place from which one views the world and presents one’s self. In murals, it became the base from which Chicano/a artists operated as Chicano/as; they complicated and radicalized this position by their use of code switching in form, theme, and content to visualize qualities and aspects of the Chicano experience.11 Radical mestizaje is, therefore, about the production of new meaning, about the creation of a counter-discourse that has the capacity to refuse the erasure inherent in the original Chicano and Mexican formulations of the concept.12 Murals stand out as one of the predominant manifestations of the broad and varied corpus of Chicano/a visual art that both constructs and embodies a radical mestizaje that both takes for granted and privileges mixed-race identities. It romanticizes the past while also offering a critique. It foregrounds the deleterious effects of racism on the one hand and the value of Chicano/a mixed identities and cultures on the other. Through radical mestizaje, Chicano/a murals connect Mexico to the United States, bring the past into the present, and join the practice of art to political and social activism. Radical mestizaje as practice and trope offers us a vehicle to better understand the ways in which Mexican murals have affected both the form and content of Chicano/a murals, and to more effectively tease out how those influences have been appropriated, transformed, and sometimes, rejected. The legacy of Mexican murals in both Mexico and the United States inspired the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the work  

 

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of African American artists of the 1950s. It set the precedent for the early black civil rights murals initiated in 1967 by William Walker and others of Chicago and the early Chicano/a murals in Chicago, Denver, and California.13 Mexican muralists were acknowledged, studied, and sometimes emulated — especially by Chicano/a artists because of the monumentality of their artistic accomplishments that were perceived as making a real difference in the reconstruction of a nation after a decade of revolution. These were understood to be heroic acts. The foregrounding of indigenous peoples and mestizos who were peasants and members of the working class in Mexican murals resonated for artists seeking to help construct the identity, ethos, and ideologies of chicanismo.14 Mexican murals, therefore, occupy a central position in a critical history of the Chicano/a mural movement that is well documented but not always adequately examined. The nature of that centrality is still being analyzed and debated by artists and scholars. Critics and art historians have frequently used point-by-point comparisons between Mexican and Chicano/a murals as the basis for establishing a binary set of measures to ascertain what Chicano/a murals have achieved or failed to accomplish vis-à-vis Mexican murals.15 These measures posit the considerable accomplishments of Mexican murals as the most significant baseline by which to gauge the informal, yet wide-ranging, national mural project undertaken by Chicano/a artists. There are no comparable studies available, however, to assess the legacy of Mexican murals for the more far-reaching international community murals movement, of which Chicano/a murals are definitely a part. This inclusive community-based framework actually places Chicano/a murals at some categorical remove from Mexican murals and provides a sufficiently different frame of reference to make it clear that Chicano/a and Mexican murals are as comparable as apples and oranges. Such a comparison between the Mexican murals of the 1920s through the 1940s and the international community murals movement does, however, renew appreciation of the fixed nature of those earlier, now official murals; it reminds us that what is now permitted in Mexico to be considered a Mexican mural was frozen during those decades.16 There has never really been a flourishing Mexican community murals movement or the acknowledgment of one, although there have been street murals painted there since the early 1970s — as overtly counter-cultural, counter-discursive interventions. These murals are now just beginning to be studied in depth.17 As an alternative to approaches that seek to compare Chicano/a murals with Mexican precedents, it may be fruitful to propose the concept of a radical mestizaje as a process by which attributes and qualities of Mexican murals were incorporated into and transformed by Chicano/a murals, as seen in the close readings below. Chicano/a mural painting is national in scope, local in its particularities, and variable over time and territory. Beginning in 1965, literally thousands of murals were painted throughout the United States; new ones continue to be made.18 Muralists participated in the construction of differing but interconnected collective actions: the national Chicano  

 

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civil rights and art movements,19 as well as the international community mural movement, as noted above.20 These artists engaged in both community-based art making and art-based community making.21 Chicano/a artists re-examined and critiqued American history by reinserting Mexican muralism into their own contemporary practice and into American art history as a legacy of their combined Mexican and American heritage. Furthermore, the artists believed that the Mexican American residents of barrios and colonias (urban neighborhoods and rural communities) deserved their own monumental art. In the broad politicized context of the Mexican American experience, Chicano/a murals embody the multiple, simultaneous, and shifting positions of Chicano/a culture formulated by the artists and by writers such as Luis Valdez and Gloria Anzaldúa, and articulated by scholars such as Rafael Pérez-Torres and Ramón Saldívar, among others.22 A close reading of four early murals demonstrates strategies and qualities of radical mestizaje for making both meaning and form within the contexts of the Chicano civil rights and arts movements.

M e s t i z a j e i n a n E a r ly Ch i c a n o M u r a l

In the fall of 1965, a number of young farm workers and activist teatristas, including Luis and Danny Valdez, founded the Teatro Campesino in Delano, California, with the full support of Cesar Chavez.23 The Teatro’s first efforts were announced on November 2, in a leaflet distributed among the farm workers associated with the newly established United Farm Workers (UFW) and its strikes against growers in the Central Valley of California. It called for volunteers to participate in a new farm workers’ theater designed to be Of, by, and for the men and women (and their families) involved in the strike. . . . The social and human themes emerging from the strike are at least as great and as deep as they were during the strikes and social movements of the 1930s. It is time the Raza landed the artistic blow it is well capable of giving, as witness the revolutionary arts of Mexico.24

This effort to found a community-based improvisational theater is often cited as a major catalyst for an explosion of Chicano/a arts that was already in preparation.25 By the early 1960s, visual, literary, and performing artists who came to call themselves Chicano/a were looking in their Mexican American homes and communities to see “what we had produced that could be called art,”26 and they were traveling to Mexico to learn that country’s history and to claim their cultural patrimony. The Teatro’s founders drew upon their antecedents of the 1930s as models. They relied on the Carpa (Mexican and Mexican American tent theater) traditions of traveling improvisational troupes, often featuring a character akin to the pelado figure — perfected in the movie performances of Cantinflas, the beloved character created by  

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Mario Moreno.27 The Teatro created its own pelado transformed into a Chicano,28 the farmworker Don Sotaco, scrappy and victorious against the growers and the Teamsters in the actos and in the Malcriado cartoons of Andy Zermeño.29 Thus several elements of Chicano/a art are present from these beginnings: a reliance on vernacular and popular culture, a grounding in both American and Mexican social mobilizations and cultural practices, a belief in the value of the arts as activist intervention,30 and an understanding of the importance of performance to get people’s attention and make a point. Cesar Chavez called the march his art form, a concept echoed by Luis Valdez, who wrote of the march as theater.31 By 1967, the Teatro Campesino separated from the UFW, moved to Del Rey in the Central Valley of California near Fresno, and established a cultural center. The following year, the Fresno artist Antonio Bernal painted The Del Rey Mural on the two exterior walls flanking the entrance to the center (figures 13.1 and 13.2), one of the first Chicano/a murals.32 Although it is frequently cited and reproduced, it deserves a careful examination to better understand the several connections made by the Chicano/a movement between the ancient Mesoamerican past and the Chicano/a present, and between Mexico’s revolutionary legacy and contemporary civil rights efforts in the United States. Each mural panel is on a different street of this corner building, so that it is virtually impossible to see or photograph the two walls simultaneously. Nonetheless, they form a single triangular mural requiring the viewer to walk around it to experience its full impact. The halves are brought together by their location, by the activities of the Teatro Campesino members in their cultural center, and by the viewer. This very early work of Chicano/a art brings viewers’ attention to murals as performance. In terms of the idea of movement and mestizaje in Chicano/a art, it became apparent that murals’ scale and placement allowed them to function both in and between artistic/social categories and practices. A procession or a loose grouping of pre-Columbian male Maya/Aztec warriors and dignitaries led by a young woman occupy the panel to the left of the door.33 The figures are mostly in profile, facing the building’s entrance, while the woman who faces them appears to be dancing. The figures are presented in a style reminiscent of the ancient Maya fresco cycle at Bonampak (c. 800).34 If this site was indeed a source for Bernal, it draws ancient murals and performance into similar contemporary forms, thereby creating historical precedents and legacies and giving legitimacy to Chicano/a art forms. It also demonstrates the relevance of ancient beliefs and practices for Chicano/as as philosophical and theoretical underpinnings specifically of the Teatro Campesino, as well as for elements of the larger civil rights and arts movements.35 Luis Valdez and other participants embraced pre-Columbian poetry, ritual, and philosophy as integral to their Chicano/a spiritual and activist worldview.36 Perhaps another important source for the Del Rey Mural is the early poem about cultural affirmation, “Yo Soy Joaquín/I Am Joaquín,” written as a form of agitprop in 1967 by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, founder of the Crusade for Justice in Denver. By

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Figure 13.1 Antonio Bernal. The Del Rey Mural, left panel, Teatro Campesino Cultural Center, Del Rey, California (1968), destroyed. Photograph by Robert Sommer, reproduced with permission of El Teatro Campesino. Courtesy of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, and Robert Sommer.

March of 1967, the Teatro Campesino had adapted the text for a film, released in 1969. The poem ties the character of Joaquin (the Everyman Chicano protagonist) to the entire history of Mexico—indio and Spaniard, good and evil. Furthermore, the poem and the movie, both affirmative calls to action, tie the ancient indigenous civilizations to their conquest, and its resulting mix of Indian and Spaniard as the first mestizaje. This new people and culture are then connected directly to the heroes of the Mexican Revolution, those mestizos upon whom the post-Revolutionary nation was built, and, finally, to the present formation of mestizaje, the Chicano Joaquin. The imagery and sensibilities found in this problematic, precedent-setting text and its significance both to the Teatro Campesino and to the early Chicano/a movimiento are relevant to this mural. Although the mural ignores the Conquest entirely and ties Chicano and black civil rights efforts together, taking Chicano/a ideology or chicanismo in a new, expanded direction, the overall resonances between the two remain. Pérez-Torres cites the poem as an example of historical pastiche (with no parodic intent) that must be considered in the context of Chicano/a culture’s counter-discursive nature.37 The mural similarly carves out a counter-discursive space. We must also consider other sources for the mural. Some of the people who used  

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Figure 13.2 Antonio Bernal. The Del Rey Mural, right panel, Teatro Campesino Cultural Center, Del Rey, California (1968), destroyed. Photograph by Robert Sommer, reproduced with permission of El Teatro Campesino. Courtesy of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, and Robert Sommer.

the Del Rey Cultural Center participated in the marches organized by the UFW and other civil rights organizations throughout the United States. As Valdez wrote in 1971, “A demonstration with a thousand Chicanos, all carrying picket signs, shouting CHICANO POWER! is not a revolution. It is theatre about the revolution.”38 If Bernal invokes a march either as activism or as theater, he cites a salient expression of it, considering the figures on the wall to the right of the door and the year in which this mural was painted, 1968. These figures, primarily men, are once again led by a woman. All face left toward the entrance and as though to meet the other procession around the corner. The accoutrements of the leader identify her as Adelita, a mythical composite—based on the women warriors and soldaderas (camp followers) documented in Mexican revolutionary-era photography. Adelita entered popular culture via corridos (ballads), liberally incorporated into Teatro performances, and commercial calendarios (calendars given out to customers by restaurants and other businesses). In Bernal’s mural she stands ready, curved sword raised, poised to lead a historically mixed group of leaders and heroes. Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata follow her. These populist generals of the Mexican Revolution are now mythical heroes of resistance and the plebe (the working or peasant classes)—or, from  

 

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the perspective of the US government, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue, bandits. Both men carry rifles whose verticality parallels that of Adelita’s sword; Villa reaches for bullets. They are followed by a nineteenth-century Mexican resistance fighter active north of the post-1848 border, perhaps Tiburcio Vasquez, Gregorio Cortez, Joaquín Murrieta, or a mythical composite comparable to Adelita.39 The fighter reaches for his holstered gun. These figures are prepared for combat. Next in line are two men who represent the philosophical poles of Chicano/a activism: Cesar Chavez, whose weapon was nonviolence, and the violent Reies López Tijerina. Chavez undertook his first fast in 1968. He is depicted as carrying both the UFW banner and a pair of branch cutters, symbols both of the labor movement and of actual labor. López Tijerina, who follows him in the mural with a copy of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,40 was imprisoned in 1968 for storming the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, in 1967 to effect a citizen’s arrest of the district attorney. As the leader of the Alianza Federal de Las Mercedes in northern New Mexico, he was intent on forcing the US federal government to honor seventeenth- and eighteenth-century royal land grants to Nuevo Mexicano descendants of early settlers. All five Mexicano/Chicano figures are individuals whose lives (mythic or historic) were closely associated with fighting for the rights of the campesino (farmworker) and raza (the Mexican American/ Chicano people) to own, work, and live on the land. The last members of the procession, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., introduce new elements of alliances, mentoring, and parallel engagement. The two men represent the philosophical poles of the black civil rights movement, echoing those of the Chicano activists. Malcolm X, incongruously in a Black Panther T-shirt and carrying the third upright rifle, represents the militant wing of black nationalism: the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party.41 His hand rests supportively on López Tijerina’s shoulder. The year, 1968, dramatically connected black militancy to Mexico.42 That year also saw racially and politically motivated assassinations in the United States: of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4 and Bobby Kennedy on June 5. King marches at the end of this procession. As the most vocal proponent of nonviolence as a vehicle for social change in the United States, he was an important role model for and ally of Cesar Chavez. Bernal acknowledges that year and those multiple relationships in this panel. Each figure is connected to the others by his (and her) dedication to causes whose values and goals the Teatro Campesino shared and commemorated. There is energy, a sense of alertness, camaraderie, even preparedness. The slogan for the landmark 1966 UFW march from Delano to Sacramento was “Peregrinación, Penitencia, Revolución” (pilgrimage, penitence, revolution).43 Viewers of the two panels of the mural see an unlikely gathering of diverse peoples from past and present about to join ranks and march from the Cultural Center. Each of the figures in the mural panels can also be seen as waiting to be escorted into the center as audience participants in one of the Teatro’s actos. The center is the gather-

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ing place; the skits become the irresistible draw that pulls the past into the present as a few of the most engaged and legendary individuals gather to envision their collective future. Theater (and, by inference, the other arts) here is a locus of and catalyst for individual and social transformation. This 1968 foundational and performative meeting of ancient elite personages, modern historical figures, and contemporary working-classbased Chicano/a and black civil rights activists in the Del Rey Mural establishes multiple self-identities for Chicanos as mestizo. This is visible not only in terms both of race and ethnicity, but also of differing class affiliations through time and over territory. Finally, mestizaje is presented here as alliances between political and cultural engagement striving for reform and revolution.

R adic al Mestiz aje in E a s t L . A .

Willie Herrón began painting murals with a confidence that came from living around those who wrote on the walls in the East L.A. neighborhoods and housing projects in which he grew up, from his training as a sign painter, and from years of sketching everything he saw. In 1972 and 1973, he painted three murals in the East L.A. neighborhood of City Terrace. Two of them—The Wall That Cracked Open (1972) (figure 13.3) and Caras, the untitled curved wall mural of 1973 painted with Gronk’s assistance in City Terrace Park (figure 13.4)— are studied together here.44 The third mural, The Plumed Serpent (figure 13.5), at the other end of the alley from The Wall That Cracked Open and across from his mother’s home, is outside the scope of this study.45 Herrón painted The Wall That Cracked Open in the alley behind his home in about twelve hours, as a response to his brother’s almost lethal attack by rival gang members at that spot in the late evening.46 His mural called for an end to the barrio gang warfare that devastated everyone in the communities of East L.A. The Wall That Cracked Open has become an icon of Chicano/a urban culture and art. Incorporating existing graffiti and cracks in the stuccoed surface in his work, Herrón created a reverberating image that simultaneously breaks into and out of the wall. He foregrounds the surface itself, inspired by Siqueiros’ dissolution of walls. Herrón makes the violent expressionism of Orozco his own. In the midst of this tough urban present, however, he remembers the ancient indigenous past as part of the Chicano/a worldview. Using a life and death mask from the pre-Aztec site of Tlatilco, the Native New Mexican Zia symbol, and the word Aztlan—to denote the indigenous/mestizo Chicano/a “nation” —Herrón calls on ancient indigenous belief systems to heal the rage and trauma in an urban hell of institutionalized racism and gang warfare. Further balm is offered by family and belief in Christianity as embodied in the abuelita (grandmother) presenting her crucifix. This mural is a call to action and a prayer, an ofrenda (offering) for the recovery of his brother and the deliverance of his community. The power and effectiveness of this mural as well as the City Terrace Park mural result first from Herrón’s transformation of Mexican precedents, mixed with locally  

 

 

 

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Figure 13.3 Willie Herrón. The Wall That Cracked Open, alley, City Terrace, Los Angeles (1972), whitewashed and restored. Photograph by Marcos SanchezTranquilino, reproduced with permission of Willie Herrón. Courtesy of Willie Herrón and Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino.

recognizable imagery and meaning; second from what he did to the walls; and third from the walls’ locations. In these two murals the images neither rest on the surface of the walls, nor do they work optically to dissolve the walls, as those of Siqueiros did. The brothers in The Wall That Cracked Open and the faces and hands of the curved wall are embedded in, trapped by, and imprisoned within the walls. They lie beneath the surface, distorted in ferocious rage or dream-like apathy by Herrón’s ratcheting up Orozco’s nightmarish disgust to almost hateful caricature. This is evident when one looks at both murals together, and when one stands back from the curved wall. Faces and hands are smashed against the interior surface; they float in what amounts to a circle of hell. Instead of the horrific beauty of the human/machine cyborg in the murals of Oroz­co and Siqueiros, bespeaking the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, Herrón provides the real beauty and horror of graffiti, addressing the limitations of a life that demands this kind of visual language. Mexican American gang graffiti was (and is)

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Figure 13.4 Willie Herrón with the assistance of Gronk and neighborhood youths. Caras, City Terrace Park, City Terrace, Los Angeles (1973), destroyed. Photograph by Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino, reproduced with permission of Willie Herrón. Courtesy of Willie Herrón and Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino

a powerful and graphically compelling form of communication, legible to those who need to read it, but opaque to outsiders. Herrón and Gronk encouraged the graffiti in these murals— so evidently on top of, rather than inside, the surface of these cement canvases— to get the youths to participate in painting the mural. The graffiti are like tattoos on the skin of the murals, on the arms and faces and hands of the people, marks of their imprisonment. The scale and grandeur of Siqueiros’ and Orozco’s visions of history and humanity writ large are brought into the streets of East L.A., and radically altered to express a different, more local, and specific vision. But the scale does not diminish. These murals do not represent a Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, apocalyptic fires of the conquest, the rise of fascism, or the degradations of Catharsis.47 They create a vision of young men trapped in a small neighborhood of a larger barrio in a megalopolis, desperately fighting for— what? For a promise of self-determination made visible, which is personal yet resonates far beyond the barrio. The scale, grandeur, and ferocity of the Mexican murals become Chicano/a through Herrón’s artistry. By absorbing and transposing those qualities, he raises the level of tragedy from the local and particular to the universal. In turn, these same qualities metamorphose in their new locations in alleys and city parks; with their new iconography of 1970s urban anger, frustration, and hope; their different messages for radical change; and the new audiences they address. They are transformed by the  

 

 

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Figure 13.5 Willie Herrón. The Plumed Serpent, alley, City Terrace, Los Angeles (1972), whitewashed and restored. Photograph by Marcos SanchezTranquilino, reproduced with permission of Willie Herrón. Courtesy of Willie Herrón and Marcos Sanchez-Tranquilino.

artist’s experiences of the community and people as they are, and his belief that young Chicano/as must break open the walls of their own imprisonment. The presence of these murals, in turn, transforms and reveals these locations and the people who live in them. Radical mestizaje in these two murals emerges in the imagery but also in the performative collective act of painting them. Furthermore, the performance is continued by the viewers—those who walk through or stand in the alley, or by those who go to the park. In 1974, Carlos Almaraz painted a mural with members of the Third Street Gang called No Somos Esclavos de la Migra . . . (We are not slaves of the INS — Immigration and Naturalization Service; plate 9). It was one of a pair (its mate was No Compre Vino Gallo; Don’t Buy Gallo Wine; figure 13.6), located on the exterior of the former All Nations Community Center buildings on Soto near 4th in Boyle Heights, a predominantly Mexican American barrio.48 These murals can be read as giant billboards or recruiting posters for the causes of the UFW and Chicano/a activists in a neighborhood already blighted with commercial signs. In Chicano/a art there is often a melding of monumental murals as fine art and as forms of commercial or political mass communication. Located on a busy cross-town street, the messages of defiance and agitation of the murals are directed to specifically Mexican American, Mexican immigrant, and Chicano/a populations.  

 

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Figure 13.6 Carlos Almaraz. No Compre Vino Gallo (Don’t Buy Gallo Wine), former All Nations Community Center, Soto near 4th Street, Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (1974), destroyed. Photograph by Eva Cockcroft, reproduced courtesy the Carlos Almaraz Estate. Courtesy of Elsa Flores Almaraz, Tim Drescher, and Eva Cockcroft.

Almaraz, a gifted painter and a graduate of Otis Parsons, was already working with the UFW and Cesar Chavez after his return from a year in New York City. In 1972 he painted a huge portable mural for the annual union convention, incorporating caricatured figures of the Teamsters, the State Police, and growers harassing dignified yet angry striking workers (figure 13.7). No Somos . . . effectively incorporates and alters carefully selected elements and stylistic devices from the murals of Siqueiros, Orozco, and Rivera. The artist takes certain exaggerations even further, intensifying the vehemence to a level more regularly found at demonstrations and marches. By repurposing the band of clenched fists derived from Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural of 1932–33 to hold symbols of different kinds of labor in California (grapes, a sewing needle, a paintbrush, the hammer and sickle), Almaraz equates historical industrial manufacture with the conflict between contemporary agri-business and farm workers, the historical efforts of labor unions with the current attempts of the UFW to unionize, monumental Mexican mural masterpieces with Chicano/a art. He also introduces characters that could be derived from Teatro Campesino actos, composed using Orozco’s repetitions and caricatured human forms. These postures echo the physical movements of the teatristas on their flatbed truck stages. Barbed wire, a motif from the US-Mexico border, binds the leg of the Siqueiros-inspired protestor to a large dried-up bone: the bone of contention? The bone that is thrown to pacify the workers? The bone that dogs and coyotes fight over in Almaraz’s later paintings? The morning suit and top hat of the robber barons (and Uncle Sam) clothe a crudely rendered coyote, wolf, or mouse (a cousin of Mickey, perhaps) as the embodiment of exploitation.  

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Figure 13.7. Carlos Almaraz. United Farm Workers Banner, portable mural (1972). Photographer unknown, reproduced courtesy the Carlos Almaraz Estate. Courtesy of Elsa Flores Almaraz, Tim Drescher, and Eva Cockcroft.

Humor and acid commentary combine as they often do in political cartoons. Words and slogans are pouring out of people’s mouths—not quite in cartoon bubbles, but on the visible rush of air. No Somos Esclavos de la Migra . . . with its in-your-face assertion, cartoon figures, and deadly seriousness of purpose, conveys its message through an unusually abundant, sophisticated, and effective pastiche of Mexican muralism, US mass and popular culture, Chicano/a activist performance motifs, and Almaraz’s own artistic vocabulary. Furthermore, he ties everything together through composition, color, and effective incorporation of architectural structures.  

Conclusion

As I wrote at the outset of this chapter, Mexican murals occupy a central but not isolated position in the history of Chicano/a murals. Their scale and grandeur, the variety of their content, and their perceived relationship to the people and history of Mexico made a profound impact. Those qualities were incorporated, absorbed, and transformed via a Chicano/a worldview as they were mixed with the local imagery, experiences, and places of Chicano/a lives in the United States. In the case of murals, the radicalization

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of mestizaje includes their location and the performative aspects of making and viewing. The monumental scale of murals and their availability in neighborhoods, painted on outdoor walls in alleys and near sidewalks in populous areas, solicits interaction between the mural and artist, the artist and community, the mural and viewers — on a daily basis. Those interactions through time produce further layers of meaning that alter as the viewers and their communities change, resulting in a conceptual palimpsest of the ongoing Chicano/a experience.  

Notes

1.  The definition of the terms “Chicano” and the more contemporarily gendered version, “Chicano/a,” “Chicana/o” or “Chican@” is no longer open to debate for the movimiento years of 1965– 85, the period covered in this chapter; the earliest attempts are the ones that are still in play. “A Chicano is a Mexican American with a non-Anglo image of himself,” and “A Chicano is a politicized Mexican American. To call oneself a Chicano is an overt political act.” Ruben Salazar, “Who Is a Chicano, and What Is It Chicanos Want?” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1970. Santos Martinez, Frontispiece, Dalé Gas — Give it Gas! Chicano Art of Texas (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1977). It is once again a controversial term as generations coming of age in the twenty-first century are negotiating their own relationship to their Chicano/a elders and the movimiento itself. 2.  José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica, Didier T. Jaén, translator (Los Angeles: Centro de Publicaciones, California State University, Los Angeles, 1979 [1925]). 3. Luis Valdez, “Introduction: ‘La Plebe,’ ” in Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner, editors, Az­tlan: An Anthology Mexican American Literature (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. xxxiv. Founding statement of the CARA National Advisory Committee, July 1987. Richard Griswold Del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, editors, Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, 1965–1985 (Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, 1991), p. 27. 4.  Rafael Pérez-Torrez, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. xi. 5.  Stacie Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), p. 11. See also Introduction, pp. 3 – 13, and Chapter 3, “Resurrecting the Past: The Embodiment of the Authentic and the Figure of the Indian,” pp. 78–121. 6.  Widdifield, 1996, pp. 9–13; Pérez-Torres, 2006, pp. 13 –22. 7.  Pérez-Torres, 2006, p. 16. It is not that simple, and the author elaborates further. Neither the Mexican nor the Chicano/a muralists or activists completely effaced contemporary indigenous people or practices, even if official policies within Mexico (or within certain Chicano cultural nationalist declarations) were so directed. 8.  Ruben Salazar, “Who Is a Chicano, and What Is It Chicanos Want?”Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1970. 9.  In social mobilization as in art, there were important alliances made between Chicanos and Native Americans, exceptions to the relegation of the indigenous to the past.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Several murals include references to contemporary indigenous peoples of Central and South America, particularly during US interventions in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s. The Great Wall of Los Angeles, directed by Judy Baca, includes a segment in which a Native American young man’s braids are cut prior to sending him away from the reservation to an Indian School. Luis Valdez and the Teatro Campesino worked directly with contemporary Maya and other indigenous spiritual and performance practitioners. Yolanda BroylesGonzáles, El Teatro Campesino: Theater in the Chicano Movement (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 78–127. 10.  “With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan.” From the Preface, Plan Espiritual de Aztlan, March, 1969, Denver Youth Conference. Published in Valdez and Steiner, 1972, p. 403. “The rise of the Chicano is part of the irrevocable birth of América, born of the blood, flesh, and life spirit of this ancient continent. Beyond the two-thousand mile border between Mexico and the U.S.A. we see our universal race extending to the very tip of South America. We see millions upon millions of bronze people, living in Mestizo nations, some free, some yet to be freed, but existing: Mexicanos, Guatemaltecos, Peruanos, Chilenos, Cubanos, Bolivianos, Puertoriqueños. A new world race born of the racial and cultural blending of centuries. La Raza Cósmica, the true American people.” Luis Valdez, Introduction, “La Plebe,” in Valdez and Steiner, 1972, p. xxxiv. 11.  Rafael Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 210. 12. Pérez-Torres, 2006, p. xi; Ramón Saldívar, “A Dialectic of Difference: Towards a Theory of the Chicano Novel,” Melus Vol. 6 (Fall 1979):88. 13.  An entire generation of African American artists between the 1940s and 1980s were influenced by Mexican art, particularly murals. See Alan Barnett, Community Murals: The People’s Art (Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1984), p. 24; James Prigoff and Robin J. Dunitz, Walls of Heritage/Walls of Pride; African American Murals (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2000), pp. 24 – 25; and Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins and Shifra M. Goldman, In the Spirit of Resistance African-American Modernists and the Mexican Muralist School (New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1996). 14.  Ignacio M. García, Chicanismo: The Forging of a Militant Ethos among Mexican Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 15.  Among those who have worked with this binary structure are Jean Charlot, Shifra Goldman, David Maciel, and Victor Sorell. The two most influential early articles in this genre were Goldman, “Mexican Muralism: Its Social-Educative Roles in Latin America and the United States,” Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research Vol. 13, Nos. 1 and 2 (Spring/Fall 1982):111 –33; revised and reprinted as “Mexican Muralism: Its Influence in Latin American and the United States,” in Goldman, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 101– 17; and Goldman, “Resistencia e identidad: Los murales callejeros de Aztlán, la ciudad ocupada,” Artes Visuales, Mexico City, No. 16 (Winter 1977):22–25, 47–49;  

 

 

 

 

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this appeared as “Resistance and Identity: Street Murals of Occupied Aztlán,” in Goldman, 1994, pp. 118–39. 16.  One of the remarkable aspects of the canonical heroic murals of the early years is that, although they were part of a state-sponsored program of the Ministry of Public Education, the artists still managed to create murals that functioned both within “the party line” and as a counter to the burgeoning Institutional Revolutionary Party’s real agenda. The best of them worked simultaneously with and against the grain. 17.  Shifra M. Goldman’s “Elite Artists and Popular Audiences: The Mexican Front of Cultural Workers,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Vol. 4, 1985, pp. 139 –54, is the first documentation of murals of resistance in Mexico. Bruce Campbell’s Mexican Murals in Times of Crisis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003) is the first book-length study. 18.  The year 1968 is the traditional date provided for the first Chicano murals, The Del Rey Mural in Del Rey, California, and Metafisica in Chicago. However, Tim Drescher has documented that a mural-size banner was created for the interior of the Crusade for Justice building in Denver, Colorado, in 1965. Manuel Martinez painted murals in 1967 and 1968, also at the Denver Crusade for Justice Headquarters. 19.  Chicano/a muralism in the 1960s and 1970s developed during the multiple US civil rights, student, women’s, and anti-war movements, along with similar efforts around the world. Chicano/a art grew directly out of and in support of the Chicano civil rights movement, an umbrella designation for several distinct yet coinciding attempts to end discriminatory practices against, improve the living conditions of, and provide future opportunities for Americans of Mexican descent. This movement was never monolithic in its histories, values, goals, approaches, or even definitions of the newly self-named Chicano/a people. 20.  Pérez-Torres, 1995; The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, The Barrio Murals (Chicago: The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 1987); Timothy W. Drescher, “Afterword: The Next Two Decades,” in Eva Cockcroft, John Pitman Weber, and James Cockcroft, Towards a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998 [1977]) pp. 281 –312. See also Community Murals Magazine (Berkeley, California, 1981–1987); Timothy W. Drescher, San Francisco Murals: Community Creates Its Muse, 1914– 1994 (San Francisco: Pogo Press, 1994). 21.  George Lipsitz, “Not Just Another Social Movement: Poster Art and the Movimiento Chicano,” in Chon Noriega, ed. ¿Just Another Poster? Chicano Graphic Arts in California (Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001), p. 84. Lipsitz discusses Chicano/a poster proliferation as “art-based community making” to underscore the reciprocal relationships between making community and making art that occurred in the Chicano/a movement. 22.  Luis Valdez, “El Plebe,” in Valdez and Steiner, 1972, pp. xxi– xxxiv; Luis Valdez— Early Works: Actos, Bernabé, Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990 [1971]); Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999). In this volume of essays and poetry, Anzaldúa introduced her version of an Aztec concept of Nepantla, or the “in between state” resulting from the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, to describe the Chicana/o experience. See “To Live in the Borderlands Means You,” pp. 216–217; Ramón Saldívar, 1979; Rafael Pérez-Torres, 1995, 2006.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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23.  Broyles-Gonzáles, 1994, p. 10. 24.  From a copy of the original flyer reproduced in the celebratory large-format booklet produced by ETC for their twentieth anniversary, El Teatro Campesino: The First Twenty Years (San Juan Bautista, El Teatro Campesino, 1985), p. 7. 25.  This is a theater in which community members are the actors as well as the audience. 26.  Oral History Interview of Gilbert Sanchez Luján by Jeffrey Rangel, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 1977, p. 25, available at http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/lujan97.htm. 27.  Broyles-Gonzáles, 1994, pp. 3 –77. The term “pelado” is defined as a penniless urban roustabout, comparable in many ways to Charlie Chaplin’s classic character of the tramp. 28.  Valdez, 1972, pp. xxix –xxxi. 29. “Actos” were the skits created by the Teatro Campesino in the fields and on the beds of pick-up trucks. “El Malcriado” (translated as “the ill-bred”) was the official newspaper of the UFW. It often featured reproductions of Mexican graphic arts; the political cartoons of its resident artist, Andy Zermeño; and photographs relevant to UFW actions. 30.  Activist intervention was perceived by the early Teatro ensemble members as not only change within the social body but also the decolonization of the individual bodies and psyches of the Chicano/a. Broyles-Gonzáles, 1994, pp. 78 –127. 31.  Interview by the author with Cesar Chavez, summer 1988. See also Luis Valdez, “Notes on Chicano Theatre,” Luis Valdez—Early Works: Actos, Bernabé and Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990 [1971]), p. 8. 32.  This mural is cited in numerous publications as the first Chicano mural —and as one directly connected to labor and movimiento activism. 33.  Shifra Goldman, “The Iconography of Chicano Self-Determination: Race, Ethnicity, and Class,” Art Journal 49, No. 2 (Summer 1990):168. Goldman correctly acknowledges the remarkable presence of two women placed in roles of action and leadership in this early mural, at a time when women were invisible or anonymous. It should be noted, however, that even while active leaders, they still play a supportive role in the mural. 34.  Shifra Goldman, “How, Why, Where, and When it all Happened,” in Eva Sperling Cockcroft and Holly Barnet-Sanchez, editors, Signs from the Heart: California Chicano Murals (Albuquerque and Venice, California: University of New Mexico Press and Social and Public Art Resource Center, 1993), p. 26. Yolanda Broyles-Gonzáles devotes a chapter in her book to the “Theater of the Sphere,” “a method of performance and life training developed by the ensemble between 1970 and 1980, a theory and practice of communicative action based on Native American (Maya and Aztec) wisdom and teaching — to develop a decolonized Chicano/a human potentiality or performance energy, one rooted in the Americas.” Broyles-Gonzáles, 1994, p. 80. Although this practice postdates the mural by two years, the artist may include an early kernel of such a humanistic concept of communicative action based in the Americas. 35. The key pre-Columbian concept for Chicano/a cultural, philosophical, and social mobilization is “Aztlán.” This was the originary homeland of the Mexica Aztecs prior to their migration south to the Valley of Mexico and the creation of their empire based in Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City). “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” generally considered a foundational manifesto of the Chicano Movement, was written during the 1969 Youth  

 

 

 

 

 

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Liberation Conference in Denver, Colorado. Aztlán has become a highly theorized and contested trope for land, belonging, and collective identity. 36.  Broyles-González addresses the Teatro’s uses of the pre-Columbian in performance and elsewhere: “Furthermore, the Teatro constructed indigena knowledge and science as something pertaining equally to the past, present, and future, not just a thing of the past. The Teatro saw contemporary Chicana/os and Mexicanos as directly rooted in indigena culture and history.” Broyles-Gonzaléz, 1994, p. 121. Although many Chicano/a artists and writers evoked pre-Columbian imagery and histories as part of their oeuvres, the other early art collective that fully embraced that resource was Los Toltecas en Aztlán, located in San Diego. This collective was affiliated with both the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park and the land reclamation/mural project of Chicano Park. One of their most active contributing members was the poet Alurista, who grounded his thought and writing in pre-Columbian belief systems. 37.  Pérez-Torres, 1995, p. 209. 38.  Luis Valdez, “Notes on Chicano Theatre,” Luis Valdez— Early Works: Actos, Bernabé, Pensamiento Serpentino (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990 [1971]), p. 8. 39.  Murrieta is the resistance figure called forth in “Yo Soy Joaquin.” Goldman, 1990, p. 26. Goldman identifies Murrieta as the man in the mural. 40.  The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified in 1848, ceding the northern half of Mexico to the United States—for a price of US $15 million. 41.  Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965. The Black Panther Party for SelfDefense was founded in October 1966, in the wake of and in direct response to his assassination. The Black Panthers were the model for the Chicano militant organization, the Brown Berets. 42.  During the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, two US black track athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, stood with raised fists, black armbands, and heads lowered on the awards podium during the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner. They were ejected from the competition. On October 12, only ten days prior to the opening of the Olympics, youthful residents of Mexico City had experienced the wrath of the government during a demonstration turned massacre at the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district, when several hundred (or thousand) student protestors were killed. 43.  Broyles-Gonzáles, 1994, p. 1. 44. Only The Wall That Cracked Open still exists in its entirety. It, too, was whitewashed in the late 1990s, but has subsequently been recuperated by the original artist, Willie Herrón. Remnants of a much-altered Plumed Serpent are still visible; the artist restored its upper portion in 2010, covering the lower portion with plywood. 45.  These two alley murals are the only instances in which Herrón prominently featured or even incorporated pre-Columbian imagery. The Plumed Serpent is deserving of close analysis of its several versions, which changed its meaning over time. 46.  Herrón returned to paint the mural after ensuring that his brother was being cared for in the hospital. Herrón was twenty-one at the time and a veteran of one other self-directed mural. He was also a participant —with Patssi Valdez, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Gronk —in an artists’ group that would become the performance collective Asco. 47.  These are references to Siqueiros’ Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, located in the Electri 

 

 

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cians’ Syndicate building in Mexico City; to Orozco’s Hospicio Cabañas and University frescoes in Guadalajara; and to his fresco, Catharsis, in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. 48.  Boyle Heights, the first community east of downtown Los Angeles and the LA River, has been home to numerous ethnic populations over the decades, each leaving behind traces that touch the next group.

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14 An Unauthorized History of Post–Mexican School Muralism Bruce Campbell

The term “muralism” and its cousin “muraling” (used now by younger public artists) suggest important characteristics of the mural form: “muralism,” a cohesive outlook with the mural image at its center, and “muraling,” a cultural practice that recurs to monumental visual aesthetics. These terms suggest that the mural image is not only a visual object with aesthetic value that displays an artful technique, but also the product of an organized endeavor, a practical application of knowledge, and of a coherent way of seeing and thinking about the world. Art historians sometimes err in isolating the mural from the muralism that produced it. Adequate recognition of late twentiethcentury Mexican muralism requires that we see latter-day murals as the visual record of a cultural practice and its rich, ongoing public engagements. This chapter takes a historically and politically grounded view of Mexican mural art in the post– Mexican School era. The more conventional view of mural art, which focuses on the individual image, tends to obscure much late twentieth-century Mexican mural production and fails to recognize the aesthetic value of murals not authorized by the Mexican state.1 The official view of Mexican muralism combines a conventional view of art with the conservatism of the post-Revolutionary Mexican state. A focus on the practical entanglements of mural art in Mexico with public space, social communication, and political conflict brings into view a broader and more diverse field of mural production.  

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Me xican Mur alism af ter the Me xican School

The official storyline of Mexican muralism is well known. In the early 1920s, as revolutionary violence ebbed and public institutions were re-consolidated, José Vasconcelos, Minister of Public Education under President Obregón, convened a group of artists. Vasconcelos wanted to create a new civic life for the nation by developing Mexican cultural and aesthetic sensibilities. He theorized that aesthetic consciousness was the pinnacle of historical development, and that a public arts program could both overcome the primitive militarism of revolutionary conflict and help Mexico achieve a state of cultural development surpassing that of the United States, its materialistic neighbor to the north.2 Putting his plan into practice, he commissioned murals for the corridors of public agencies, hiring the artists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, along with others less famous than these tres grandes, or “three great ones.” Although Vasconcelos enjoyed only a brief tenure as education minister, official mural commissions over the next three decades set the national standard for public art and raised the mural’s prestige in Mexico and worldwide. This story usually emphasizes the talent and genius of the artists of the Mexican School and Vasconcelos’ personal vision, the prime movers in bringing art of the highest quality to the Mexican demos. In this version of the story, the mural movement ended as the great artists died off: thus, Mexican muralism, closely identified with los tres grandes, peaked in value and visibility prior to the death of Diego Rivera in 1957, and by 1974, when Siqueiros died, Mexican mural arts had completed their precipitous decline. Subsequently, the legacy of the Mexican School would be viewed as a beautiful corpse rather than a practice continued by subsequent generations of artists. The renowned Mexican poet Octavio Paz described this official view when he wrote in 1979 that “mural painting belongs to [ . . . ] the wax museum of Mexican nationalism.”3 The “decline” of Mexican muralism, however, has an institutional history. In the 1940s and 1950s, successive Mexican governments subordinated mural commissions to state-led modernization, drawing on the accumulated prestige of the Mexican mural in large public works projects (e.g., the National University, 1950 –52) to support an official image of national identity and progress. Revolutionary politics faded from this image, and as a consequence the radical presence in mural images of unionists, campesinos, and so forth was weakened as well. Eventually, the reduction of government funding for arts and culture programs reduced the number of official mural commissions and opened the domestic cultural market to greater influence from private investors and buyers outside Mexico. At the height of the cold war, abstract expressionism, considered politically “safe,” became dominant via its embrace by international capital. In Latin America, US capital from the oil and automotive industries underwrote a de-politicized aesthetic formalism.4 The altered position of Mexican art in the political economy corresponded with the infamous “ruptura” of the painter José Luis Cuevas in 1956 with the Mexican School’s  

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socially representative art. Cuevas denounced the revolutionary nationalist model as a “cortina de nopal,” or “cactus curtain,” like the Soviet Union’s “iron curtain.” The cold war political economy set the conditions for Mexican mural production. The fourteen murals officially commissioned in Mexico in 1969 represented a significant drop from an annual average of thirty-five for the period between 1920 and 1964.5 The alleged death of Mexican muralism is part of a larger story about the demise of the social compact that emerged from the Mexican Revolution, institutionalized first in the 1917 Constitution and later in projects undertaken by the Lázaro Cárdenas administration (1934– 40) to support the working class, campesinos, and indigenous communities in exchange for social stability. Official programs provided essential support to the corporativist politics of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI), which channeled and controlled Mexico’s urban and rural workers, campesinos, students, small business class, and indigenous groups through a one-party regime pursuing economic modernization. After 1940, the government withdrew official support for the Mexican School’s revolutionary nationalist vision of mural production and gradually backed away from the state-led model of economic development. Siqueiros’ final mural commission, the Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum, begun in the late 1960s, was a privately financed jewel in the crown of a massive international tourism project. Mexico at the time of Siqueiros’ death already had a decade’s experience with transnational maquiladoras operating on its northern border, representing policies designed to create a favorable environment for global capitalism. Revolutionary workers and campesinos famously depicted in Mexican School murals were no longer politically convenient images for a government that weakened organized labor and lowered real wages to attract foreign investors. Tensions emerged between the cultural legacy of revolutionary Mexican nationalism and the increasingly neo-liberal and authoritarian Mexican state, between Mexico’s popular sectors and the political apparatus that demanded their obedience. The PRI’s corporativist model entered into a long period of crisis, with Mexican youth, campesinos, unions, and urban working-class communities testing their autonomy and often confronting official authority publicly. These were the circumstances in which post – Mexican School muralism staked out its aesthetic and political positions. The artisticgenius version of Mexican mural history obscures this political context. It also overlooks much of the extraordinary mural work produced after the deaths of los tres grandes. During the period when the mural movement is said to have declined, the nation’s mural production was in fact going through a popular re-alignment and revitalization. To bring the full arc of post –Mexican School mural development into focus, the history of the art form needs to be situated amid the transformations of Mexican politics, culture, and society. Late twentieth-century mural history transpired during an intense process of urbanization and the reconfiguration of urban public space, the development of a mass media visual culture, and political crises for the one-party state. Post–Mexican School muralism emerged in conditions that include massive rural-to-urban migration  

 

 

 

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and urban industrialization, resulting in greater population density and widespread popular political agitation in Mexico City, the center of political and cultural authority in Mexico. Meanwhile, television and satellite technologies have transformed the national public arena, bringing to bear the explicit and implicit ideologies of commercial culture and putting pressure on Mexico’s visual patrimony with television, film, and now digital imagery. Mainstream art historical perspective overlooked much of the recent muralism practiced in plain sight, because this perspective was preoccupied with the completed artistic works of the Mexican School. But the legacy of los tres grandes and others was not solely a body of individual works but also a public cultural practice through which individual works were positioned in the public arena. By looking at Mexican muralism as a public cultural practice, we can see that the much-mourned passing of Mexican mural arts was in fact only the decline of their official prestige and recognition —indeed, a restriction of official recognition—and not the end of the meaning-making endeavor of producing murals, established as an adjunct of the national public sphere in the first half of the twentieth century. Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, et al. not only brought art into the public arena; in an important sense they also established visual art as a component of the public arena. To paraphrase cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis, more than producing new art for the public, they created new publics for art. Their murals gained prestige and recognition in part from the aesthetic power of the image but also, and more importantly, from the way their mural practice positioned the image in the public sphere. Mexican muralism cannot be reduced to the images alone, for it emerged as a cultural practice of the national public sphere (the arena of collective opinion formation and public discourse) with two key components:  

 



1. It is a representational visual language of sweeping scope that links national history and the character of the state to aesthetics and modernity; and



2. It is also a public discourse whose signifying strategies include speech-making; pamphleteering; engaging in public provocation and debate; writing for journals, newspapers, magazines and books; participating in marches and protests; political party militancy; giving interviews to the print media, and so forth.

The Mexican School method of “muraling” operated by linking the artwork, the state, and the general public. The muralist actively mediated these relations by producing public discourse about the mural image as part of the process of producing the image itself. Changes in the political and cultural circumstances of post-Revolutionary Mexico required consonant shifts in mural practice. Among the foremost changes was the loss of the muralist’s power to act in the national public sphere, as muralists became marginalized politically vis-à-vis post-Revolutionary Mexican officialdom, and marginalized culturally vis-à-vis the media of mass communication.

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Moreover, the meaning of the mural image within the public arena was no longer stable. What emerged in the post– Mexican School period in Mexico were in fact two contentious and opposed relationships to the mural image: one official and the other independent of the state and based in social movements that challenged one-party rule— both vying for control of the mural’s public meaning. The official relationship to the mural form was institutionalized through selective application of the 1972 law governing cultural patrimony.6 The Mexican state’s relationship to the mural image reduced muralism to a gallery of conserved images. This official view of the mural separates the aesthetic value of the mural from the social realities or political demands that the image makes publicly visible, and thus typically ignores or silences public speech evoked through the mural form. The independent social movement relationship to the mural form, in contrast, perceives in Mexican murals generally (that is, not only those protected by the state under the law on cultural patrimony) elements of national identity. Mexican civil society has sought to revivify critical public discourse about Mexican society and the need for social change that mural works visibly place in the nation’s public arena. One example of these clashing relationships to the mural image occurred in 2000, when student activists were jailed for “destruction of the artistic patrimony of the nation” after they altered a detail of a Siqueiros mural at the National University, adjusting an open-ended revolutionary date inscribed in the image, “19??,” to read “1999.” The students wanted to link Siqueiros’ mural to the students’ protests in 1999 against tuition hikes and privatization measures that would make a university education less accessible to most Mexicans. The mural in question was The Right to Culture (1956), which depicts students as agents of Mexican history, from Cortés’ battles with the Aztec Empire in 1521 through the Revolution of 1910, to the unspecified historical moment altered in the mural. Another instructive instance occurred two years later, in the 2002 controversy over murals from the 1940s and 1950s destroyed by the US - based Costco Corporation following the privatization of the state-owned Casino de la Selva near Cuernavaca. Citizen organizations demanded that the murals be recognized under the country’s cultural patrimony law and that the privatization of the Casino be reversed; the Mexican state insisted that neither the murals nor the muralists were specifically protected under the law. The official perspective’s segregation of the language of the artistic image from the language of the public arena, the segregation of aesthetic value from public meaning, resulted by the 1970s in a reduction of the legacy of the Mexican School. The murals of los tres grandes became jealously guarded features of national identity and culture, but the public discourse that had given them meaning had become officially irrelevant. The continued production of murals after los tres grandes was weakened as a feature of the national public arena by a decline in government funding; an emphasis on the infrastructure of transportation and tourism, policing, and the segmentation of urban space; and less tolerance of opposition politics. Early signs of the trend were the official effort to  

 

 

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create a tourism-friendly Mexico City for the 1968 Olympic Games and the massacre of several hundred student protesters at Tlatelolco. These were the practical circumstances for muralism after the Mexican School.

From Mur alism to Mur alisms

The Mexican state continued to commission murals at all levels, and legatees of the Mexican School model — important contemporaries of los tres grandes such as Raúl Anguiano, José Chávez Morado, and Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin, as well as younger artists like Adolfo Mexiac, Ariosto Otero, and Patricia Salas—continued to integrate their work into the public sector. But murals lost their prominence in the national public sphere, and the state no longer made arts funding a priority.7 Meanwhile, outside the sphere of influence of limited government commissions and the increasing dominance of private money and an elite gallery system, Mexican muralism continued with the public cultural practice of the Mexican School, alive and well and more combative than ever. Art historians, however, drawn to the highly visible and prestigious mural work of previous decades, paid little heed to the broader field of Mexican muralism until some thirty years after the death of Siqueiros.8 By the 1970s, mural artists who sought to continue the publicly engaged work of the Mexican School had developed a counter-official mural practice that was linked to organized opposition to the one-party Mexican state and its policies. The public meaning and aesthetics of their mural production was no longer centered in official spaces and governing discourses. Instead, they moved their new and innovative mural production to the public arenas of working-class communities. Murals did not disappear —but many of them became less visible to art historians. Mural practice produced images and public discourse for local public arenas, and the muralists experimented with materials, visual aesthetics, thematics, and modalities of production suited to the popular venues, a mass cultural media environment, and the aesthetic sensibilities of emergent social actors. Post–Mexican School mural practice developed multiple strategies for producing publicly meaningful images, connecting mural work to the multiple fronts of political and cultural struggle from the 1960s to the present. The counter-official profile for this new muralism emerged against the backdrop of the PRI’s growing crisis of legitimacy. In the 1960s, students and graduates of Mexico’s arts schools began seeking work outside the official precincts of power. They rejected dogmatic adherence to revolutionary nationalist visual aesthetics in the nation’s art academies, and they also questioned the apolitical individualism promoted by the art markets.9 Students from the arts academies of San Carlos and La Esmeralda produced visual propaganda for the movement of 1968. The influential novelist and cultural critic José Revueltas wrote an essay that critiqued Mexican School visual discourse as bourgeois nationalism used to legitimize an untenable status quo.10 In this context, José Hernández Delgadillo — a third-generation Mexican School  

 

 

 

 

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Figure 14.1 José Hernández Delgadillo. La Mujer en la Lucha (for Asamblea de Barrios), marble grain on cement, Iztapalapa, Mexico City (1992). Photograph: Bruce Campbell.

artist— pioneered the revitalization of socially committed muralism by refusing official commissions in favor of working with student radicals in the provinces. Although much of the mural practice of the student protest movement — such as graffiti street messaging or stenciling—was ephemeral and propagandistic, Delgadillo formalized a new mural practice, with independent social movements as its center of gravity and a corresponding visual aesthetics. His early murals for student organizations combined bold, stencil-like abstract forms with a defiant human figure. By combining abstraction with human form he constructed an image of motion that transcended individual gesture to convey how a collective movement confronted stasis. This visual presentation of dynamic, collective, and popular power continued to be as important to his mural images as his collaboration with protests and radical movements was central to his mural practice (an example of his dynamic presentation can be seen in his La Mujer en la Lucha, shown in figure 14.1) three decades later. In Delgadillo’s mural work, the image has the sharp immediacy of direct action, as his activist aesthetic pushes hard at the solidity of the wall. Delgadillo was not alone in taking in counter-official directions the public activism inherited from the Mexican School. Another artist who allied himself with the student movement was Mario Falcón, who developed monumental political portraits drawn from a hagiography of the political left, and put these portraits at the service of an urban insurgent politics. His murals celebrated radical left leadership and commemorated  

 

 

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moments of violent repression such as the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. During a student takeover of the National University campus in 1972, Falcón painted massive images of Emiliano Zapata and the guerrilla leader Genaro Vásquez on campus buildings, taking the space visually as student militants took it physically. Falcón reprised this radical approach in murals of the late 1980s in collaboration with striking transportation workers in Mexico City. The authorities or their allies destroyed all of Falcón’s National University murals; the later murals were protected by union activists’ constant vigilance. Muralists allied with oppositional politics discovered the ephemeral mural as a monumental public provocation, daring authorities to destroy it and thereby publicly demonstrate an official penchant for censorship and a disdain for a national cultural form. Whereas artists such as Falcón and Delgadillo were not surprised when their works had a short life span, other artists— such as Arnold Belkin— discovered that even official commissions could be ephemeral.11 The growing conservatism of the Mexican state predictably endangered the production of new murals not aligned with official policies. The ephemeral mural thus became symptomatic of the post-Revolutionary public arena, and a distinguishing feature of the post –Mexican School era. Following the Chiapas uprising of 1994, for example, a group of artists in Mexico City (including Felipe Ehrenberg, Rafael Barajas, and Agustín Castro López) formed Resistencia Eléctrica, dedicated to nonviolent direct action aimed at exposing and resisting the official deceptive accounts of events in Chiapas. The group produced ephemeral murals, rapidly and publicly, and both the production and destruction of the murals became mass media events. Similarly, Mauricio Gómez and others painted an immense portrait of Emiliano Zapata on the pavement of Mexico City’s zócalo, or central public square, to celebrate the historic arrival of the Zapatista indigenous rights caravan at the National Palace in April 2001. Post – Mexican School muralism is marked also by an affinity of urban youth for mural forms. Although Mexican graffiti art developed late relative to the rebel aerosol aesthetic in the United States, by the 1980s a graffiti sensibility appeared in Mexico City under the influence of US mass culture and the social disintegration generated by rapid, capitalist urbanization. Roving groups and individuals in Mexico City marked urban territory with their “tags” and painted the occasional defiant “piece.” Flashes of individual artistic talent and organized social consciousness among aerosol artists presented collaborative opportunities between formally trained muralists and marginal urban youth. By the early 1990s, murals were a common product of the student left in the Prepas, or high schools; they were also a common public emblem of rebellious youth culture, often produced in collaboration with formally trained artists. During the 1990s, the mural work of Alfredo Arcos in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, Otto Campbell in Ciudad Juárez, and Iseo Noyola in Mexico City involved significant collaboration with economically marginalized and socially disaffected youth. Another defining change in politically motivated mural practice, the shift to local public arenas noted above, resulted by the 1970s in mural work taking place increasingly outdoors and in the social spaces of working-class Mexicans—the calle, the barrio, the  

 

 

 

 

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vecindad or community housing unit, the local mercado or outdoor market. Although popular murals in Mexico significantly pre-dated the modern mural movement and co-existed with it, community murals had been principally an informal, and often commercial, activity — landscapes and fanciful scenery depicted on the walls of cantinas and restaurants, for example, or images of the Virgin of Guadalupe. With rapid urbanization at mid-century, however, urban space became politicized, with local housing and community economic interests engaged in struggles against commercial designs and/or government modernization schemes. Barrio-based muralism began to re-invent the representational function of the mural image and the public discursive practice of mural production. Nearly a decade after the birth of the community murals movement in the United States, murals in Mexico City’s neighborhoods began to integrate social and political themes. One of the most important producers of barrio-based murals was the arts and culture collective Tepito Arte Acá, founded in 1974 and led by the Tepiteño Daniel Manrique. Arte Acá articulated an anarcho-communitarian social vision in mural practice defending the traditional vecindad—a multi-family housing unit with a shared internal courtyard — against government plans to modernize the barrio of Tepito. The Acá project remained a powerful actor in the barrio until the mid-1980s, and though the group subsequently splintered, Manrique continued to produce murals and to articulate Arte Acá communitarianism in barrios throughout Mexico City (figure 14.2). The Canadian transplant Arnold Belkin, who had advocated for a revival of Mexican muralism as early as the 1960s, also produced community murals. Belkin’s early work in the prisons and later work in barrio settings (such as the community murals he painted in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen in 1972, and in the Magdalena Contreras precinct of Mexico City in the mid-1980s) set him clearly apart from los tres grandes, despite a shared revolutionary politics and embrace of internationalism. Belkin’s widow, Patricia Quijano, logically chose local venues—the mercado, restaurants, community centers, and so on—in their Contreras neighborhood to build on this direction in Belkin’s mural practice from the 1990s to present, now with a civic-minded localism instead of Belkin’s revolutionary and historical outlook. Overall, however, much of the mural work undertaken in urban neighborhoods from the 1970s onward went undocumented, produced in near anonymity nationally even if the artists were known in the neighborhoods where they painted. Independent urban social movements arose after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, providing a unique social laboratory for another generation of mural artists. The earthquake had left thousands dead and thousands more homeless, and when the response of the government proved inadequate, grassroots organizing in the cities’ barrios gave muralism a renewed purpose. Younger artists, often influenced by Manrique’s work, developed relationships with urban communities — for example, Felipe Hernández of the Colonia Morelos in north central Mexico City, Alicia Soto of the Santo Domingo area to the south, and Gustavo Chávez in San Juan de Aragón to the north. Some of these younger artists joined forces to produce mural works for communities other than  

 

 

 

 

 

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their own. Chávez and Soto participated in arts collectives formed after the earthquake (La Gárgola and Espiral Urbana, respectively) and produced mural work in a variety of public settings and neighborhoods, from the northern Azcapotzalco area to Iztapalapa in the south. Frequently, the work of these well-trained and highly capable artists shared the walls in the community with mural images generated by local autodidacts, such as Eduardo Candelas and his project Plástica Humana in Colonia Valle Gómez and “Sandino” Cerda of the Morelos area, and those by anonymous local residents. This proliferation of local muralisms owed some of its impetus to independent social organizations such as the citywide Asamblea de Barrios, which supported community mural activities to build political awareness and group identity. But the proliferation of barrio-based muralisms also represents an appropriation and re-invention of the mural as a medium for conserving and defending Mexican popular culture and historical memory. In the post – Mexican School cultural environment, murals served to define and/or commemorate local working-class public spaces and identities. The working class is made publicly visible in much of the local work of established muralists, such as the murals of Tepito Arte Acá (see figure 14.2), Asamblea de Barrios commissions aimed to identify urban residential communities with the social movement (see figure 14.1), or even Gustavo Bernal’s commemorative mural cycle in the former mines of Tlalpujahua, Michoacán (plate 10). The appropriation of an official cultural form in a broader struggle over the national cultural patrimony associated with the Mexican Revolution is a hallmark of the post – Mexican School era. The mural practice and aesthetics that emerged marked a shift in the locus of the work; they also revealed new productive relationships between artworks and art publics. Perhaps the best-known evidence of the changes is the phenomenon of the grupos in the 1970s, the arts collectives whose collaborative approach to artistic production and alignment with communities marginal to the “art world” were reflected in collectively made community murals and experimentation with ephemeral and portable mural forms. In addition to Tepito Arte Acá, the grupos included the Taller de Arte e Ideología, a project focused on the critique of dominant ideology and led by the art critic Alberto Híjar, who had studied with Siqueiros; the Taller de Investigación Plástica (TIP), based in Morelia, Michoacán, and still extant, a group unique in working closely with campesino groups and rural communities; the Suma group, which grew out of a workshop at the Academia de San Carlos; Proceso Pentágono, centered on installations and other threedimensional works; and the monumental graphics collective Germinal. Although the grupos did not focus all their efforts on the mural form, formal innovations included work with the manta, or banner-cloth, as a kind of mobile mural that allowed the monumental and visual narrative aesthetics of muralism to be adapted for use in protest marches and community assemblies. Many of their experiments with visual language and community participation had implications for mural work, particularly with regard  

 

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Figure 14.2 Daniel Manrique. Detail of community mural for Centro Cultural de Campamentos Unidos, acrylic on cement, Colonia Guerrero, Mexico City (1997). Photograph: Bruce Campbell.

to the way the social realism of the Mexican School relates to contemporary social, political, and cultural realities. One sees this in dramatic form, for example, in El Sepelio, a 1977 mural study on canvas by TIP’s José Luis Soto (see figure 14.3). Soto’s image recapitulates a detail from Diego Rivera’s 1926–27 mural cycle at the Autonomous University of Chapingo— the burial of a revolutionary campesino — but Soto overshadows both the narrated event and Rivera’s visual language with icons of capitalist consumer culture.  

 

 

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Figure 14.3 José Luis Soto. El Sepelio, study for a mural image for the Taller de Investigación Plástica, oil on canvas (1977). Reproduced courtesy of José Luis Soto.

The grupos influenced Mexican cultural production a generation later by providing a model for collective authorship. The group Ojos de Lucha (David Gallegos, Daniel Camacho, and Cassandra Smithies), formed after the 1985 earthquake, worked closely with the independent Garment Workers Union, emphasizing collective authorship, experiments with a highly referential visual language, and a mobile mural (manta) aesthetics. The group’s mantas adapted the narrative imagery of murals to the street tactics and public discourse of social movements, often carefully positioning the viewer in a kind of dialogue with the political cause. The mantas sought to give public visual pres-

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Figure 14.4 Ojos de Lucha. Zapatista manta, acrylic on polyvinyl cloth (1994). Photograph: Bruce Campbell.

ence to social and political actors typically excluded by officialdom and unrepresented in the mass media, as with the manta in figure 14.4, where a Zapatista rebel from rural Chiapas looks eye-to-eye with, and calls to action, the urban viewer in Mexico City, despite the Mexican state’s military containment of the Zapatistas to the southern state. The influence of the grupos is also clear among barrio artists. Tepito Arte Acá enjoys a nearly mythic status among urban community muralists, even though the group’s project of collective production fell apart long ago. In general, collaborative “muraling” remains a widespread practice, manifest from communities in resistance in Chiapas to

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community organizations in urban centers. Murals by artists without formal training, common in the post–Mexican School period, helped democratize an art form previously produced for the official culture by elite representatives of the art world. Not only did self-trained community muralists become more common, but established figures in the art world also helped to de-professionalize mural production. Mauricio Gómez, founder of Germinal, co-authored popular education texts in the 1980s that promoted community mural practices in Mexico City.12 Felipe Ehrenberg, one of Mexico’s most distinguished conceptual artists and a founding member of Proceso Pentágono, spurred the development of talleres de muralismo (mural workshops) in 1980 as a project of his arts and communications workshop Haltos2Ornos (Talleres de Comunicación H2O). H2O promoted a five-day production schedule for murals in workshops that integrated locals into every aspect of mural production, from site selection to image design and transfer. The mural talleres emphasized an amateur artistic authorship and a non-hierarchical, democratic mode of generating images and themes. Ehrenberg estimates that the talleres produced more than a thousand murals throughout Mexico in the 1980s. Iseo Noyola’s Escuela de Cultura Popular (which opened in the early 1990s as the Escuela de Cultura Popular Revolucionaria) also operated to introduce muraling and Mexico’s mural traditions to community activists and political militants. Similarly, some TIP projects in rural Nayarit and Michoacán produced murals executed by communities instead of trained artists. In effect, communities have been empowered to appear in mural work not as visual “content,” like the indigenous people in the works of Diego Rivera, but as both social agents and the social reality of the mural. With the 1994 neo-Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas, mural practice encountered new challenges, locations, and themes. Surprisingly, given the almost exclusively urban history of the mural form, muralism began to appear frequently in the countryside, grounded in local indigenism. Guided in part by the tactics and concerns of the Zapatista movement, oppositional mural practices now aid in opening channels of communication between rural struggles and urban social milieux, and re-invigorate local community autonomy threatened by official efforts at control, global market forces, and commercialized mass culture. Gustavo Chávez has been collaborating in recent years with Chiapas communities and has produced mantas for the Zapatistas’ national tours — political caravans that travel the country to promote democratic reforms and communicate the interests of indigenous communities to the national public. The neoZapatista movement has energized the indigenous communities with which the TIP collaborates. The new political energy in these communities inspired the TIP’s turn, since the mid-1990s, to murals made of mosaic tile, rendering the art works nearly indestructible and thus making difficult conservative efforts to destroy important public representations of the identities and concerns of politically vulnerable local publics. Community murals and mantas painted by artists and/or members of the community are now a commonplace in public protests, especially those defending local space against privatization or other forms of external appropriation.13  

 

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Conclusion

Mexican muralism continues, in multiple forms, at a broad range of sites and with a wide variety of themes. Art historical attention to it remains relatively limited. There is no book-length study yet published treating the muralism of José Hernández Delgadillo, Daniel Manrique of Tepito Arte Acá, or José Luis Soto of the TIP, despite their extensive production and important aesthetic contributions, over more than three decades, to Mexican visual culture. But broader sociographic attention to mural practice is also needed. Muralism outside government institutions and the formal art world is largely undocumented. Conservation of this rich visual record is simply not on the agenda of Mexico’s arts and culture institutions.14 An examination of the recent history of muralism is instructive for continued research. By bringing the mural image into contact with the more sociological observation of mural practice— that is, the aggregate of communicative strategies that make a mural possible and publicly meaningful — one begins to see in the image a locus of social struggle, a point of articulation for collective opinion and public space, and a moment of aesthetic adaptation to changing cultural circumstances. In addition, Mexican muralism after the Mexican School continues to be an artistic practice in the public sphere, despite the reconfiguration of the national public sphere under pressures from mass media culture, the neo-liberal political economy, and an increasing distance between elite discourse and popular experience. Hence, instead of the centrally positioned muralism of the Mexican School, the past forty years have been marked by multiple local muralisms, deploying themselves as elements of diverse local, often counter-official, public spheres. Viewed as a locus of social struggle and medium of public discourse, mural production affords researchers a special kind of visual record. A map of present-day mural practice would reveal nearly all the nodal points of conflict over public space and public policy in Mexico. Murals also track the politicization of Mexico’s cultural patrimony. Cultural patrimony— the forms of symbolic and cultural capital associated with national identity — became a bone of contention as the state moved away from the revolutionary nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. Developments in the mural arts are significant in this regard. First, the public profile of the mural is one instance of this broader cultural conflict, and it pits the emerging independence of social movements against the dead weight of official corporativism in a struggle to determine how mural art is identified with the nation. Myriad popular muralisms co-habit the cultural field with the monolithic but static official profile of the Mexican School. Second, the “content” of murals indicates a reshaping of the cultural field. Intriguingly, for example, despite the still largely masculine domain of mural practice, popular mural images more frequently foreground women as subjects of history and public life than did Mexican School works. In the TIP’s work in north central Mexico, and in Chávez’s work in Chiapas, indigenous communities appear in the image as coeval subjects. Whereas Mexican School imagery  

 

 

 

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involved elite portraiture, Manrique references local histories and personalities whose public importance is undocumented outside oral narrative and the mural work. In sum, counter-official muralisms of late twentieth-century Mexico present a visual and aesthetic record of artistic engagement with social movements, territorial poaching of urban space, delimitation and defense of local popular space, transformation of local public spheres, and critical intervention in mass culture. The absence of this record from the received (authorized) history of the mural represents a challenge for art history. As a public sphere phenomenon, the fate of Mexico’s mural tradition is a political question. The object of study, in this case, beckons the art historian to enter the public arena.

Notes

1.  Bruce Campbell, Mexican Murals in Times of Crisis (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003). 2.  See José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (Mexico City: Espasa-Calpe, 1994). 3.  Octavio Paz, “Social Realism in Mexico: The murals of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros,” artscanada (December/January 1979 –80):59. 4.  See Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Shifra Goldman, “Rewriting the History of Mexican Art: The Politics and Economics of Contemporary Culture,” in Mexico: A Country in Crisis, Jerry R. Ladman, ed. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1986). 5.  Juan Acha, Las culturas estéticas de América Latina (Mexico City: UNAM, 1994), p. 162; and Shifra Goldman, Pintura mexicana contemporánea en tiempos de cambio (Mexico City: Instituto Politécnico Nacional, 1989), pp. 29–30. 6.  Ley federal de monumentos y zonas arqueológicos, artísticos e históricos, Diario Oficial de la Nación, 1972. 7.  In 1993, in an effort to revive the tradition, a number of prominent muralists created a professional organization — Creadores de Arte Público en México — to press for renewed governmental commitment to public art. 8.  Exceptions are Shifra Goldman, Mexican Painting in Times of Crisis, and Leonard Folgarait, “Murals and Marginality in Mexico City: The Case of Tepito Arte Acá,” in Art History 9, No. 1 (1986):55 –72. 9.  See Sylvia Pandolfi, ed., De los grupos los individuos (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1985); María Teresa Favela Fierro, “La década de los sesenta en las Escuelas de Arte,” in the exhibit catalogue Sesenta de los Sesenta (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1983), pp. 6– 17; and Luz María Abarrán Favela, Luisa Fernanda Fernández González, and Laura Elena Ramírez Rasgado, “Importancia del Salón Independiente en el desarrollo artístico y social de México,” Master’s thesis for the Escuela de Historia de Arte, Universidad Iberoamericana, August 1973. 10. José Revueltas, “Escuela Mexicana de Pintura y novela de la revolución,” in José Revueltas, Cuestionamientos e intenciones (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1978). 11.  See Arnold Belkin, Contra la amnesia (Mexico City: Editorial Damés, 1986). 12.  Mauricio Gómez Morín, Teresita González Carballo, María Esther Montes González,  

 

 

 

 

 

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Responses to Muralism

and Marcela Noriega Melchor, Manual de Mantas (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana– Xochimilco, 1984); and Mauricio Gómez Morín, Cómo hacer un periódico mural (Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1987). 13.  See my “Mural Production and Public Space in Mexico,” in Everyday Life in Urban Mexico, Gareth A. Jones, ed. (Palgrave, 2011). 14. At the Getty Institute’s 2003 international symposium on “Mural Painting and Conservation in the Americas,” Walter Boelsterly, director of Mexico’s National Center for Artistic Patrimony, indicated that documenting murals in popular settings is a prohibitively expensive undertaking given the budget for his office.  

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Part 4

Chronology and Primary Texts

Chronology Alejandro Anreus with Holly Barnet-Sanchez and Bruce Campbell

M e x i c a n - US B o r d e r R e l at i o n s , 1836 – 5 4  

 

1836

Texas wins its independence from Mexico and establishes an independent republic.

1845

The Territory of Texas is annexed by the United States.

1846

The United States, under the leadership of President James K. Polk, invades Mexico in an effort to settle long-disputed boundary lines and to expand US territory, with the support of a near-unanimous declaration of war by the US Congress in May.

1847

Mexico City falls to invading US forces, led by General Winfield Scott on September 16.

1848

The Mexican War ends with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It is signed on February 2 and ratifications are exchanged on May 30. The northern frontier lands, comprising approximately one-third (one-half, if Texas is included) of all Mexican territory are ceded to the United States. Land rights, freedom of religion, language, and education are initially guaranteed to former Mexican citizens by this treaty; ultimately such provisions are removed from the final document.

1854

The Gadsden Purchase Treaty is signed between the governments of Mexico and the United States. This ratifies the ceding of the Mesilla Valley (now portions of New Mexico and Arizona) to the United States for $10 million.

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Th e U n i t e d S tat e s a n d M e x i c a n Am e r i c a n s , 185 4 – 19 10  

1855

The Newspaper El Clamor Público is founded in Los Angeles.

1859

The Cortina War is waged, led by Juan Cortina to protest Anglo American mistreatment of Mexican Americans.

1861

The US Civil War begins and more than 10,000 Mexican Americans serve in both Union and Confederate armed forces. It ends in 1865, legally abolishing slavery.

1875

Mariano Vallejo’s history of California from a Mexican American perspective is published.

1877

The El Paso Salt War is waged by Mexican Americans when Anglo Texans deny Mexican Americans their salt rights.

1881

The newspaper The Laredo Times begins publication.

1883

The first attempt to organize a Mexican American agricultural union happens in Texas.

1892

Eusebio Chacón writes El hijo de la tempestad, one of the first Mexican American novels.

1894

The Alianza Hispano Americano, one of the first mutual-aid (mutualista) organizations is formed in Tucson.

1900

Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón found the magazine Regeneración in Mexico. Over 125 Spanish-language newspapers are in circulation throughout the United States.

1901

Theodore Roosevelt is elected President of the United States; serves until 1909. Ricardo Flores Magón founded the Partido Liberal Mexicano (Liberal Reformist Association) as part of an effort to overthrow the Díaz administration in Mexico. He connected his ideas about revolution in Mexico to working-class struggles in the United States.

1904

Ricardo Flores Magón founded the magazine Regeneración in San Antonio, in 1905 in Saint Louis, and 1906 in Canada. In 1907 he began Revolución in Los Angeles, and restarted Regeneración there in 1908.

1909

William Howard Taft is elected President of the United States; serves until 1913.

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M e x i c o, E u r o p e , t h e U n i t e d S tat e s , 19 10 – 2 0 03  

1910

Francisco I. Madero campaigns against sitting President Porfirio Díaz, until he is arrested and jailed. Díaz wins eight terms through electoral rigging. Madero in exile in the United States. Revolution begins. The first large-scale migration of Mexicans to the United States begins. At the New Mexico constitutional convention, Mexican American delegates succeed in establishing equality of the Spanish and English languages for all state business. Diego Rivera (1886–1957) returns to Mexico from Paris and exhibits his European paintings at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts as part of the celebrations of Mexico’s Independence Centennial. Rivera returns to Paris the following year.  

1911

Díaz resigns the presidency and goes into exile. Francisco I. Madero enters Mexico City. David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) enrolls in evening classes at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. Students at the Academy demand educational reforms and go on strike. Among the student leaders of the strike is José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949). The Academy closes.  

 

1912

Peasants in the southern and northern regions of Mexico demand land reform. Emiliano Zapata and Francisco “Pancho” Villa attack the provisional government. Francisco I. Madero is elected President. Diego Rivera visits Toledo twice during the year, studying the work of El Greco and Ignacio Zuloaga.

1913

General Victoriano Huerta seizes power through a military coup. President Francisco I. Madero and his vice-president are assassinated. Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871–1946) inaugurates the open-air art school in Santa Anita. The school is attended by Siqueiros, Fernando Leal (1896–1964), Jean Charlot (1898–1979), Ramón Alva de la Canal (1892–1985), and Fermín Revueltas (1902–35).  

 

 

 

 

 

In Paris, Diego Rivera begins his cubist phase (1913–17).  

Woodrow Wilson is elected President of the United States; serves through World War I and the founding of the League of Nations, until 1921. The miner’s strike of 1913–14 in Ludlow, Colorado, fails and more than fifty people, many Mexican Americans, are killed by the National Guard.  

1914

Constitutionalist army is organized by Venustiano Carranza with the support of Alvaro Obregón. General Victoriano Huerta goes into exile. Siqueiros joins the Constitutionalist army at the behest of painter Gerardo Murillo (“Dr. Atl”) (1875–1964). Orozco joins the Red Battalions of the anarcho 

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syndicalist Casa del Obrero Mundial together with Dr. Atl. He will draw political caricatures and covers for the battalion’s periodical La vanguardia. World War I begins when Austria declares war on Serbia. 1915

Venustiano Carranza reaches Mexico City. Villa and Zapata break with Carranza and capture Mexico City, forcing Carranza’s withdrawal to Veracruz. The “Plan de San Diego” is written in San Diego, Texas, calling for a Mexican American rebellion in the southwestern United States.

1916

Carranza retakes the Mexican capital; his government is recognized by the United States. Villa retaliates by attacking US property, provoking an armed intervention led by General Pershing. Novelist Mariano Azuela publishes Los de abajo; not until 1924 did it receive widespread acclaim. Ramón López Velarde publishes La sangre devota.

1917

A new constitution provides for economic and social reforms. Carranza is elected President of Mexico. Essayist and poet Alfonso Reyes publishes Visión de Anahuac. The United States enters World War I. The Flores Magón Brothers (Ricardo and Enrique) are found guilty of violating the US Espionage Act and are sentenced to prison. The United States passes the Immigration Act, which requires all immigrants except Mexicans to pay a head tax and fulfill a literacy requirement.

1919

Zapata continues his revolt against the Carranza government until he is assassinated in April. The Mexican Academy of History is founded. Siqueiros visits Europe as the Mexican military attaché; he meets with Rivera in Paris, and they discuss the Mexican Revolution and the social role of art. World War I ends with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

1920

Carranza is unsuccessful in naming a successor. The Revolt of Agua Prieta takes place. Carranza is driven from Mexico City into the Puebla sierra, where he is killed in May. Obregón becomes President of Mexico, beginning a period of stability. Philosopher José Vasconcelos is named Minister of Public Education by Obregón. Vasconcelos begins educational and cultural reforms, eventually inviting Mexican artists to paint murals on the walls of government buildings. Rivera is in Italy, where he studies mural painting techniques and the work of Renaissance painters.

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The Johnson Act institutes the first immigration quota in US history, in which all immigration is strictly limited except from the nations of the Western hemisphere. 1921

The National Agrarian Commission implements land reform. Rivera returns to Mexico from Paris. Vasconcelos’ mural program begins with the decoration of the former Jesuit Church San Pedro y San Pablo in Mexico City, by Roberto Montenegro (1887–1968) and others. In November, at the invitation of Vasconcelos, Rivera travels to Yucatán to view pre-Columbian sites in the company of other artists and intellectuals, including poet Carlos Pellicer.  

López Velarde writes “La suave patria” shortly before his premature death. The poem will be included posthumously in the 1932 collection El son del corazón. Pellicer publishes Colores en el mar y otros poemas. Jean Charlot “discovers” the work of popular engraver José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913) and introduces it to his fellow artists. Charlot, Alva de la Canal, and Leal take up the woodcut medium.  

The poet Manuel Maples Arce and the painters Ramón Alva de la Canal, Jean Charlot, and Fernando Leal are active in the estridentista movement (1921–28). Maples Arce publishes the movement’s manifesto, Actual No. 1, “Comprimido estridentista.”  

Warren Harding is elected President of the United States; serves until 1923. Mexican Painters and Photographers of California, one of the first exhibitions of contemporary Mexican art in the United States, opens in Los Angeles. 1922

Rivera begins the encaustic mural Creation in the Anfíteatro Bolívar of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (San Ildefonzo). He is assisted by Carlos Mérida (1891–1985), Jean Charlot, Xavier Guerrero (1896–1974), and Amado de la Cueva (1891–1926).  

 

 

Charlot and Alva de la Canal experiment with fresco on the walls of the open courtyard of the Preparatoria. Together with Revueltas and Leal who will work in encaustic, they will paint murals in the building. They will be joined by Orozco who, working in fresco, will complete the largest mural cycle in the building (1923–26). Siqueiros returns to Mexico and begins murals that he does not complete in the colegio chico of the Preparatoria.  

The Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors is formed by Siqueiros, Rivera, Orozco, and others. The union’s manifesto, authored principally by Siqueiros, will be drafted in 1923 and published in 1924. Broadsheets printed and distributed by the union become the newspaper El Machete. Rivera joins the Mexican Communist Party. Siqueiros will join the following year. Other artists are ideologically close to the Party at this time.

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The estridentistas publish the magazine Ser; it will be followed by Irradiador (1923) and Horizonte (1926–27).  

Maples Arce publishes Andamios interiores. 1923

Villa is assassinated. The Obregón government is behind the killing. Rivera begins murals at the Secretaría de Educación Publica (the SEP, or Ministry of Public Education). Charlot, Guerrero, and de la Cueva paint seven panels in the SEP. Mérida and Emilio Amero (1901–76) paint in the public library annex. Eventually Rivera destroys all of their panels, replacing them with his own work, with the exception of two by de la Cueva and one by Charlot.  

Fermín Revueltas paints a fresco panel in the second courtyard of the SEP. Photographers Edward Weston and Tina Modotti arrive in Mexico City. María Izquierdo (1902–55) arrives in Mexico City with her husband and children.  

Calvin Coolidge becomes President of the United States; serves until 1929. 1924

Dissatisfied with the policies of the Obregón government, Vasconcelos resigns as Minister of Public Education. J. M. Puig Casauranc replaces him. Plutarco Elías Calles, Obregón’s handpicked successor, wins the election and is inaugurated President of Mexico in December. Students protest murals at the Preparatoria and deface murals by Orozco and Siqueiros. Orozco, Siqueiros, and others are dismissed from jobs as mural painters; Rivera is not and continues to work. Maples Arce publishes Urbe.

1925

Calles de-radicalizes organized labor and brings it into the government. Vasconcelos publishes his essay “La raza cósmica.” Orozco paints the mural Omniscience for a private patron at the Casa de los Azulejos in Mexico City. Rivera resigns from the Mexican Communist Party in order to devote himself better to Marxism through his art. He will be re-admitted to the Party in 1926. Salvador Novo publishes XX poemas. Mario Carreño (1913–99) attends the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba.  

1926

The government enforces constitutional anti-church laws. Religious expression is curtailed, with clerical education and dress outlawed. The Mexican Catholic Church declares an ecclesiastical strike. Land reform is also an issue, as a majority of former followers of Zapata and Villa are practicing Catholics. The Cristero peasant revolt takes place in the north-central western provinces. Civil war lasts until truce is called in 1929.

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Rivera, while continuing to paint at the SEP, begins murals in the chapel at Chapingo. Orozco resumes work at the Preparatoria and completes the mural Social Revolution at the Escuela Industrial in Orizaba, Veracruz. Siqueiros abandons artistic activity in favor of union organizing and political activism. Painter and stage designer Adolfo Best-Maugard (1891–1964) publishes Metodo de diseño creativo (A Method of Creative Design), which is used to teach drawing throughout the educational system of Mexico.  

1927

Orozco departs for the United States in search of mural commissions; he will reside there until 1934. Carlos Chávez composes the ballet H.P.; Rivera designs sets and costumes for it. Rivera visits the Soviet Union to participate in the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution; he will return to Mexico in June of the following year. Fermín Revueltas paints a fresco at the Technical-Industrial Institute in Mexico City. María Izquierdo leaves her husband and enrolls at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. Leal paints frescoes at the Ministry of Public Health in Mexico City. Revueltas paints a fresco at the Technical Industrial Institute in Mexico City. La Esmeralda (Escuela Nacional de Pintura y Escultura) opens as an alternative art school to the more conservative Academia de San Carlos. Easel painters such as Manuel Rodríguez Lozano (1897–1971), Agustín Lazo (1896–1971), María Izquierdo, Jesús Guerrero Galván (1910–73), and Antonio Ruíz “El Corcito” (1897–1964), who will be the school’s director from 1942 to 1958, will teach there.  

 

 

 

1928

The constitution is changed so that Obregón may run for the presidency for a second time. President-elect Obregón is assassinated by a radical Catholic activist and is succeeded by Emilio Portes Gil as interim president. Novelist Martín Luis Guzmán publishes El aguila y la serpiente. El Machete becomes the periodical of the Mexican Communist Party. The magazine Contemporáneos (1928–31) begins publication; its editors/ contributors are the poets and essayists Carlos Pellicer, Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo, José Gorostiza, and Jorge Cuesta. Artists committed to easel painting such as Agustín Lazo, Julio Castellanos (1905–47), Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, and Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) are associated with the magazine.  

 

 

Jorge Cuesta edits and publishes Antología de la poesía mexicana moderna. Siqueiros visits the Soviet Union.

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Rivera meets Frida Kahlo (1907–54) at one of Tina Modotti’s weekly parties.  

With Emilio Portes Gil (1928–30), Pascual Ortiz Rubio (1930–32), and Abelardo Rodríguez Luján (1932–34) begin three short-term presidencies with Calles governing indirectly.  

 

 

Daniel Venegas writes the novel Las aventuras de Don Chipote, o cuando los pericos mamen in Los Angeles. 1929

Julio Antonio Mella, exiled Cuban communist and lover of Tina Modotti, is assassinated in Mexico City. The Mexican Communist Party is declared illegal (until 1935). Rivera begins a mural cycle at the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City. In April he accepts an appointment as director of the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, proposing sweeping changes in the curriculum. He is expelled from the Mexican Communist Party. In December Rivera begins a mural on the history of Cuernavaca and Morelos in the loggia of the Palacio de Cortés in Cuernavaca. The mural is commissioned by US Ambassador Dwight W. Morrow. Partido Nacional Revolucionario is created by Calles. After several name and organizational changes it will become the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which will govern Mexico until the end of the twentieth century. Rivera marries Frida Kahlo in August. Vasconcelos campaigns for the presidency and is defeated by Pascual Ortiz Rubio; Calles will continue to govern behind the scenes until 1934. Novelist Martín Luis Guzmán publishes La sombra del caudillo. María Izquierdo and Rufino Tamayo (who had been one of her instructors at the academy) begin a relationship and share a studio (1929–33).  

Jean Charlot leaves for the United States, where he will live and paint in New York, Iowa, Georgia, and will eventually settle in Hawaii, where he will die in 1979. Rivera organizes María Izquierdo’s first solo exhibition at the Galería de Arte Moderno del Teatro Nacional. Herbert Hoover is elected President of the United States; serves until 1933. The US stock market crashes and the Great Depression begins. Repatriation programs begin. Almost 500,000 Mexicans and Americans of Mexican descent are returned to Mexico during a five-year period. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) forms in Corpus Christi, Texas; The LULAC News begins publication. Mexican American artist Antonio Garcia produces paintings based on preColumbian themes.

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1930

Aggression against communists occurs throughout Mexico. The fascist Gold Shirts are created in Mexico City. Siqueiros is expelled from the Mexican Communist Party. Because of tumultuous May Day demonstrations in Mexico City, Siqueiros is placed under confinement in the town of Taxco (1930–32). While in Taxco, Siqueiros will execute prints (woodcuts and lithographs) as well as easel paintings.  

Orozco paints Prometheus at Pomona College, Claremont, California. Rivera is forced to resign the directorship of the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. He begins the Allegory of California at the Stock Exchange in San Francisco, California. Fernando Leal paints murals on the life of Bolívar in the entrance of the Anfiteatro Bolívar at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City. María Izquierdo exhibits her paintings at the Art Center in New York City. Argentinean painter Antonio Berni (1905–81) returns to his homeland after living and studying in Europe since 1925. While in Paris, Berni befriended French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre.  

1931

Orozco completes murals at the New School for Social Research in New York (begun in November 1930). Rivera paints The Making of a Fresco at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California. In December, Rivera’s retrospective (the second in the institution, after Henri Matisse’s) opens at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Guatemalan poet and art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragón arrives in Mexico as an exile from the Ubico y Castañeda dictatorship in his homeland. Berni joins the Communist Party of Argentina. He will leave the Party the following year over ideological differences. Cuban painter Carreño arrives in Spain, where he will remain until 1935. He earns his living as a magazine illustrator and is close to the Communist Party of Spain, although he does not join it.

1932

Rivera paints a mural, commissioned by Edsel Ford, in the courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Orozco travels to Europe for the first and only time; he studies the work of El Greco. Orozco begins his mural cycle at the Baker Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. Siqueiros is in Los Angeles, California, where he paints the murals Worker’s Meeting (Chouinard School of Art, destroyed), Tropical America: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism (The Plaza Art Center), and Portrait of Mexico Today (Dudley Murphy home, Santa Monica).

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Fermín Revueltas completes a fresco on the subject of work in the building of the newspaper El Nacional. Abelardo Rodríguez Luján becomes President of Mexico (until 1934). 1933

Siqueiros travels to Uruguay and Argentina. He paints Plastic Exercise in a private home in Don Torcuato, a province of Buenos Aires, with the collaboration of Argentinean painters Antonio Berni, Lino Eneas Spilimbergo (1896–1964), and others. Siqueiros is expelled from Argentina because of his political activism.  

Tamayo paints a mural in the Conservatory of Music in Mexico City. He ends his relationship with María Izquierdo and begins seeing his future wife Olga Flores Rivas. Julio Castellanos paints his only mural on the subject of children’s games at the Melchor Ocampo school in Coyoacán. Fermín Revueltas paints an allegorical encaustic on the subject of production in the National Mortgage Bank in Mexico City. Silvestre Revueltas composes Janitzio. Rivera begins the mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center in New York. He is dismissed in May and the mural is covered (it will be destroyed in 1934) because of Rivera’s inclusion of a portrait of Lenin in the work. In July, Rivera begins portable murals Portrait of America at the anti-Stalinist New Workers School in New York. The school’s director is his close friend and future biographer Bertram Wolfe. In December, Rivera completes two small portable frescoes for the Communist League of America, a Trotskyite center in New York. Novo publishes Nuevo amor, a collection of poems charged with homo-eroticism. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected President of the United States. He is elected to office an unprecedented four times, dying part way through his fourth term in 1945. FDR institutes the New Deal in 1933, which establishes the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Several federal art programs are created out of the WPA, based in large part on the Mexican example of federal sponsorship of the arts. A national mural program is established for commissioning murals for public buildings such as post offices, government buildings, public schools, and so on. 1934

In February Orozco completes the Dartmouth mural and returns to New York City. He will depart for Mexico in the summer. General Lazaro Cárdenas is elected President of Mexico. This is the end of behindthe-scenes influence of Calles. A Six Year Plan is adopted by the government. Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR, League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers) is founded in Mexico City by printmaker Leopoldo Méndez (1902–69), painter Pablo O’Higgins (1904–83), and writer Juan de la Cabada as part of the Popular Front strategy for opposing fascism and war.  

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Palacio de Bellas Artes, designed by Adamo Boari, is inaugurated. Rivera recreates Man at the Crossroads in Bellas Artes; across from it, Orozco paints the mural Catharsis. Fermín Revueltas completes his stained-glass murals at the Centro Escolar Revolución in Mexico City and the party offices of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional in Culiacán, Sinaloa. 1935

LEAR is commissioned by the government to decorate the walls of the newly renovated Abelardo L. Rodríguez market in the center of the city. Work is executed by both Mexican and US artists (Marion Greenwood and Isamu Noguchi). Rivera is in charge of approving all designs for the murals. Rivera completes the final stairway wall at the Palacio Nacional, begun the previous year. Carlos Chávez composes Sinfonía India. In August at the meetings of the North American Conference of the New Education Fellowship, Rivera and Siqueiros attack each other, brandishing pistols. In October, Rivera will respond to Siqueiros’ accusation that he is a political opportunist by issuing a statement explaining his reasons for breaking with the Mexican Communist Party. Fermín Revueltas completes the stained-glass mural in the building of the local peasant organization in Hermosillo, Sonora. He paints a fresco at the Gabriela Mistral school in Mexico City; he dies from alcohol poisoning on September 9, before he can complete it. Carreño returns to Cuba and exhibits the production of his Spanish years at the Lyceum in Havana.

1936

LEAR is commissioned by the Union of Graphic Workers of the Nation to decorate the main stairway of the union hall in Mexico City. O’Higgins, Méndez, and Alfredo Zalce (1908–2003) collaborate on this project, whose theme is union struggle and the right to strike.  

In February Orozco and Siqueiros attend the American Artists’ Congress in New York City as the official representatives of LEAR. In April Siqueiros establishes the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop—A Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art, in New York City. Jackson Pollock is a student/assistant at the workshop.  

Rivera paints four panels on the theme of Mexican festivals for the new Hotel Reforma in Mexico City. Panels are repainted and later removed by the patrons because of their political and religious satirical content. Rivera files suit and wins, and the panels are eventually sold to art dealer Alberto Misrachi. Antonin Artaud visits Mexico and befriends María Izquierdo. He will write about her paintings in the August issue of Revista de revistas. In July Civil War begins in Spain. Mexican artists, intellectuals, and the Cárdenas government support the Spanish Republic against the fascists until

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the conclusion of the war in 1939 with the victory of Franco’s forces. Afterward, Mexico will offer asylum to thousands of Spaniards. Orozco begins his mural cycle in Guadalajara (at the University, the Governor’s Palace, and the Cabañas Hospice), which will occupy him until 1939. In September Rivera joins the Trotskyite International Communist League. In November he intercedes with President Cárdenas requesting political asylum for Leon Trotsky. Cárdenas grants Trotsky refuge with the stipulation that he not engage in political activity while in Mexico. Mural commissions cease for Rivera in Mexico until 1942. Rufino Tamayo and his wife Olga move to New York City, where they will live until 1954. Tamayo will teach drawing and painting at the Dalton School, the New School for Social Research, and the Brooklyn Academy of Art. Brazilian painter Cândido Portinari (1903–62) paints murals at the Department of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The cycle will be completed in 1944.  

Cuban painter Carreño travels to Mexico, where he studies with Dominican painter Jaime Colson, who espouses a return to the neoclassical tradition. In Mexico Carreño becomes aware of the work of painters Rodríguez Lozano, Julio Castellanos, and Guerrero Galvan. Carreño returns to Cuba the following year. 1937

The Cárdenas government nationalizes the railroads. In January Leon Trotsky and his entourage arrive in Mexico. They will live in Frida Kahlo and Rivera’s Coyoacán home until 1939. Siqueiros, after closing the Experimental Workshop in the fall of 1936, travels to Spain, where he marries Angélica Arenal and joins the 29th division of the Spanish Republican Army, where he will achieve the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. At the invitation of poet Pablo Neruda, writers Carlos Pellicer, Octavio Paz, and José Mancisidor (a member of LEAR) attend the second Congreso Internacional de Escritores en Defensa de la Cultura in Spain. Silvestre Revueltas composes Homenaje a García Lorca. Playwright Rodolfo Usigli writes El gesticulador, which will be staged in 1947. Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) is founded in Mexico City by Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O’Higgins, and others. Ramón Alva de la Canal paints in fresco and encaustic the life of Morelos in the interior of the monument to Morelos in Janitzio, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. Juan O’Gorman (1905–82) paints mural panels in egg tempera for the Mexico City Airport. These are removed because of the satirical manner in which religion and politics are depicted.  

Carreño arrives in Paris, where he will live until 1939.

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1938

The Cárdenas government nationalizes oil fields and mines. André and Jacqueline Breton visit Mexico from April through the summer. They socialize with the Riveras and the Trotskys and travel together. In the fall Rivera and Breton will sign “Manifesto: For a Free Revolutionary Art,” published in Partisan Review, which was actually written by Breton and Trotsky. By the end of this year, personal and political conflicts develop between Trotsky and Rivera. LEAR dissolves in July because of conflicts between Mexican Communist Party members and anti-Stalinist elements within the organization. In November Frida Kahlo has the first exhibition of her paintings, twenty-five works, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. Rivera denounces Stalin’s role in the Spanish Civil War at the Congress of the Confederation of General Workers in Mexico City. Xavier Villaurrutia publishes Nostalgia de la muerte. Rafael Solana, Octavio Paz, Efraín Huerta, and others begin publishing the magazine Taller. It will last until 1941 and it will bring together the two previous generations of writers, including Alfonso Reyes and the Contemporáneos. Siqueiros leaves Spain, and on his way back to Mexico stops in Paris where Louis Aragon arranges for him to lecture on Mexican mural painting. The National Conference of Spanish-Speaking Peoples is organized by Luisa Moreno and Josefina Fierro de Bright. It becomes one of the earliest Mexican American civil rights organizations.

1939

José Gorostiza publishes Muerte sin fin. Frida Kahlo exhibits at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris. Rivera and Trotsky end their personal and political alliance. The Trotskys move to their own house on 19 Viena Street in Coyoacán. Rivera and Kahlo separate and get divorced by the end of the year. Siqueiros paints Retrato de la burguesía, his first mural utilizing Duco paint, airbrush, and stencils at the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas in Mexico City. He is assisted by the exiled Spaniard Josep Renau (1907–82), a painter with experience working in photomontage.  

Argentineans Berni and Spilimbergo paint murals for the Argentine Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Brazilian Portinari paints mural panels for the Brazilian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Carreño exhibits with Jaime Colson and Costa Rican painter Max Jiménez at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris. He departs for Italy. World War II begins when France and Great Britain declare war on Germany.

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1940

Exposición internacional del surrealismo opens at Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City. The exhibit is organized by painter Wolfgang van Paalen and Peruvian poet César Moro. On May 24, Siqueiros leads an assassination attempt on Trotsky in his Coyoacán house. Siqueiros is arrested and questioned. Rivera arrives in San Francisco and paints a mural on the theme of Pan-American unity for the Golden Gate International Exposition. On August 20, Trotsky is assassinated by Spanish Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader. In September, Kahlo visits Rivera in San Francisco and they reconcile. They will remarry in December. Orozco paints frescoes at the Gabino Ortíz Library in Jiquilpán, Michoacán. Composer Silvestre Revueltas dies. 20 Centuries of Mexican Art opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Orozco travels to New York and paints the portable mural Dive Bomber and Tank at the museum. Luis Cardoza y Aragón publishes La nube y el reloj, where he discusses the work of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros as well as easel painters Tamayo, Lazo, and Castellanos. O’Gorman paints a fresco mural at the Gertrudis Bocanegra library in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. General Manuel Ávila Camacho, a practicing Roman Catholic, is elected President of Mexico. Portinari travels in the United States and exhibits his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The press dubs him “the Brazilian Rivera.” Carreño arrives in New York.

1941

Rivera finishes the Golden Gate International Exposition mural in San Francisco and returns to Mexico. Orozco paints a series of fresco murals in the Supreme Court in Mexico City. Rodríguez Lozano paints the fresco mural La piedad en el desierto in the Mexico City penitentiary. Siqueiros flees to Chile as a result of his role in “l’affaire Trotsky.” This is facilitated by the Chilean consul, poet Pablo Neruda, who grants him a visa. In the city of Chillán in southern Chile, Siqueiros paints the mural Muerte al invasor in the library of the Mexico school. Portinari begins murals in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, which he will complete the following year. Carreño exhibits his work at Perls Galleries in New York City.

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1942

Rivera returns to the Palacio Nacional and paints a series of fresco panels on preConquest cultures in the second floor courtyard. Orozco begins fresco murals on the theme of the Apocalypse in the chapel of the Hospital de Jesús Nazareno in Mexico City. The mural will remain incomplete at the time of his death. Siqueiros travels and lectures in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama. Art historian Justino Fernández publishes Orozco Forma e Idea. Carreño returns to Cuba. He marries heiress and art collector María Luisa Gómez Mena. The Sleepy Lagoon Incident, in which twenty-four Mexican American youths are charged with a gang killing, occurs in Los Angeles; seventeen are sentenced to prison until their convictions are reversed for civil rights violations and lack of evidence. The United States institutes the Emergency Labor Program (the Bracero Program) to import Mexican workers during the labor shortages caused by World War II. WPA-sponsored programs for artists, writers, actors, and musicians ends.

1943

José Revueltas publishes the novel El luto humano. The Colegio Nacional de México is newly formed. President Ávila Camacho appoints Orozco and Rivera as representatives of the visual arts. Siqueiros is in Havana, Cuba, where he lectures and paints the murals Nuevo día de las democracias, Dos montañas de América, and Alegoría de la igualdad y confraternidad de las razas blanca y negra en Cuba, this last one at the home of María Luisa Gómez Mena and her husband painter Mario Carreño, who assists the artist. Rivera begins two simultaneous mural projects; one on the history of cardiology for the Instituto Nacional de Cardiología, the other in the nightclub Ciro’s in the Reforma Hotel. Leal completes a fresco cycle on the history of transportation at the San Luis Potosí railroad station begun the previous year. The Zoot-Suit Riots occur in Los Angeles, San Diego, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Detroit, when gangs of US servicemen attack Mexican Americans.

1944

Siqueiros returns to Mexico and paints the mural Cuauhtémoc contra el mito in a private residence. He founds the Realist Center for Modern Art. Rivera begins the mosaic decorations of Anahuacalli, his residence/museum/ tomb begun in 1942. Leal begins frescoes in the Dominican Order church San Juan de Dios, San Luis Potosí.

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The Museum of Modern Art in New York opens the exhibition Modern Cuban Painters, which includes the work of Carreño. Portinari paints murals in the Franciscan church in Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The building is designed by Oscar Niemeyer. The murals will be completed two years later. Carreño and María Luisa Gómez Mena divorce. Carreño travels to New York. 1945

Siqueiros is given his first public wall since 1939; he paints Nueva democracia and the side panels Víctimas de la Guerra and Víctimas del facismo on the third floor of the Palacio de Bellas Artes. He publishes his most controversial text, No hay más ruta que la nuestra. Siqueiros begins the mural Patricios y patricidas at the Santo Domingo Customs House in Mexico City. He will complete this mural in 1966. Rivera paints La gran ciudad de Tenochtitlán at the Palacio Nacional. María Izquierdo is commissioned to paint murals in the main stairwell of the Mexican Federal Government building in Mexico City. The commission is rescinded after pressure from Rivera and Siqueiros. In September, Orozco returns to New York City in the hopes of establishing himself and finding an art dealer to represent him. He will remain in the city until the spring of 1946. Berni paints murals in the dome of the Galerías Pacífico in Buenos Aires. Carreño settles in New York City. He teaches drawing and painting at the New School for Social Research and the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Harry S. Truman assumes the Presidency of the United States after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death; serves until 1953. Thousands of Mexican American soldiers fight in World War II, receiving the largest number of medals for valor based on the percentage of the population for any defined group of combatants. The war ends when Japan surrenders. Josephina Niggli publishes ten stories portraying the alienation of being part Mexican, part Anglo in her book Mexican Village.

1946

Siqueiros is re-admitted to the Mexican Communist Party. Rivera petitions, for the second time, his re-admission to the Mexican Communist Party, but is rejected. Alva de la Canal completes an encaustic mural on the theme of war and peace at the Chapultepec Naval Center. Leopoldo Méndez resigns from the Mexican Communist Party and joins the more populist Grupo Insurgente José Carlos Mariátegui, which will become the Popular Party. With O’Higgins he paints frescoes in the maternity clinic of Hospital #1 of the Mexican Institute of Social Security.

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Miguel Alemán is elected President of Mexico. KCOR in San Antonio becomes the first full-time Spanish-language television station owned and operated by a Mexican American. 1947

President Alemán forms the Commission of Mural Painting, a section of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, consisting of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. Rivera begins the fresco mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en el Alameda Central for the newly constructed Hotel del Prado. Retrospective exhibition of Orozco is held at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Siqueiros exhibits seventy easel paintings at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The Community Services Organization (CSO) forms in Los Angeles to provide grass-roots political organization for Mexican Americans. This is where Cesar Chavez gets his first training. Mario Suárez in his short stories published in the Arizona Quarterly in 1947 and 1948 is one of the first writers to use the term “Chicano” in print.

1948

Rivera completes Hotel del Prado mural, which will be kept from public view for nine years because of his inclusion of the slogan “God does not exist.” Orozco paints murals at the National Teacher’s School in Mexico City, and a portable fresco, Juárez y México Independiente at Chapultepec Castle, which since 1940 has been the National Museum of History. Illness causes the right side of María Izquierdo’s body to become paralyzed. She will paint with her left hand for the next six years. Siqueiros begins, but does not complete, the mural Monumento a Ignacio Allende at San Miguel de Allende. The American GI Forum is founded in Corpus Christi, Texas, to combat discrimination and improve the status of Mexican Americans; branches form in twenty-three states. Carey McWilliams publishes North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. It is considered to be the first, and is still one of the most thorough, histories of the Mexican American experience.

1949

Kahlo is re-admitted to the Mexican Communist Party, but Rivera’s petition is denied for the third time. Rivera’s first major retrospective opens at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in August and closes in December. Carlos Mérida completes a sculptural mural at a private residence in San Angel, Mexico City, followed by a tile mural in the Department of Hydraulic Sources, Mexico City. Both works are abstract and geometric. Octavio Paz publishes Libertad bajo palabra.

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On September 7, Orozco dies in Mexico City. Earlier in the year he had completed two small murals in the Chamber of Deputies at Guadalajara’s Governor’s Palace. Rivera, Siqueiros, and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda will be part of the honor guard at the artist’s funeral. Leal completes his encaustic mural Las apariciones de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in the chapel at Tepeyac in Mexico City. O’Gorman begins mosaic murals at the central library of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico City. He will complete these in 1951. Carreño returns to Cuba. Edward Roybal is the first Mexican American since 1881 to win a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. 1950

Rivera and Siqueiros illustrate a limited edition of Pablo Neruda’s Canto general. Paz publishes his essay “El laberinto de la soledad.” The Mexican Government awards Rivera the National Art Prize. Rivera designs the scenery for José Revueltas’ play El cuadrante de la soledad. Siqueiros returns to the third floor of the Palacio de Bellas Artes and paints the murals Tormento de Cuauhtémoc and Resurección de Cuauhtémoc. He publishes the magazine Arte Público. Both Rivera and Siqueiros campaign for the Stockholm Peace Conference, an anti-atomic bomb gathering sponsored by Communist Parties from all over the world. Mérida completes a mural on the theme of childhood at a daycare center in Coyoacán, Mexico City. He will begin his murals on pre-Columbian myths for the Juárez Public Housing complex, which will be completed in 1952. Rosario Castellanos completes her master’s thesis, “Sobre cultura femenina,” which provides the intellectual underpinnings for the future women’s movement in Mexico. The Korean War begins when the United States and the United Nations send military assistance to South Korea. Car clubs and customized cars appear throughout the Southwest in the 1950s.

1951

Rivera paints murals at the Lerma Waterworks in Mexico City. Intended to be submerged under water, he utilizes polystyrene and liquid rubber. Siqueiros publishes his pamphlet Cómo se pinta un mural. O’Gorman begins mosaic mural Alegoría de México in the Department of Communications, Mexico City. The American Council of Spanish Speaking People holds its founding convention in El Paso, Texas.

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The Bracero agreement between the United States and Mexico is renewed; the flow of temporary workers from Mexico continues for thirteen years. 1952

Rivera paints, on commission from the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), a mural-size oil on composition board on the theme of the nightmare of war and the dream of peace. The work depicts favorably the figures of Stalin and Mao, while satirizing the symbols of Uncle Sam, Marianne, and John Bull. The INBA, under the direction of composer Carlos Chávez, refuses to exhibit the work (which was intended for a traveling exhibit of Mexican art) and removes it from the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Rivera returns his advance and with the help of the French Communist Party exhibits the work in Paris. Afterward, the mural will travel throughout Eastern Europe, arriving in China at the end of 1953, where it will be lost. Siqueiros begins his murals at the Hospital de la Raza and at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma. Adolfo Ruíz Cortines is elected President of Mexico. Rivera again applies for re-admission to the Mexican Communist Party and is again rejected. Tamayo returns to Mexico and begins to paint a mural on the theme of the birth of nationality at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. He will complete it the following year. Juan José Arreola publishes Confabulario. Portinari begins murals at the United Nations building in New York City. They will be concluded in 1956.

1953

Rivera begins a mosaic mural for the façade of the new Teatro de los Insurgentes. Scandal erupts over the depiction of the comedian Cantinflas, who is represented stealing from the rich, giving to the poor, and wearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Rivera removes image of the Virgin from the mural. Kahlo’s first solo show in Mexico opens at Lola Alvarez Bravo’s Galería de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. Rivera begins a mural on the theme of health and medicine at the Hospital de la Raza. Juan Rulfo publishes his book of short stories, El llano en llamas. Mérida completes a mosaic mural on Mayan themes for the Alianza Insurance building in Mexico City. José Luis Cuevas (1932– ) has his first solo exhibition of drawings at the Galería Prisse in Mexico City.  

Carreño joins the Culture section of the Ministry of Education in the Fulgencio Batista government. Batista has been governing Cuba since his March 10, 1952, military coup.

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Dwight David Eisenhower is elected President of the United States; serves until 1961. Operation Wetback is instituted by the US government to apprehend and repatriate undocumented workers to Mexico. The first Mexican American discrimination case to reach the US Supreme Court, Hernández v. Texas, challenges the jury selection process and gains a ruling in favor of Hernández. 1954

On July 2, Rivera, Kahlo, O’Gorman, and others participate in a demonstration protesting CIA involvement in the ouster of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. Kahlo dies of a pulmonary embolism on July 13. The Mexican Communist Party, on its 12th National Congress, re-admits Rivera as a Party member. Tamayo returns permanently to Mexico. He begins a still-life mural at Sanborn’s in Lafragua Street in Mexico City. Cuevas exhibits his drawings at the gallery of the Pan-American Union in Washington, DC, at the invitation of José Gómez Sicre, chief of the Visual Arts Section of the institution. The US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision on Brown v. Board of Education outlaws segregation by race in public schools. The First Annual Mexican American Art Exhibition is held in Los Angeles.

1955

In June, Rivera is diagnosed with cancer. In August he will visit the Soviet Union to receive cancer treatments. He will remain in Moscow until March of 1956, then travel throughout Eastern Europe. He will return to Mexico on April 4, 1956. Marí Izquierdo dies in Mexico City. Rulfo publishes the novel Pedro Páramo.

1956

In April, Rivera removes the legend “God does not exist” from the Hotel del Prado mural. Days later, at a press conference at the hotel, he announces “I am a Catholic” and thanks his friend, the poet and Catholic Carlos Pellicer, for his prayers. Leal begins a mural on the subject of Divine Providence in the church of the same name in Mexico City. Before the mural’s completion he is dismissed by patrons and the mural is covered up. Operation Wetback is terminated after deporting more than two million people to Mexico in three years.

1957

In September, Rivera suffers a blood clot that paralyzes his right arm. He continues to paint. He dies on November 24 of heart failure in his San Angel studio. At his funeral, held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, Siqueiros and members of the Mexican Communist Party are part of the honor guard.

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Siqueiros begins his mural Del porfirismo a la Revolución at the National Museum of History (Chapultepec Castle). He refuses to sign a petition criticizing the invasion of Hungary by Soviet forces. Tamayo leaves Mexico for Paris, where he will remain until 1964. Cuevas publishes his anti-muralist manifesto La cortina de nopal in the magazine Novedades. Carreño abandons Cuba and settles in Santiago, Chile, where he will live the rest of his life. Richard Valenzuela takes the name Ritchie Valens and writes and records “La Bamba,” “Let’s Go,” and “Donna” in the months before his death. 1958

Siqueiros begins a mural in the vestibule of the Jorge Negrete Theatre. Titled El arte escénico en la vida social de México, the work will be controversial because of its depiction of the Mexican Army stomping the Constitution. Siqueiros will be sued by the Actors Union and the work covered until 1964. Carlos Fuentes publishes the novel La región más transparente. Adolfo López Mateos is elected President of Mexico. Américo Paredes’ book, With a Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero, is published, and influences the development of Chicano/a scholarship.

1959

Tamayo paints the fresco Prometeo dando fuego a los hombres at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. Cardoza y Aragón publishes his monograph Orozco. Cuevas wins the international drawing prize at the São Paulo Biennial with his series Los funerales de un dictador. Antonio Villareal publishes his book Pocho, one of the first Mexican American generational novels. The Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) is founded in Fresno, California, by Bert Corona and Eduardo Quevedo. They open an art exhibition that same year.

1960

In April, novelist José Revueltas abandons the Mexican Communist Party, which he joined in the late 1920s. Siqueiros is invited by the new revolutionary government of Cuba to visit Havana and lecture. Back in Mexico he is arrested and imprisoned on August 9 for “inciting to riot and public dissolution.” He will remain in prison until July 13, 1964, when he is pardoned and released by President López Mateos. O’Gorman begins a fresco on the theme of the war of independence at the National Museum of History (Chapultepec Castle). Carreño completes his mosaic mural in a geometric style, Homenaje a Fra Angelico, in the Jesuit San Ignacio school in Santiago, Chile.

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1961

John Fitzgerald Kennedy is elected President of the United States; serves until November 22, 1963, when he is assassinated in Dallas, Texas. He presides over the abortive US invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961; the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and the creation of the Alliance for Progress between the United States and countries of Latin America. President Kennedy approves the first phase of the Vietnam Program, which sends combat support troops overseas. Octavio Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico is published in English translation. Mural artist Arnold Belkin publishes an essay, “La pintura mural,” calling for a revival of Mexican muralism: “If mural painting is being developed with increasing vigor in other countries, how can we allow it to die here?”

1962

Rosario Castellanos publishes her novel Oficio de Tinieblas. Fuentes publishes his novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz. Art historian Justino Fernández publishes El hombre (Estética del arte moderno y contemporáneo). The Farm Workers Association (FWA) is founded in Delano, California, by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. With MAPA support, Edward Roybal is elected to represent California in the US Congress.

1963

O’Gorman paints a fresco on the theme of credit for the International Bank, Mexico City. Writer Vicente Leñero wins the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize for his novel Los albañiles. Lyndon Johnson assumes the Presidency of the United States in November after the assassination of John F. Kennedy; serves until 1969. Reies López Tijerina founds the Alianza Federal del Mercedes, an alliance dedicated to enforcing the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. The Taller de Gráfica forms in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, continuing an important Mexican tradition of printmaking.

1964

Siqueiros is released from prison. Mérida finishes a mosaic mural titled Motivos tlatelolcas at the tower of the National Bank in Mexico City. He begins a stained-glass mural for the Cora Huichol gallery at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Tamayo returns to Mexico. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is elected President of Mexico. The Bracero Program ends.

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El Malcriado, the Farm Worker Association’s newspaper, begins publication. 1965

Siqueiros begins the final mural project of his career, La marcha de la humanidad en la tierra y hacia el cosmos, in an annex building, part of the Hotel de Mexico. He sets up a home/studio in Cuernavaca. President Johnson sends 267,000 ground troops to Vietnam and removes restrictions on combat support. Martin Luther King, Jr., leads a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, where he delivers a civil rights petition to the governor. President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, eliminating all discriminatory qualifying tests for voter registration. Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City. The National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) joins the Filipino farm workers in the Delano, California, grape strike. The Teatro Campesino is founded in San Juan Bautista, California, by Luis, Danny, and Socorro Valdez in support of the United Farm Workers Union organizing efforts. This is generally acknowledged as the beginning of the Chicano/a art movement.

1966

Siqueiros completes murals at Chapultepec and Santo Domingo Customs House. He receives the National Art Prize from the Mexican government. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta lead farm workers on a 300-mile march from Delano, California, to Sacramento. The march is considered by many to mark the beginning of the Chicano/a civil rights movement. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales founds the Crusade for Social Justice in Denver, Colorado, from the earlier political organization Los Voluntarios. The founding of this organization is considered to be one of the markers of the beginning of the Chicano/a civil rights movement. El Centro de la Cruzada para la Justicia is established and continues as the home of the Crusade for Justice until 1978. Reies López Tijerina leads Alianza members to reclaim part of the Kit Carson National Forest in New Mexico. The Black Panther Party is founded in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

1967

Siqueiros receives the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet Union; he donates its 25,000 rubles to the Vietnamese people. In August, his retrospective opens at the University Museum of Science and Art in Mexico City. Fuentes receives the prestigious Biblioteca Breve Prize for his novel Cambio de piel. Cuevas paints his Mural efímero on a billboard in the Zona Rosa neighborhood of Mexico City.

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Novelist José Revueltas publishes his essay “Escuela Mexicana de Pintura y novela de la revolución” (The Mexican School of Painting and the Novel of the Revolution), in which he critiques “Mexican revolutionary painting” as art in the service of bourgeois interests, because it conceals “the bourgeois content to the ruling state regime.” The grape boycott, begun in 1965, spreads to Canada and Europe. Chicano student activists form the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) in San Antonio and the United Mexican American Students (UMAS) in Los Angeles. David Sánchez founds the Brown Berets in Los Angeles, a militant organization modeled on the Black Panthers. Reies López Tijerina and Alianza members storm a courtroom in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, to free Alianza members held in custody. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales publishes the epic poem Yo Soy Joaquín/I Am Joaquín. Quinto Sol Publications, an independent Chicano press, begins publishing in Berkeley, California. One of its first efforts is El Grito: A Journal of Contemporary Mexican-American Thought. El Teatro Campesino Cultural Center is founded in Del Rey, California. William Walker and other African American artists paint the Wall of Respect on the South Side of Chicago. This first outdoor mural painted on the walls of a boarded-up tenement marks the beginning of community murals. Manuel Martinez paints the first Chicano (portable) mural The Dehumanization of Mankind for the interior of the first Crusade for Justice building in Denver, after his return from a four-month visit to Mexico to study the murals of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. He was inspired by the social and political messages he had seen in the murals. During this first trip, Martinez and his traveling companion, a Puerto Rican artist, met Siqueiros who invited them to work on his mural La marcha de la humanidad the following year. Chicano/a artists begin to travel to Mexico to study the murals, visit the Taller de Gráfica Popular, and meet with Mexican artists. 1968

O’Gorman paints a fresco on the subject of Madero at the National Museum of History (Chapultepec Castle). Mérida completes a mural in acrylic and gold leaf titled Abstracción in the auditorium of the Aristos Hotel, Mexico City. Alva de la Canal completes acrylic-on-plastic murals on the theme of the law and justice at the law school of Universidad Veracruzana in Jalapa. Siqueiros attends the Cultural Congress in Havana, where he is harassed and booed by painters Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam for his involvement in the assassination attempt against Leon Trotsky in May 1940.

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Siqueiros refuses to sign a petition protesting the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces. Student movement unrest is felt throughout much of the world: the United States, France, Germany, and Mexico. In the autumn, while Mexico hosts the Olympics, students stage a demonstration in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district. Government Secretary Luis Echeverría calls out army troops, who fire on demonstrators, leaving hundreds of students and bystanders dead. The army storms the University and arrests student leaders. Novelist José Revueltas is arrested for participating in the student movement. He will not be released until 1971. Paz resigns as Mexican Ambassador to India over the massacre in Tlatelolco. Chicano high-school students boycott classes in Los Angeles to protest educational deficiencies in the public schools; the boycott is called “the blowouts”—almost 3,500 students stay away from classes for eight days. Highschool students in Abilene, Crystal City, Denver, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Santa Clara walk out of schools in 1968 and 1969.  

Cesar Chavez begins the first of many fasts to protest violence. Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, California. The first Mexican American studies program in the United States opens at California State University, Los Angeles. Chicanos and other Latinos initiate a national boycott of Coors Brewing Company to protest discriminatory hiring practices. The Ford Foundation funds the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), which informs Chicanos of their legal rights and prepares civil rights cases. The Crusade for Justice opens the first Chicano/a art gallery El Grito de Aztlán, at their Centro. It remains open until 1972. The Del Rey Mural, possibly the first Chicano mural in California, is painted by Antonio Bernal on the front entrance of El Teatro Campesino Cultural Center in Del Rey. It includes both pre-Columbian and modern Mexican revolutionary figures in concert with Chicano and African American civil rights leaders. Mario Castillo, a Mexican/Chicano student at the Art Institute of Chicago, paints Metafisica—The Wall for Peace, an abstract outdoor mural in the Mexican American Pilsen District of Chicago, with barrio youth.  

Chicano murals are begun in Austin, Chicago, Crystal City, Denver, El Paso, Houston, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and San Diego. Mexican American Liberation Art Front (MALAF) is organized in Oakland, California, by Jose Montoya, Malaquias Montoya, Esteban Villa, and Rene Yañez.

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1969

Tamayo paints an acrylic mural titled Energía at the Industrialists Club, Hotel Camino Real, Mexico City. While in prison, Revueltas publishes the novel El apando based on his experiences there. Richard M. Nixon is elected President of the United States; serves until 1974 when he leaves office to avoid being impeached after the Watergate Break-In and subsequent scandal. Gerald Ford assumes the Presidency of the United States when Richard Nixon resigns; he serves until 1977. Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales and the Crusade for Justice convene the National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver; over 1,500 Chicanos and Chicanas attend. Writers and artists (particularly the poet Alurista and the muralist Emanuel Martinez) collaborate to write El Plan Espiritual del Aztlán, considered to be the seminal manifesto of the Chicano/a civil rights and art movements. The Raza Unida Party forms in Crystal City, Texas, under the leadership of José Angel Gutiérrez. The Chicano Coordination Council on Higher Education meets in Santa Barbara, California, and creates the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) which becomes a national organization with branches in colleges and universities throughout the country. MEChA issues El Plan de Santa Barbara, a master plan for the Chicano student movement. Chicano studies programs are established at universities in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, the Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest. Murals are painted in the offices and conference rooms of many of these programs. The Brown Berets organize the National Chicano Moratorium Committee in Los Angeles to protest Chicano fatalities and US involvement in Vietnam. El Espejo, edited by Octavio I. Romano, is published and becomes one of the first anthologies of Chicano Literature. The Rebel Chicano Art Front, later renamed the Royal Chicano Air Force or RCAF, is organized by Jose Montoya, Esteban Villa, and Ricardo Favela at Sacramento State College, Sacramento, California. The RCAF, with as many as 16 or more members at any given time, executed murals, after-school art programs, and posters for the United Farm Workers. The RCAF and Jose Montoya in particular are credited with resuscitating interest in the 1940s and 1950s Pachuco phenomenon, as an early form of cultural resistance to assimilation, and therefore as the precursors to or as the first Chicanos. The exhibition New Symbols for la Nueva Raza opens in Oakland, California. The Goez Gallery is founded by the Gonzalez brothers. It operates as a for-profit art gallery in East Los Angeles until 1974. Goez opens an extension gallery in Olvera Street, the historic Mexican (and now tourist) section of downtown Los Angeles, several doors down from the building that houses Tropical America by

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Siqueiros. More than thirteen artists, directed by Juan Gonzalez, paint The Birth of Our Art for the façade of the Gallery. The Mechicano Art Center is founded—first on Melrose Ave., and then in East Los Angeles, where it will remain open until 1979.  

Plaza de la Raza—sponsored by the Mexican actress Margo Albert, wife of actor Eddie Albert—is opened in East Los Angeles. It is still an active art center, gallery space, and community park.  

 

1970

Siqueiros donates his easel painting Cristo de la Paz to the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art. Luis Echevarría is elected President of Mexico. Paz publishes a postscript to his earlier El laberinto de la soledad, titled Postdata, where he expresses his outrage over the political repression of 1968. Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University during an antiwar demonstration. La Raza Unida Party becomes a national independent party at the Second National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference in Denver, with El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán as its platform. More than 30,000 protestors attend the August 29 National Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War in East Los Angeles; three people are killed by the police, including Los Angeles Times reporter Rubén Salazar. No one is charged with the shootings. The United Farm Workers Union signs contracts with California growers; the table grape and lettuce boycott continues. The Midwest Council of La Raza is established at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Chicanas form the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional, Inc., at the Mexican American National Issues Conference; they hold a separate caucus at the MAPA National Convention. Luis Omar Salinas’ book of poetry, Crazy Gypsy, is published. Aztlán: Chicano Journal of the Social Sciences and Arts begins publication at UCLA. It is still being published. Art historian Shifra Goldman and film maker Jesus Treviño begin research on Siqueiros’ Los Angeles mural Tropical America on Olvera Street, in an effort to get it restored. Treviño’s documentary on the mural is released in 1971. As of 2006, the Getty Conservation Institute and the Mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, announced plans for its restoration. Los Artes de Guadalupanos de Aztlán begins in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a mural collective. The group will work together until 1977, painting murals throughout northern New Mexico.

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Chicano/a activists and residents of the Barrio Logan in San Diego, California, occupy the land under the recently completed Coronado Bridge whose construction destroyed several blocks of that neighborhood. The occupation was successful, and the land was converted to a public neighborhood park named Chicano Park. More than one hundred murals have been painted on the bridge pylons since the early 1970s. El Centro Cultural de la Raza is founded in San Diego, California. It is housed in a transformed water tank, covered inside and out by murals, and is the home of the Los Toltecas en Aztlan mural collective, the founding location of the Border Art Workshop, and official sponsor of the mural program at Chicano Park. It is still active. The Galería de la Raza/Studio 24 is founded in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. It remains active as an alternative Latino arts space. The billboard outside its building has been used since the late 1970s as a site for rotating, temporary murals that are sometimes connected to the exhibition inside the gallery and sometimes painted as separate works of art. Recently, computergenerated murals have been added to the repertoire. Ray Patlán, assisted by Chicano youths, paints From My Father to Yours in the Sala de la Raza auditorium at Casa Aztlán, a community center in the Pilsen District of Chicago. This mural is influenced by Rivera, Siqueiros, and most prominently by Orozco. It combines themes from the pre-Columbian and Mexican Revolutionary pasts with images of the Chicano present, including a portrait of Cesar Chavez. The exterior of Casa Aztlán is also covered with murals, based on pre-Columbian architectural design motifs and roller stamp designs from Jorge Enciso’s book on roller stamp designs. Teatros Nacionales de Aztlán (TENAZ), the international Chicano/Latino theater umbrella organization, is founded. More than one hundred Chicano/a teatros are formed throughout the United States in the 1960s through the 1980s. TENAZ is active with theater organizations in Mexico. 1971

Siqueiros completes the mural La marcha de la humanidad en la tierra y hacia el cosmos. He donates his home/studio in Mexico City to the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes; it becomes the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros. Armando Rendon publishes Chicano Manifesto: The History and Aspirations of the Second Largest Minority in America. Edward Simmen’s publishes his edited volume of writings: The Chicano: From Caricature to Self-Portrait. La Raza Silkscreen/La Raza Graphic Center begins in the Mission District of San Francisco. Asco, a Chicano performance collective, is founded in East Los Angeles by Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez. Herrón and Gronk also

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became known for their collaborative and individual mural work. Asco innovates “no-movies”—movies without the use of celluloid.  

La Casa de la Raza, Inc., is founded in Santa Barbara, California. It sponsors exhibitions, art classes, and murals throughout the barrio. Los Toltecas en Aztlán is founded by artists, musicians, and poets in San Diego, California; it will disband in 1973. Guillermo Aranda and Los Toltecas in Aztlán begin La Dualidad, a mural inspired by Siqueiros, both in form and content, on the concave inner wall of the Centro Cultural de la Raza. It will be completed in 1979. Murals are painted on the walls of ethnic and Chicano studies centers at colleges and universities, including Somos Aztlán at the University of Washington, Seattle, painted by Emilio Aguayo. Tomás Rivera publishes his coming-of-age novel y no se lo tragó la tierra. A scholar of literature and university administrator, he became the Chancellor of the University of California, Riverside. In 1985, the Tomás Rivera Institute, which focuses on Latino/a issues, was founded in his honor. Currently it is affiliated with the University of Southern California. 1972

La marcha de la humanidad en la tierra y hacia el cosmos is inaugurated by President Echevarría. The building is named the “Polifórum Cultural Siqueiros.” The Tepito Arte Acá is formed in Mexico City. This is an evolving collective of artists and intellectuals, usually numbering around four to six, with Daniel Manrique as the only mural painter in the group. Rodolfo Acuña publishes Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. Oscar Zeta Acosta publishes The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo. Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner edit Aztlán: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature. The Congreso de Artistas Chicanos en Aztlán (CACA) is founded in San Diego, California. The artists will work together until 1980. Self-Help Graphics and Art, a screen-print workshop and art gallery, is founded by Sister Karen Boccalero in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles. An Homage to Siqueiros, a reproduction of Tropical America, will be painted on the outside second floor by Eva Cockcroft and others in 1997–98.  

Galería Posada is opened in Sacramento by the Royal Chicano Air Force. It will remain active until the early 1990s. The Con Safo art collective is founded in San Antonio, Texas, from earlier organizations including Tlacuilo (1967–70), Los Pintores de Aztlán (1970), and Los Pintores de la Nueva Raza (1970–71).  

 

El Río Community Center is founded in Tucson, Arizona.

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El Centro de la Raza is founded in Seattle. It is still active as a general Latino/a cultural center, sponsoring exhibitions and murals. Willie Herrón paints two murals in an alley in City Terrace, one of the oldest Mexican American barrios of Los Angeles. Quetzalcoatl is the first effort. He painted The Wall That Cracked Open in homage to his brother and as a protest against gang warfare, including images of gang warfare, graffiti, and the life/ death mask from Tlaltico. This has become one of the most reproduced Chicano murals. Alurista publishes his book of poetry Nationchild Plumaroja. 1973

Siqueiros travels for the last time to the Soviet Union. In September he is diagnosed with cancer. Dr. Luis Dávila, Indiana University, Bloomington, and Dr. Nicolas Kanellos, Indiana University, Northwest, jointly publish La Revista Chicano-Riqueña. Kanellos moves the publication to the University of Houston in 1980. Gary Keller founds the Bilingual Review Press in Arizona. The journal Encuentro Femenil is begun in 1973 by Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, a feminist group with education of Raza women as its primary goal. Jacinto Quirarte publishes Mexican American Artists. The first book on the topic, it includes a section on Mexican muralists in the United States, focusing on the work of Orozco and Rufino Tamayo. No Mexican American muralists are featured. The City-Wide Mural Program is begun in Los Angeles with Judy Baca as its director, painting and overseeing numerous murals in Boyle Heights and elsewhere. Los Four, a Chicano grupo (art collective) is formed by the artists Carlos Almaraz, Magu (Gilbert Lujan), Beto de la Rocha, and Frank Romero. Las Mujeres Muralistas is founded in San Francisco. The first women’s mural collective, it includes Patricia Rodriguez, Irene Perez, Graciela Carrillo, and Consuelo Mendez. They will work together and with other artists until 1980, painting murals in the Mission District. Mural cycles are begun at two federally funded housing projects in East Los Angeles. The Estrada Courts murals are directed by Charles “Cat” Felix, ultimately including more than eighty murals (including the walkway wall murals). Artists from the Goez Gallery—including David Botello, who paints Dreams of Flight—work at Estrada Courts in Boyle Heights in conjunction with young people from the Courts. Mural painting at Ramona Gardens near Lincoln Heights is overseen by artists from Mechicano Art Center, including Wayne Alaniz Healey who paints Ghosts of the Barrio in 1974. More than twenty-five exterior murals and one interior mural are painted here. Members of Los Four, including Judithe Hernandez, paint at Ramona Gardens. The existence of rival  

 

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resident gangs at the housing projects prevents muralists from working at both locations; Willie Herrón is the only artist who is able to paint at both sites. 1974

Siqueiros dies at his home/studio in Cuernavaca on January 6th. His funeral, like Orozco’s and Rivera’s before him, takes place at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. La Brocha del Valle Chicano mural collective is founded in Fresno, California. Judy Baca, along with several additional artists and numerous young people, begin the project of painting The Great Wall of Los Angeles in the Tujunga Flood Control Channel of the San Fernando Valley. Painted over five summers with over 400 youths, it is currently a half-mile long. Los Four have the first exhibition of Chicano art in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It features the front-end of a low-rider car, a pyramidal altar, selections of the graffiti-based paintings and murals, focusing on Chicano popular culture. The Mujeres Muralistas paint Para el Mercado and Panamérica in the Mission District of San Francisco.

1975

The Mission Cultural Center is founded in the Mission District of San Francisco. It remains active as a gallery, theater, and graphic arts workshop. For the past decade, it has housed San Francisco’s Rooms for the Dead—installation exhibitions during the Day of the Dead.  

The Mexican Museum is founded by the artist Peter Rodríguez in the Mission District of San Francisco. Created to exhibit the arts of Mexico from preColumbian times to the present, it features both fine and folk art. It quickly adds Mexican American and Chicano/a art. La Peña Cultural Center is opened in Berkeley, California, by a group of Latin and North Americans in response to the military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende of Chile. It is still active as a center for cultural and educational programming. The front of its building is covered by the 1978 mural La Canción de la Unidad/Song of Unity, one of the first acrylic, ceramic, and papier-maché collective murals created in the Bay Area. Painted by Osha Neumann, Ray Patlan, and Brian Thiele with Anna de León and Joanne Cooke, it was restored in 1986, and again in 1998. It depicts and celebrates the peoples of the Americas coming together in song and struggle. Movimiento Artistico de la Raza Chicano (MARCH) is founded in Chicago, by Chicano, Mexican American, and Mexican visual artists and poets. Mark Rogovin, Marie Burton, and Holly Highfill publish Mural Manual, the first guide to painting community murals. 1976

Mural artist José Luis Soto founds the Taller de Investigación Plástica (TIP) in Michoacán. TIP develops a community-based model for public art production,

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including numerous murals, working with indigenous and campesino communities in north-central Mexico. The Social and Public Art Resource Center is founded by Judith Baca, Christina Schlesinger, and Donna Deitch. It is still open in the old Venice, California, jail. It has sponsored many citywide mural projects, most notably the Great Wall of Los Angeles, Walls Unlimited, Neighborhood Pride, and the World Wall. East Los Streetscapers, the Chicano mural collective, is started by David Botello and Wayne Alaniz Healey. Judithe Hernández paints Chicano Heritage on the exterior of Stoner Recreation Center in West Los Angeles. 1977

Eva Cockcroft, John Pitman Weber, and James Cockcroft publish Towards a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement, with a preface by Jean Charlot. Mujeres Artistas del Suroeste is founded in Austin, Texas, by the artist Santa Barraza and others. Jimmy Carter is elected President of the United States; he serves until 1981. Xicanindio, Inc., Chicano centro is founded in Mesa, Arizona. Community Murals Magazine begins publication in Berkeley, California, with articles covering the international community murals movement. Quarterly issues will be published for twelve years.

1978

Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado (MARS) Artspace is founded in Phoenix, Arizona. It will continue into the 1990s. La Cofradía de Artes y Artesanos Hispánicos is founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

1979

The first bilingual edition of José Vasconcelos’ La Raza Cosmica is published by the Department of Chicano Studies and California State University, Los Angeles. It is illustrated with the 1960s mural La cultura es patrimonio de todas las razas, by the Mexican artist Gonzáles Camarena, from the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Patricia Rodriguez, of the Mujeres Muralistas mural collective, creates a Chicano Studies Reader focused on Chicano art. It includes readings on murals, graphic arts, poetry, and the movimiento. Nicolas Kanellos founds the Arte Público Press in 1979 at Indiana University. He moves it to the University of Houston in 1980. The Chicano Humanities and Arts Council (CHAC) is established in Denver. Mujeres Artistas del Suroeste (MAS) organizes one of the first conferences to bring together artists, filmmakers, critics, and art historians from both sides of the border. This was the first formal encounter among Chicano/Mexican American artists, North American art historians, and Mexican artists and scholars.

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The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center is founded in San Antonio, Texas. It sponsors exhibitions, live theater, art classes (especially printmaking), and murals. George Vargas and Martín Romero paint the exterior mural CitySpirit in Detroit near the city’s border with Canada. 1980

Conceptual artist Felipe Ehrenberg initiates a grassroots mural production project called “Haltos2Ornos/Talleres de Comunicación.” Teams of local participants produce murals in their home communities on a five-day production schedule, collaborating on site selection, mural design, and image transfer. Organizers estimate that the program produced over one thousand community murals throughout Mexico in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan is elected President of the United States; he serves until 1989.

1981

Berni paints the portable acrylic mural panels La crucifixión and El apocalipsis in the chapel of the Jesuit school San Luis Gonzaga in the town of General Las Heras, province of Buenos Aires. The school’s board of trustees rejects it. The apostolic nuncio, Mons. Pio Laghi, intercedes and the mural remains in the chapel. Mi Raza Arts Consortium (MIRA) is organized in Chicago. Berni dies in Buenos Aires.

1982

Carlos Tortolero and several other public high school teachers found the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago. It will open in the Harrison Park Boat House in the Pilson District in 1987, featuring an exhibition and catalogue of The Barrio Murals/Murales del Barrio, with an essay by Victor Sorrell. In 2007 it will change its name to the “National Museum of Mexican Art.”

1983

A Traves de la Frontera is the first exhibition of Chicano/a art curated by Mexican institutions for Mexican venues. Organized by El Centro de Estudios Económicos y Sociales del Tercer Mundo and El Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas de UNAM, the catalogue includes essays by Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Carlos Monsiváis, Malaquias Montoya, Lezlie Salowitz-Montoya, and many other Mexican and Chicano artists, film makers, and scholars. Rupert Garcia and Eva Cockcroft wrote the essays on Chicano murals, while Shifra Goldman wrote about Mexican and Chicano cultural workers. The Hispanic Culture Foundation is created in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Foundation eventually creates the National Hispanic Cultural Center that opens as a museum, performing arts center, library, genealogy archive, and literary center in 2000. The Mexic-Arte Museum is founded in Austin, Texas, to promote Mexican and Latino art throughout the State of Texas.

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1984

The Taller de Gráfica Monumental, founded by Mauricio Gómez Marín and others as a socially committed graphic arts workshop within the arts curriculum of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de Xochimilco, begins to document and systematize the production of mantas, or mobile murals on cloth. The group authors an important series of how-to publications—including a Manual de mantas (1984)—aimed at activating cultural and artistic practice within the social movements.  

 

Jacinto Quirarte edits Chicano Art History: A Book of Selected Readings, published by the Research Center for the Arts and Humanities and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. It includes key movement manifestos and sections on colonial arts on the borderlands, Mexican muralists, Chicano muralists and the influence of Mexican murals, and a separate section on Chicano art that focuses on mural production. The Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo is founded in San Diego, California, by artists from San Diego, Tijuana, and Mexico City. 1985

In the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, David Gallegos, Daniel Camacho, and Cassandra Smithies form the visual arts collective Ojos de Lucha, which produces mantas for use by social organizations and communities affected by the quake. Reconstruction efforts after the earthquake result in the revitalization of the urban social movements and the formation of the activist organization Asamblea de Barrios, or Assembly of Neighborhoods.

1988

In a presidential election widely viewed as fraudulent, the official tally names Carlos Salinas de Gortari the newly elected President of Mexico despite the apparent victory at the polls by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the candidate of a centerleft opposition coalition.

1989

The Partido de la Revolución Democrática is founded by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and other former members of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.

1994

The North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, goes into effect. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional leads an armed uprising in the southern state of Chiapas, announcing its opposition to NAFTA and the neo-liberalism of the Mexican state.

1997

The US Electrical Workers Union and the independent Mexican labor group Frente Auténtico de Trabajo (FAT) conduct a bi-national “mural exchange” as part of a cross-border union solidarity program, bringing Mexican artist Daniel Manrique to Chicago to paint a mural at the Electrical Workers headquarters, and US artist Mike Alewitz to Mexico City to paint a mural at the FAT headquarters.

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Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is elected mayor of Mexico City, establishing the political dominance of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución or PRD) in Mexico’s urban center. 1998

Mexican army troops destroy a Zapatista community mural in Taniperla, Chiapas. Local Mayans had painted the mural under the direction of artist Sergio Valdez Rubalcaba in order to celebrate their declaration of a newly autonomous municipality allied with the rebel Zapatista movement. The mural, and its destruction by the army, becomes an international symbol of the Zapatista movement and the popular demand for democracy, indigenous rights, and social justice in Mexico.

1999

During a prolonged student strike at the UNAM in protest of tuition hikes and other privatization measures, student activists alter a detail of Siqueiros’ mural The Right to Culture—changing the final date in the mural’s timeline of Mexican revolutionary progress from “19??” to “1999.” The students are prosecuted for “destruction of the artistic patrimony of the nation.”  

Carreño dies in Santiago, Chile. 2000

The Partido Revolucionario Institucional loses the presidency for the first time, after more than 70 years of rule. Vicente Fox, candidate of the right-wing Partido de Acción Nacional, is elected President of Mexico.

2001

Mauricio Gómez Marín and several other artists lead some 200 volunteers in painting a monumental, ephemeral mural portrait of revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata on the floor of the zócalo in front of Mexico’s National Palace. The mural is estimated to measure 3,750 square meters, and celebrates the historic arrival of representatives of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional to the nation’s central public plaza to promote indigenous rights.

2001 – 3 The US-based Costco corporation purchases the landmark Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca from the Mexican government and reveals plans to destroy the building and erect a massive commercial outlet. A broad-based opposition movement seeks to block Costco’s plans, citing, among other concerns, the presence of numerous murals inside the Casino painted between the 1930s and the 1970s. After a political battle lasting nearly two years, Costco prevails because the Mexican government decides not to enforce legal protections of “the artistic patrimony of the nation” that opponents argue apply to the Casino murals.  

 

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Primary Texts Edited by Alejandro Anreus

Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors Written on December 9, 1923, and published in El Machete No. 7 (June 1924), Mexico City In 1923 the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors was established in Mexico City, with David Alfaro Siqueiros as its Secretary General. At the end of that year Adolfo De la Huerta was proclaimed provisional president of Mexico by General Guadalupe Suárez, against the legitimate government of General Alvaro Obregón. As a response to this attempted coup, Siqueiros authored the Syndicate’s manifesto on December 9, 1923, which was signed by him, Rivera, Revueltas, Orozco, Alva Guadarrama, Cueto, and Mérida. The manifesto was published in June of 1924 in the Syndicate’s official organ, the periodical El Machete.

To the Indian race humiliated through centuries; to the soldiers converted into hangmen by their chiefs; to the workers and peasants who are oppressed by the rich; and to the intellectuals who are not servile to the bourgeoisie: On the one hand the social revolution, ideologically more coherent than ever, and on the other, the armed bourgeoisie. Soldiers of the people, peasants, and armed workers defending their rights, against soldiers of the people, press-ganged by deceit or force by the politico-military leaders in the pay of the bourgeoisie. On their side, the exploiters of the people in union with traitors who sell the blood of soldiers who fought in the Revolution.

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On our side, we are with those who seek the overthrow of an old and inhuman system within which you, worker of the soil, produce riches for the overseer and politician, while you starve. Within which you, worker in the city, move the wheels of industries, weave the cloth, and create with your hands the modern comforts enjoyed by the parasites and prostitutes, while your own body is numb with cold. Within which you, Indian soldier, heroically abandon your land and give your life in the eternal hope of liberating your race from the degradations and misery of centuries, only for a Sánchez or an Estrada to waste the generous gift of your blood by favoring the bourgeois leeches who strip your children of their happiness and rob you of your land. Not only are our people (especially our Indians) the source of noble labor but even the smallest manifestations of the material and spiritual vitality of our race spring from our native midst. So does the extraordinary and marvelous ability to create beauty. The art of the Mexican people is the highest and greatest spiritual expression of the world tradition which constitutes our most valued heritage. It is great because it surges from the people; it is collective, and our own aesthetic aim is to socialize artistic expression, to destroy bourgeois individualism. We repudiate so-called Salon painting and all the ultra-intellectual salon art of the aristocracy and exalt the monumental expression of art because such art is public property. We believe that any work of art which is alien or contrary to popular taste is bourgeois and should disappear because it perverts the aesthetic of our race. This perversion is already almost complete in the cities. We proclaim that this being a moment of social transition from a decrepit to a new order, the creators of beauty must invest their greatest efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people, and our supreme objective in art, which is today mere individualist masturbation, is to create something of beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle. We are all too aware that the advent of a bourgeois government in Mexico will mean the natural decline of our race’s popular indigenous aesthetic, at present found only in our working classes but which was, however, beginning to penetrate and purify intellectual circles. We will struggle to prevent this happening, because we know that the victory of the working classes will bring a flowering of ethnic art, of cosmological and historical significance to our race, comparable to our admirable ancient autochthonous civilizations. We will struggle tirelessly to bring this about. The triumph for De la Huerta, Estrada, and Sánchez will be, aesthetically and socially, the triumph of the taste of typists; criollo and bourgeois approval (which is all corrupting) of popular music, painting and literature, the reign of the “picturesque,” the north American kewpie doll, and the official implantation of “l’amore e come zuchero.” Love is like sugar. As a consequence, the counter-revolution in Mexico will prolong the pain of the people and depress their admirable spirit. The membership of the Union of Painters and Sculptors have in the past supported the candidacy of General Plutarco Elías Calles, because we believed that his revolution-

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ary personality, more than any other, guaranteed a government that would improve the conditions of the productive classes in Mexico. We reiterate this support in the light of the latest politico-military events, and place ourselves at the service of his cause, which is the cause of the people, to serve in whatever form is required. We appeal to the revolutionary intellectuals of Mexico to forget their proverbial centuries-old sentimentality and laziness and join us in the social, aesthetic and educational struggle we are waging. In the name of the blood shed by our people during ten years of revolution, with the threat of a reactionary barracks revolt facing us, we urgently call on all revolutionary peasants, workers and soldiers in Mexico to understand the vital importance of the impending struggle, and laying aside tactical differences, form a united front to combat the common enemy. We appeal to ordinary soldiers who, unaware of what is happening or deceived by their traitorous officers, are about to shed the blood of their brethren of race and class. Remember that the ruling class will use the self-same weapons with which the Revolution guaranteed your brothers’ land and livelihood to now tear them. “For the proletariat of the world”: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Secretary General; Diego Rivera, First Committee member; Xavier Guerrero, Second Committee member; Fermín Revueltas, José Clemente Orozco, Ramón Alva Guadarrama, Germán Cueto, Carlos Mérida

“New World, New Races and New Art” José Clemente Orozco Creative Art Vol. 4, No. 1 (January 1929):44–46.  

The art of the New World cannot take root in the old traditions of the Old World nor in the ancient aboriginal traditions represented by the remains of our ancient peoples. Although the art of all races and of all times has a common value —human, universal— each new cycle must work for itself, must create, must yield its own production, its individual share to the common good. To go solicitously to Europe, bent on poking about its ruins in order to import them and servilly to copy them, is no greater error than is the looting of the indigenous remains of the New World with the object of copying with equal servility its ruins or its present folk-lore. However picturesque and interesting these may be, however produc 

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tive and useful ethnology may find them, they cannot furnish a point of departure for the new creation. To lean upon the art of the aborigines, whether it be of antiquity or of the present day, is a sure indication of impotence and of cowardice, in fact, of fraud. If new races have appeared upon the lands of the New World, such races have the unavoidable duty to produce a New Art in a new spiritual and physical medium. Any other road is plain cowardice. Already, the architecture of Manhattan is a new value, something that has nothing to do with Egyptian pyramids, with the Paris Opera, with the Giralda of Seville, or with Saint Sophia, any more than it has to do with the maya palaces of Chichen-Itza or with the “pueblos” of Arizona. Imagine the New York Stock Exchange in a French cathedral. Imagine the brokers all rigged out like Indian chieftains, with head feathers or with Mexican sombreros. The architecture of Manhattan is the first step. Painting and sculpture must certainly follow as inevitable second steps. The highest, the most logical, the purest and strongest form of painting is the mural. In this form alone, it is 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.  

“The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art” Diego Rivera The Modern Quarterly Vol. 6, No. 3 (Baltimore: Autumn 1932):51 –57.  

Transcribed here with minor spelling changes and informational additions, which appear within square brackets.

Art is a social creation. It manifests a division in accordance with the division of social classes. There is a bourgeois art, there is a revolutionary art, there is a peasant art, but there is not, properly speaking, a proletarian art. The proletariat produces art of struggle but no class can produce a class art until it has reached the highest point of its development. The bourgeoisie reached its zenith in the French Revolution and thereafter created art expressive of itself. When the proletariat in its turn really begins to produce its art, it will be after the proletarian dictatorship has fulfilled its mission, has liquidated all class differences and produced a classless society. The art of the future, therefore, will not be proletarian but Communist. During the course of its development, however, and even after it has come into power, the proletariat must not refuse to use the best

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technical devices of bourgeois art, just as it uses bourgeois technical equipment in the form of cannon, machine guns, and steam turbines. Such artists as Daumier and Courbet in the nineteenth century were able to reveal their revolutionary spirit in spite of their bourgeois environment. Honoré Daumier was a forthright fighter, expressing in his pictures the revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century, the movement that produced the Communist Manifesto. Daumier was revolutionary both in expression and in ideological content. In order to say what he wanted to say, he developed a new technique. When he was not actually painting an anecdote of revolutionary character, but was merely drawing a woman carrying clothes or a man seated at a table eating, he was nevertheless creating art of a definitely revolutionary character. Daumier developed a drastic technique identified with revolutionary feeling, so that his form, his method, his technique always expressed that feeling. For example, if we take his famous laundress, we find that he has painted her with neither the eye of a literary man nor that of a photographer. Daumier saw his laundress through class-conscious eyes. He was aware of her connection with life and labor. In the vibration of his lines, in the quantity and quality of color which he projected upon the canvas, we see a creation directly contrary and opposed to the creations of bourgeois conservative art. The position of each object, the effects of light in the picture, all such things express the personality in its complete connection with its surroundings and with life. The laundress is not only a laundress leaving the river bank, burdened with her load of clothes and dragging a child behind her; she is, at one and the same time, the expression of the weariness of labor and the tragedy of proletarian motherhood. Thus we see, weighing upon her, the heavy burdens of her position as woman and the heavy burdens of her position as laborer; in the background we discern the houses of Paris, both aristocratic and bourgeois. In a fraction of a second, a person, unless he is blind, can see in the figure of this laundress not only a figure but a whole connection with life and labor and the times in which she lives. In other paintings of Daumier are depicted scenes of the actual class struggle, but whether he is portraying the class struggle or not, in both types of painting we can regard him as a revolutionary artist. He is so not because he was of proletarian extraction, for he was not. He did not come from a factory, he was not of a working-class family; his origin was bourgeois, he worked for the bourgeois papers, selling his drawings to them. Nevertheless, he was able to create art which was an efficacious weapon in the revolutionary struggle, just as Marx and Engels despite their bourgeois origin were able to write works which serve as the basis for the development of the proletarian revolutionary movement. The important fact to note is that the man who is truly a thinker, or the painter who is truly an artist, cannot, at a given historical moment, take any but a position in accordance with the revolutionary development of his own time. The social struggle is the richest, the most intense and the most plastic subject which an artist can choose. Therefore, one who is born to be an artist can certainly not be insensible to such devel-

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opments. When I say born to be an artist, I refer to the constitution or make-up of his eyes, of his nervous system, of his sensibility, and of his brains. The artist is a direct product of life. He is an apparatus born to be the receptor, the condenser, the transmitter and the reflector of the aspirations, the desires, and the hopes of his age. At times, the artist serves to condense and transmit the desires of millions of proletarians; at times, he serves as the condenser and transmitter only for small strata of the intellectuals or small layers of the bourgeoisie. We can establish it as a basic fact that the importance of an artist can be measured directly by the size of the multitudes whose aspirations and whose life he serves to condense and translate. The typical theory of nineteenth-century bourgeois aesthetic criticism, namely “art for art’s sake,” is an indirect affirmation of the fact which I have just stressed. According to this theory, the best art is the so-called “art for art’s sake,” or “pure” art. One of its characteristics is that it can be appreciated only by a very limited number of superior persons. It is implied thereby that only those few superior persons are capable of appreciating that art; and since it is a superior function it necessarily implies the fact that there are very few superior persons in society. This artistic theory which pretends to be a-political has really an enormous political content —the implication of the superiority of the few. Further, this theory serves to discredit the use of art as a revolutionary weapon and serves to affirm that all art which has a theme, a social content, is bad art. It serves, moreover, to limit the possessors of art, to make art into a kind of stock exchange commodity manufactured by the artist, bought and sold on the stock exchange, subject to the speculative rise and fall which any commercialized thing is subject to in stock exchange manipulations. At the same time, this theory creates a legend which envelops art, the legend of its intangible, sacrosanct, and mysterious character which makes art aloof and inaccessible to the masses. European painting throughout the nineteenth century had this general aspect. The revolutionary painters are to be regarded as heroic exceptions. Since art is a product that nourishes human beings it is subject to the action of the law of supply and demand just as is any other product necessary to life. In the nineteenth century the proletariat was in no position to make an effective economic demand for art products. The demand was all on the part of the bourgeoisie. It can be only as a striking and heroic exception, therefore, that art of a revolutionary character can be produced under the circumstances of bourgeois demand. At present art has a very definite and important role to play in the class struggle. It is definitely useful to the proletariat. There is great need for artistic expression of the revolutionary movement. Art has the advantage of speaking a language that can easily be understood by the workers and peasants of all lands. A Chinese peasant or worker can understand a revolutionary painting much more readily and easily than he can understand a book written in English. He needs no translator. That is precisely the advantage of revolutionary art. A revolutionary painting takes far less time and it says far more than a lecture does. Since the proletariat has need of art, it is necessary that the proletariat take posses 

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sion of art to serve as a weapon in the class struggle. To take possession or control of art, it is necessary that the proletariat carry on the struggle on two fronts. On one front is a struggle against the production of bourgeois art—and when I say struggle I mean struggle in every sense — and on the other is a struggle to develop the ability of the proletariat to produce its own art. It is necessary for the proletariat to learn to make use of beauty in order to live better. It ought to develop its sensibilities, and learn to enjoy and make use of the works of art which the bourgeoisie, because of special advantages of training, has produced. Nor should the proletariat wait for some painter of good will or good intentions to come to them from the bourgeoisie; it is time that the proletariat develop artists from their own midst. By the collaboration of the artists who have come out of the proletariat and those who sympathize and are in alliance with the proletariat, there should be created an art which is definitely and in every way superior to the art which is produced by the artists of the bourgeoisie. Such a task is the program of the Soviet Union today. Before the Russian Revolution, many artists from Russia, including those who were leading figures in the Russian revolutionary movement, had long discussions in their exile in Paris over the question as to what should be the true nature of revolutionary art. I had the opportunity to take part, at various times, in those discussions. The best theorizers in those discussions, misunderstanding the doctrine of Marx which they sought to apply, came to the conclusion that revolutionary art ought to take the best art that the bourgeoisie had developed and bring that art directly to the revolutionary masses. Each of the artists was certain that his own type of art was the best that the bourgeoisie had produced. Those artists who had the greatest development of collective spirit, those who had grouped themselves around various “isms,” such as Cubism and Futurism, were convinced that their particular group was creating the art which would become the art of the revolutionary proletariat as soon as they were able to bring that particular “ism,” that particular school of art, to the proletariat. I ventured to disagree with them, maintaining that while it was necessary to utilize the innumerable technical developments which bourgeois art had developed, we had to use them in the same way that the Soviet Union utilizes the machine technique that the bourgeoisie has developed. The Soviet Union takes the best technical development and machinery of the bourgeoisie and adapts it to the needs and special conditions of the new proletarian regime; in art, I contended, we must also use the most advanced technical achievements of bourgeois art but must adapt them to the needs of the proletariat so as to create an art which, by its clarity, by its accessibility, and by its relation to the new order, should be adapted to the needs of the proletarian revolution and the proletarian regime. But I could not insist upon their accepting my opinion, for, up to the time of that discussion, I had not created anything which in any way differed fundamentally from the type of art that my comrades were creating. I had arrived at my conclusion in the following manner: I had seen the failure and defeat of the Mexican revolution of 1919, a defeat which I became convinced was the result of a lack of theoretical understanding on the part of the Mexican proletariat and peasantry. I  

 

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left Mexico when the counter-revolution was developing under Madero, deciding to go to Europe to get the theoretical understanding and the technical development in art which I thought was to be found there. The Russian comrades returned from Paris to Russia immediately after the Revolution, taking with them the most advanced technique in painting which they had learned in Paris. They did their best and created works of considerable beauty, utilizing all the technique which they had learned. They carried on a truly heroic struggle to make that art accessible to the Russian masses. They worked under conditions of famine, the strain of revolution and counter revolution, and all the material and economic difficulties imaginable, yet they failed completely in their attempts to persuade the masses to accept Cubism, or Futurism, or Constructivism as the art of the proletariat. Extended discussions of the whole problem arose in Russia. Those discussions and the confusion resulting from the rejection of modern art gave an opportunity to the bad painters to take advantage of the situation. The academic painters, the worst painters who had survived from the old regime in Russia, soon provided competition on a grand scale. Pictures inspired by the new tendencies of the most advanced European schools were exhibited side by side with the works of the worst academic schools of Russia. Unfortunately, those that won the applause of the public were not the new painters and the new European schools but the old and bad academic painters. Strangely enough, it seems to me, it was not the modernistic painters but the masses of the Russian people who were correct in the controversy. Their vote showed not that they considered the academic painters as the painters of the proletariat, but that the art of the proletariat must not be a hermetic art, an art inaccessible except to those who have developed and undergone an elaborate aesthetic preparation. The art of the proletariat has to be an art that is warm and clear and strong. It was not that the proletariat of Russia was telling these artists: “You are too modern for us.” What it said was: “You are not modern enough to be artists of the proletarian revolution.” The revolution and its theory, dialectical materialism, have no use for art of the ivory tower variety. They have need of an art which is as full of content as the proletarian revolution itself, as clear and forthright as the theory of the proletarian revolution. In Russia there exists the art of the people, namely peasant art. It is an art rooted in the soil. In its colors, its materials, and its force it is perfectly adapted to the environment out of which it is born. It represents the production of art with the simplest resources and in the least costly form. For these reasons it will be of great utility to the proletariat in developing its own art. The better Russian painters working directly after the Revolution should have recognized this and then built upon it, for the proletariat, so closely akin to the peasant in many ways, would have been able to understand this art. Instead of this the academic artists, intrinsically reactionary, were able to get control of the situation. Reaction in art is not merely a matter of theme. A painter who conserves and uses the worst technique of bourgeois art is a reactionary artist, even though he may use this technique to paint such a subject as the death of Lenin or the red flag on

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the barricades. In the same fashion, an engineer engaged in the construction of a dam with the purpose of irrigating Russian soil would be reactionary if he were to utilize the bourgeois procedures of the beginning of the nineteenth century. In that case he would be reactionary; he would be guilty of a crime against the Soviet Union, even if he were trying to construct a dam for the purpose of irrigation. The Russian theatre was safe from the bankruptcy which Russian painting suffered. It was in direct contact with the masses and, therefore, has developed into the best theatre that the world knows today. Bit by bit, the theatre has attracted to it painters, sculptors, and, of course, actors, dancers, musicians. Everyone in the Soviet Union who has any talent for art is being attracted to the theatre as a fusion of arts. In proportion with the progress made in the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union, artists are turning more and more to the theatre for expression and the masses are coming closer and closer to the theatre as an “expression of their life.” The result is that the other arts are languishing and Russia is producing less and less of the type of art which, in the rest of Europe, serves as shares on the Stock Exchange. Mural art is the most significant art for the proletariat. In Russia mural paintings are projected on the walls of clubs, of union headquarters, and even on the walls of the factories. But Russian workers came to me and declared that in their houses they would prefer having landscapes and still lifes, which would bring them a feeling of restfulness. But the easel picture is an object of luxury, quite beyond the means of the proletariat. I told my fellow artists in Russia that they should sell their paintings to the workers at low prices, give them to them if necessary. After all, the government was supplying the colors, the canvas, and the material necessary for painting, so that artists could have sold their work at low prices. The majority, however, preferred to wait for the annual purchase of paintings made by the Commissariat of Education when pictures were, and still are, bought for five hundred rubles each. I did not feel that I had the right to insist upon my viewpoint until I had created something of the type of art I was talking about. Therefore, in 1921, instead of going to Russia where I had been invited by the Commissariat of Education, I went to Mexico to attempt to create some of the art that I had been exalting. This effort of mine had in it something of the flavor of adventure because, in Mexico, there was a proletarian regime. There was in power at that time a fraction of the bourgeoisie that had need of demagogy as a weapon in maintaining itself in power. It gave us walls, and we Mexican artists painted subjects of a revolutionary character. We painted, in fact, what we pleased, even including a certain number of paintings which were certainly communistic in character. Our task was first to develop and remake mural paintings in the direction of the needs of the proletariat, and, second to note the effect that such mural painting might have upon the proletarians and peasants in Mexico, so that we could judge whether that form of painting would be an effective instrument of the proletariat in power. But let me note also another fact. In Mexico there existed an old tradition, a popular art tradition much older and much more splendid than even the peasant art of Russia. This

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art is of a truly magnificent character. The colonial rulers of Mexico, like those of the United States, had despised that ancient art tradition which existed there, but they failed to destroy it completely. With this art as background, I became the first revolutionary painter in Mexico. The paintings served to attract many young painters, painters who had not yet developed sufficient social consciousness. We formed a painters’ union and began to cover the walls of buildings in Mexico with revolutionary art. At the same time we revolutionized the methods of teaching drawing and art to children, with the result that the children of Mexico began producing artistic works in the course of their elementary school development. As a result of these things, when in 1927 I was again invited to go to Moscow, I felt that I could go, as we Mexicans had some experience which might help Soviet Russia. I ought to remark at this point that among the painters in Mexico, thanks to the development of the new methods of teaching painting in the schools of the workers, there developed various working-class painters of great merit, among them Maximo Pacheco, whom I consider the best mural painter in Mexico. The experience which I tried to offer to the Russian painters was brought to Russia at a moment of intense controversy. In spite of the fact that it was a poor time for artistic discussion and development, Corrolla, the comrade who was formerly in charge of “Agitprop” work, organized a group, “October,” to discuss and make use of the Mexican artistic experiments. I was engaged to paint by the metallurgical workers who wanted me to paint the walls of their club, the “Dynamo Club” on the Leningrad Chaussée. Soon, however, owing to differences, not of an aesthetic but of a political character, I was instructed to return to Mexico to take part in the “election campaign beginning there.” A few months after my return to Mexico I was expelled from the Party. Since then, I have remained in a position which is characteristically Mexican, namely that of the guerrilla fighter. I could not receive my munitions from the Party because my Party had expelled me; neither could I acquire them through my personal funds because I haven’t any. I took them and will continue to take them, as the guerrilla fighter must, from the enemy. Therefore, I take the munitions from the hands of the bourgeoisie. My munitions are the walls, the colors, and the money necessary to feed myself so that I may continue to work. On the walls of the bourgeoisie, painting cannot always have as fighting an aspect as it could on the walls, let us say, of a revolutionary school. The guerrilla fighter sometimes can derail a train, sometimes blow up a bridge, but sometimes he can only cut a few telegraph wires. Each time he does what he can. Whether important or insignificant, his action is always within the revolutionary line. The guerrilla fighter is always ready, at the time of amnesty, to return to the ranks and become a simple soldier like everybody else. It was in the quality of a guerrilla fighter then that I came to the United States. As to the development of art among the American workers, I have already seen paintings in the John Reed Club, which are undoubtedly of revolutionary character and at the same time aesthetically superior to the overwhelming majority of paintings which can be found in the art galleries of the dealers in paintings.

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I saw yesterday the work of a lad [Ben Shahn]— formerly a painter of abstract art— who has just completed a series of paintings on the life and death of Sacco and Vanzetti which are as moving as anything of the kind I have ever seen. The Sacco and Vanzetti paintings are technically within the school of modernistic painting, but they possess the necessary qualities, accessibility, and power, to make them important to the proletariat. Here and there I have seen drawings and lithographs of high quality, all by young and unknown artists. I am convinced that within the United States there is the ability to produce a high development of revolutionary art, advancing upward, from below. The bourgeoisie at times will be persuaded to buy great pictures in spite of their evolutionary character. In the galleries of the richest men there are pictures by Daumier. But these sources of demand are most precarious. The proletariat must learn to depend upon itself, however limited its resources may be. Rembrandt died a poor man in the wealthy bourgeois Holland of his day. In spite of his innumerable paintings there was scarcely a crust of bread in his house when he was found dead. His painting knew how to offend the wealthy Dutch bourgeoisie. In Rembrandt I find a basis of profound humanity and to a certain extent of protest. This is much more definite in the case of Cézanne. It is sufficient to point out that Cézanne used the workers and peasants of France as the heroes and central figures of his paintings. It is impossible today to look at a French peasant without seeing a painting of Cézanne. Bourgeois art will cease to develop when the bourgeoisie as a class is destroyed. Great paintings, however, will not cease to give aesthetic pleasure though they have no political meaning for the proletariat. One can enjoy the Crucifixion by Mantegna and be moved by it aesthetically without being a Christian. It is my personal opinion that there is in Soviet Russia today too great a veneration of the past. To me, art is always alive and vital, as it was in the Middle Ages when a new mural was painted every time a new political or social event required one. Because I conceive of art as a living and not a dead thing, I see the profound necessity for a revolution in questions of culture, even in the Soviet Union. Of the recent movements in art, the most significant to the revolutionary movement is that of Super-Realism [Surrealism]. Many of its adherents are members of the Communist Party. Some of their recent work is perfectly accessible to the masses. Their maxim is “Super-Realism at the service of the Revolution.”* Technically they represent the development of the best technique of the bourgeoisie. In ideology, however, they are not fully Communist. And no painting can reach its highest development or be truly revolutionary unless it is truly Communist. And now we come to the question of propaganda. All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters. Giotto was a propagandist of the spirit of Christian charity, the weapon of the Franciscan monks of his time against feudal oppression. Breughel was a propagandist of the struggle of the Dutch artisan petty  

 

*Rivera refers here to the title of the Surrealist journal, Surréalisme au service de la révolution.

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bourgeoisie against feudal oppression. Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist. The familiar accusation that propaganda ruins art finds its source in bourgeois prejudice. Naturally enough the bourgeoisie does not want art employed for the sake of revolution. It does not want ideals in art because its own ideals cannot any longer serve as artistic inspiration. It does not want feelings because its own feelings cannot any longer serve as artistic inspiration. Art and thought and feeling must be hostile to the bourgeoisie today. Every strong artist has a head and a heart. Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else. I want to be a propagandist of Communism and I want to be it in all that I can think, in all that I can speak, in all that I can write, and in all that I can paint. I want to use my art as a weapon. For the real development on a grand scale of revolutionary art in America, it is necessary to have a situation where all unite in a single party of the proletariat and are in a position to take over the public buildings, the public resources, and the wealth of the country. Only then can there develop a genuine revolutionary art. The fact that the bourgeoisie is in a state of degeneration and depends for its art on the art of Europe indicates that there cannot be a development of genuine American art, except in so far as the proletariat is able to create it. In order to be good art, art in this country must be revolutionary art, art of the proletariat, or it will not be good art at all.

“A Call to Argentine Artists” David Alfaro Siqueiros Published in the daily Crítica, Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 2, 1933.

Painters and sculptors: we are working toward the creation in Argentina and Uruguay (perhaps throughout all of South America) of the bases for a visual monumental movement that is open and multi-exemplary for the large popular masses. We propose to take the work of art out of the aristocratic sacristies where it has been rotting for the past four centuries. Our fields of operation will be those places where the greater nucleus of persons attends and the traffic of the people is more intense. We shall use the processes that will give our works widest distribution. We shall, then, paint on the most visible walls on the open sides of modern high rises, in the most visually strategic places in working-class neighborhoods, in union halls, facing public plazas, and in sports arenas and open air theaters. We shall bring out of museums— cemeteries— the pictorial and sculptural production and take these from private hands, and make of them an element of maximum service for the public and collective good, useful to the culture of the large popular masses.  

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We shall break the narrow and mortal circle of easel painting in order to courageously penetrate the immense field of multi-exemplary painting. We shall remove sculpture from the absurdity of the workshop and the movable pedestal and we shall restore it, polychromed, back into architecture and the street. We shall liberate painting and sculpture from dry scholasticism, from academicism and the solitary cerebralism of pure art, and take them to the tremendous social reality that surrounds us and that already wounds our foreheads. We shall restore to visual art the only possible system for its teaching, which consists in the application of the invariable principle that one cannot teach to paint, to engrave, except through the participation of the apprentice in the total process of the work as it is being developed and linking it to the daily and concrete facts of this development to the corresponding theoretical teachings. We shall remove visual art from the miserable individual attempt and return it to the rational, democratic and collective process used in the corporative workshops of the flourishing periods of art. We shall labor in teams, perfecting each day the coordination of our individualities, in direct relation with the capacity of each of us, just like the great soccer players do. In this way our periodic works will constitute the only and formidable public school of visual arts. We shall end with static objects circumscribed by personal and descriptive models, puerile scenes and objects, in order to arrive at new elements that offer us iron anatomies of moving machines, the thunder of sports with its great spectacles for the masses and its ascending social battles in the most exasperating and tremendous fight remembered in the history of the world. We shall step out of the pleasant darkness of the atelier and the Montparnasse schools in order to walk in the plenitude of the light of the human and social realities of factories and streets, workers’ neighborhoods, highways and the vast countryside with its tenant farms and large estates. We shall drink from the living fountains of daily facts the conviction that shall be the impetuous motor of our work, conscious that it was Christian conviction (just one example) that was the dynamo that brought forth the immense popular art of the early and most exemplary epochs of the Italian Renaissance. We are particularly concerned with finding the tools and materials that match the nature of the tremendous work that we are undertaking. We shall find the form that corresponds with the content of our visual expression. We already have two great antecedents, with two magnificent experiences, which give us the initial knowledge of the craft of this new and marvelous profession of ours. I am referring to the primary experiment represented by the Mexican Renaissance, already in process of liquidation, and the more integrated, more modern experience initiated by the Block of Painters in Los Angeles, California, which is in an actual process of development and perfection. The first one gives us the fundamental bases for establishing the principle of

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supremacy of monumental painting (in interiors) over easel painting. It shows us the need of modern work to be linked with the great traditions, in particular with the great American traditions. It gives us the objective knowledge of the procedures of traditional monumental painting which had been lost since the end of the Italian Renaissance. Lastly, it demonstrates that all of the great works of the past have been the fruit of social convictions. The second (the Block of Painters) affirms what is worth conserving of the principles and methods of the Mexican Renaissance, showing us the true nature of its initial effort, with all its failures and faults. It opens wide the door to the new world of modern technique, susceptible to be used in visual production. For the first time in the world it gives us the objective and subjective vehicles that are demanded by large mural painting, that is outdoors and multi-exemplary for the masses, which will exist under the sun and the rain, facing the street, in the first case, and in the second case in proletarian homes. It demonstrates the use of cement instead of lime and sand of traditional fresco, which are inapplicable to the conditions of modern construction. It shows us the use of airbrush, of air compressor, of sand blasting, etc. etc. It initiates us in the use of electric currents for the coloration of walls through various degrees of crystallization. It shows us the technique of collective labor. It shows us the dynamic composition demanded by outdoor visual art. The experience of the Block from Los Angeles, California, gives us in one word all that we need to produce art for the masses and for the large human masses. But this entire program would not come to fruition if we do not proceed in its application in an organic manner. This is what the Union of Visual Artists, which has been recently founded, will do. Therefore it is urgent that all of the producers of visual art, which comprehend the veracity of our principles, lend themselves, as of right now, to join our ranks. — Translated by Alejandro Anreus

“Toward a Transformation of the Plastic Arts” David Alfaro Siqueiros Translated in Siqueiros, Art and Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), pp. 45–48.  

Plans for a manifesto and study program for studio-schools of painting and sculpture, written by Siqueiros in New York, 1934

Painters, sculptors, engravers, newspaper illustrators, photographers, architects (Mexicans, South Americans, North Americans, Europeans), we have decided to foment an international movement to transform the plastic arts.

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Our movement is based on critical analysis of the two great contemporary art experiences: the Paris movement and the modern Mexican movement usually known as the Mexican Renaissance. Both these movements are disintegrating today. One of our valuable antecedents is the mechanical techniques used by Siqueiros in the groups he formed in Los Angeles and Buenos Aires; the Mural Painters Group of Los Angeles and the Polygraphic team of Buenos Aires.

Wh at d o w e wa n t ?

We want to produce an art which will be physically capable of serving the public through its material form. True art forms which will reach far and wide. This art must be commercialized according to the possibilities of each country, in order to avoid the bourgeois élitism of European art and the tourist-oriented bureaucracy of Mexican art. We must rid ourselves of the European Utopia of art for art’s sake, and also of the Mexican demagogic opportunism. We must put an end to the superficial folk art, of the type called “Mexican Curious” which predominates in Mexico today, and substitute for it an art which is internationally valid though based on local antecedents and functional elements. We must coordinate our abilities and experiences and work together as a technical team. We must put an end to the egocentrism of modern European art and the false collectivism of official Mexican art, with its “socialism.” We shall both learn and teach our new art in the course of producing it: theory and practice will go together. We shall put an end to sterile verbal didactic teaching, which has produced nothing of value in the last four hundred years of academism, and which even today is still the only method of teaching art both in Mexico and all over the world. We must make use of all the modern tools and materials which serve the purpose of our art, and put an end to the incredible technical anachronism to be found in Mexico and Europe. Instead, we shall establish the fundamental premise that art movements should always develop in accordance with the technical possibilities of their age. Modern technique and mechanics have made such enormous progress that they can enrich our creative capacity beyond our wildest imagination. Unfortunately artists today seem to know nothing of the science and technology from which their materials evolve, and their knowledge is restricted to knowing in which shop to buy them. Modern industry has made revolutionary changes in the chemistry of pigments which modern artists know nothing whatever about. We must develop a polygraphic art which will combine both plastic and graphic art and provide a great potential for artistic expression. Art must no longer be separated into units, either pure painting or pure sculpture, it must find a new, more powerful, more modern language which will give it much greater repercussion and validity as an art expression. We must use new, dialectic forms, rather than dead, scholarly, mechanical ones. We must evolve a dynamic graphic art in tune with the dynamism of the world today, and we

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must rid ourselves of mysticism, of snobbish “archaeologism,” and the other defects of modern art in both Europe and Mexico. Our art must have a real scientific basis. We must get rid of the empiricism, and emotivism which have characterized the art movements of the world until today. For the first time in history, we shall find scientific truths which can be proved, either physically, chemically, or psychologically. In this way we will be able to forge a strong connection between art and science. We must foment the teaching of exterior mural painting, public painting, in the street, in the sunlight, on the sides of tall buildings instead of the advertisements you see there now, in strategic positions where the people can see them, mechanically produced and materially adapted to the realities of modern construction. We must put an end to tourist-inspired Mexican muralism with its archaic technique, and bureaucracy; murals painted in out of the way places and which only emerge from hiding in select monographs published for foreign amateurs. We will be preparing ourselves for the society of the future, in which our type of art will be preferred to all others, because it is the effective daily expression of art for the masses. We shall, of course, conserve all the absolute values of the other art movements, because we feel that tradition is an accumulation of experiences on which our work must be based. This is even more important since our movement is a classical movement, in as much as it responds to the social and technical realities of the moment in which it exists. We shall give practical form to our theories by creating workshop schools of plastic and graphic art, from which we shall exclude archaic, livid monocopy forms and procedures, such as easel painting; we shall exclude everything which cannot be reproduced, we shall exclude exhibitions in “distinguished” galleries for the benefit of amateurs and critics, expensive limited editions, in fact everything which can be considered art for the private collector and for a privileged élite. In this way we shall be consequential with our own period of history, and we shall provide an immediate and evident service to the great masses and to all humanity. In our workshop schools we will develop polychromed engraving (both the traditional and, more especially the modern); polychromed lithography (traditional and modern); large editions of polychromed posters (mechanically printed); photo-engraving (by experimental methods); scenography; applied painting (on standards, flags, posters, curtains and commercial art); reproducible polychromed sculpture (made of cement, plaster cement and all other modern materials); photo-genic painting (all our artwork must be able to be photographically reproduced); photo-montage, cliché montage (applicable to all kinds of graphic reproduction); documentary photography and cinema; manual and mechanical printing (the problem of printing is fundamental to all popular art); modern mural painting (on cement, with silicates, using a spray gun and other applicable tools or mechanical means such as electro-ceramics, etc.); the chemical theory and practice of pigments and

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all other art materials (to prove the great superiority of modern materials over traditional ones); descriptive geometry and industrial drawing; the social history of the arts (rather than anecdotism). As for publicity, we shall have simultaneous exhibitions (in private buildings belonging to organizations and in public places; at home and abroad); co-ordinated exhibitions (of multiple painting and photogenic art); we will publish popular monographs (at prices accessible to the people); we shall set up permanent sales posts (in towns and villages, in factories, etc.); we will try to make direct sales of personal work (in order to help our collaborators, etc.). Our workshop schools will have a publicity section which will take charge of this commercial program and invent new sales methods, because we feel that our economic development depends on our finding a way to commercialize our products in accordance with the possibilities of the masses. —New York, June 1934  

“Orozco ‘Explains’ ” Reprinted from The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art Vol. 7, No. 4 (August 1940):2–11.  

This text was written by Orozco at the request of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to accompany his portable mural Dive Bomber and Tank, which he painted on the premises of the Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition 20 Centuries of Mexican Art (May through summer, 1940)

This “explanation” was written by Mr. Orozco. The quotation marks in his title indicate his feeling that explanations are unnecessary. The public wants explanations about a painting. What the artist had in mind when he did it. What he was thinking of. What is the exact name of the picture, and what the artist means by that. If he is glorifying or cursing. If he believes in Democracy. Going to the Italian Opera you get a booklet with a full account of why Rigoletto kills Aida at the end of a wild party with La Bohème, Lucia di Lammermoor and Madame Butterfly. The Italian Renaissance is another marvelous opera full of killings and wild parties, and the public gets also thousands of booklets with complete and most detailed information about everything and everybody in Florence and Rome. And now the public insists on knowing the plot of modern painted opera, though not Italian, of course. They take for granted that every picture must be the illustration of a short story or of a thesis and want to be told the entertaining biography and bright sayings of the leaders in the stage-picture, the ups and downs of hero, villain, and chorus. Many of the pictures actually tell all that and more even including quotations from the

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Holy Scriptures and Shakespeare. Others deal with social conditions, evils of the world, revolution, history and the like. Bedroom pictures with la femme à sa toilette are still very frequent. Suddenly, Madame Butterfly and her friend Rigoletto disappear from the stagepicture. Gone, too, are gloomy social conditions. To the amazement of the public the curtain goes up and nothing is on the stage but a few lines and cubes. The Abstract. The public protests and demands explanations, and explanations are given away freely and generously. Rigoletto and social conditions are still there but have become abstract, all dolled up in cubes and cones in a wild surrealist party with La Bohème, Lucia de Lammermoor and Madame Butterfly. Meanings? Names? Significance? Short stories? Well, let’s invent them afterward. The public refuses TO SEE painting. They want TO HEAR painting. They don’t care for the show itself, they prefer TO LISTEN to the barker outside. Free lectures every hour for the blind, around the Museum. This way, please. “The Artist must be sincere,” they say. It is true. He must be sincere. The actor on the stage commits suicide to thrill or frighten the public to death. The actor feels exactly what a suicide feels, and acts the same way except that his gun is not loaded. He is sincere as an artist only. Next week he has to impersonate St. Francis, Lenin or an average business man, very sincerely! The technique of painting is still in its infancy after ten thousand years of civilization, or whatever it is. Even college children know this fact, for abundant literature about the subject is on hand. It seems incredible that science and industry have not yet provided the artist with better materials to work with. Not a single improvement through centuries. The range of colors available is still extremely limited. Pigments are not permanent at all in spite of manufacturers’ claims. Canvas, wood, paper, walls are exposed to continuous destruction from moisture, changes in temperature, chemical reactions, insects and germs. Oils, varnishes, wax, gums and tempera media are dirty substances darkening, changing, cracking and disintegrating all the time. Fresco painting is free from the inconveniences of oils and varnishes, but the wall upon which the painting is done is subjected to many causes of destruction, such as the use of the wrong kind of building materials, poor planning, moisture from the ground or from the air, earthquakes, dive bombing, tanking or battleshipping, excess of magnesia in the lime or the marble dust, lack of care resulting in scratches or peeling off, et cetera. So, fresco must be done only on walls that are as free as possible from all these inconveniences. There is no rule for painting al fresco. Every artist may do as he pleases provided he paints as thinly as possible and only while the plaster is wet, six to eight hours from the moment it is applied. No retouching of any kind afterward. Every artist develops his own way of planning his conception and transferring it onto the wet plaster. Every method is as good as the other. Or the artist may improvise without any previous sketches.

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“ Th e D i v e B o mb e r ,” o r S i x I n t e r c h a n g e a b l e Pa n e l s

A painting is a Poem and nothing else. A poem made of relationships between forms as other kinds of poems are made of relationships between words, sounds or ideas. Sculpture and architecture are also relationships between forms. This word forms includes color, tone, proportion, line, et cetera. The forms in a poem are necessarily organized in such a way that the whole acts as an automatic machine, more or less efficient but apt to function in a certain way, to move in a certain direction. Such a machine-motor sets in motion our senses, first; our emotional capacity, second; and our intellect, last. An efficient and well-organized machine may work in very different ways. It can be simplified to its last elementals or basic structure or may be developed into a vast and complicated organism working under the same basic principles. Each part of a machine may be by itself a machine to function independently from the whole. The order of the inter-relations between its parts may be altered, but those relationships may stay the same in any other order, and unexpected or expected possibilities may appear. Suppose we change the actual order of the plastic elements of the vaults in the Sistine Chapel . . . A linotype is a work of art, but a linotype in motion is an extraordinary adventure affecting the lives of many human beings or the course of history. A few lines from a linotype in action may start a World War or may mean the birth of a new era. —José Clemente Orozco

 

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Contributors

is Researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología y Historia,

E s t h e r A c e v e do

Mexico City. A l e j a n d r o A n r e u s is Professor of art history and Latin American/Latino studies and Chair of the Art Department, William Paterson University. H o l ly B a r n e t- S a n c h e z is Associate Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Associate Professor of art history, University of New Mexico. B r u c e C a mpb e l l

is Associate Professor of Hispanic studies, St. John’s University,

Minnesota. M a r y K . C o f f e y

is Associate Professor of art history, Dartmouth College.

Tat i a n a F l o r e s

is Assistant Professor of art history, Rutgers University.

L e o n a r d F o l g a r a i t

is Professor of art history, Vanderbilt University.

R o b i n Ad è l e G r e e l e y is Associate Professor of art history and Latin American studies at the University of Connecticut. A n n a I n dyc h - L ó p e z is Associate Professor of art history at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY. J e n n i f e r A . J o l ly

is Associate Professor of art history, Ithaca College.

G a b r i e l P e l u f f o L i n a r i

is Director of the Manuel Blanes Museum, Montevideo.

357

Index

A Primeira Missa no Brasil (The First Mass in Brazil), 196, 197f, 203–5 Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market: entanglements of contract vs. censorship, 142; the market commission, 126–28; murals and young muralists at, 125–42; O’Higgins and, 125, 127–28, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139; RiveraSiqueiros debates and, 126–31 abstract expressionism, 29, 183, 203, 264 Adams, David, 242 aesthetic indeterminacy, 4, 9n9 aesthetic statism, 150, 157; defined, 166n14 Afro-Cuban Dance (Carreño), 188–89, 189f agrarian reform. See land reform Alemán, Miguel, 27–29, 38 Allegory of Racial Equality and Confraternity of the White and Black Races in Cuba (Siqueiros), 185, 186f Allegory of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Revueltas), 119–22, 120f Almaraz, Carlos, 254, 255, 255f, 256, 256f, pl. 8

American Art at the Service of the Victory of the Democracies, 185 American Landscape (Sheeler), 220, 221f anarchism, 40, 42, 45, 46, 76, 88 anarchist individualism, 42, 45, 52 anarcho-communitarianism, 271 anarcho-syndicalism, 40–42, 52, 79, 88, 178 Andamios exteriores (Exterior Scaffolding), 121, 121f, 122 Andamios interiores (Interior Scaffolding), 121–22 Anderson, Benedict, 112 applied painting, 334 architecture. See under Orozco, José Clemente Argentina. See Buenos Aires art: for art’s sake, 333; controversies over public works of, 209–10; scientific basis, 334. See also specific topics Art against Fascism, 185 art movements, developing in accordance with technical possibilities of their age, 333 Arte Acá, 232, 233; and defense of community,

“alternative muralism,” 179, 182–84, 189, 190 Alva de la Canal, Ramón, 20f, 21 Alvaro Obregón Center, 125, 127, 128, 131–33

235–38. See also Tepito Arte Acá (Tepito Art Here) movement arte puro, 4, 149, 150, 157, 161, 171n76

3 59

artist and public, transforming the relationship between, 77–78 Ateneo de la Juventud, 154–55 Atl, Dr., 76 Autonomous Department of Publicity and Propaganda (DAPP), 154 avant-garde (theory), muralism and, 110–13, 119, 122, 135 Ávila Camacho, Manuel, 27, 28 Azuela, Mariano, 151, 152 Bartra, Roger, 13–14 Batlle Berres, Luis, 197–98 Battista, Fulgencio, 185 Belkin, Arnold, 271 Berdía, Norberto, 200, 215f Bernal, Antonio, 247, 249, 249f, 250 Bernal, Gustavo, pl. 10 Berni, Antonio, 178–84, 190, 191n7, 192n18, pl. 7; Demonstration, 179–81, 180f; joined Communist Party, 191n2, 191n7; Siqueiros and, 178, 184, 190–91; The Wounded Man, 181–83, 182f Big Three. See tres grandes black civil rights activists. See Del Rey Mural Black Panthers, 250 Block of Painters in Los Angeles, 331–32 Bracho, Angel, 135, 136, 136f Bravo, Lola Alvarez, 21f Brenner, Anita, 204 Broyles-Gonzáles, Yolanda, 260n34, 261n36 Buenos Aires, Argentina (1933): Siqueiros’ travels and “alternative muralisms” in, 177–84 Burial of a Worker (Siqueiros), 19, 163, 164f Busca en la Tierra Tu Alimiento y en el Libro Tu Libertad (Search in the Earth for Your Nourishment and in the Book for Your Freedom), 23, 23f Calles, Plutarco Elías, 19, 129, 150, 320–21 Caras (Herrón), 251, 253f Cárdenas, Lázaro, 130–31, 149; policies, 27, 28, 151, 153–54; socialism, 15, 27, 28, 126, 129–31; support for muralism, 27, 131, 142 Cardenismo, 27, 131, 153–54 Cardenista Marxism, 151, 153–54 Carnival of Ideologies, The (Orozco), 43, 44f, 45 Carreño, Mario, 185–90, 188f, 189f; 1943

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“muralist” experience, 190 Casa del Obrero Mundial, 40 Castagnino, Juan Carlos, pl. 7 Catholic Church and Catholicism, 22, 34n44, 140, 181. See also Christianity Cézanne, Paul, 65–66, 183, 329 Charlot, Jean, 93–94, 122; Massacre at the Templo Mayor, 116–19 Chávez, César, 246, 247, 250, 255 Chávez, Gustavo, 271–72, 276 Chiapas, 275–76 chicanismo, 245, 248 Chicano/a mestizaje. See mestizaje Christianity, 41. See also clericalism and anticlericalism; Cristero rebellion civil rights activists. See Del Rey Mural civil society and modern society, 2 clericalism and anticlericalism, 22, 40, 44–45 cliché montage, 334 co-ordinated exhibitions, 335 cold war, 29, 48, 165, 264–65. See also specific topics collectivism, false: of official Mexican art, 333 Commission of Mural Painting, 28 communitarianism, 271 Constructivist Universalism (Torres García), 200–201 Contemporáneos: critical nationalism, 148–55; legacy, 164–65; vs. muralists, 148, 149, 157– 64; nation vs. state, the politics of aesthetics, and, 155–57; Paz and, 173n93 Contemporáneos (journal), 148 Corn (Pujol), pl. 4 Cortés, 231 Cortés (Orozco), 26, 160f, 161 “cosmopolitan,” meaning of, 166n15 Court of Fiestas, 63–70, 72 Court of Labor, 60–64, 68, 71, 72 Couture, Eduardo, 204 Covarrubias, Miguel, 62 Craven, David, 48 Creation (Rivera), 16–17, 17f, 46, 61, 70, 110, 119 Cristero rebellion, 22–23, 25, 26 Cuba. See Havana Cuesta, Jorge, 148, 154–58; on art and politics, 148, 157; Cardenismo, 153–54; on Contemporáneos, 150; on Marxism, 153–54; on national sentiment vs. national conscience,

170n58; on nationalism, 171n69; Nietzsche and, 155; Orozco and, 158; on Rivera, 157–58; scandal, 149; on skepticism, 158 Cuevas, José Luis, 13, 264–65 Cultural Mission (Alva de la Canal), 20f, 21 cultural missions, 20–21 DAPP (Autonomous Department of Publicity and Propaganda), 154 Daumier, Honoré, 323, 329 Day of the Dead, 63 de la Cárcova, Ernesto, 179 Dead, The (Orozco), 103 Debroise, Olivier, 216 “deep” Mexico, 62–68, 71–72, 74n15 Del Rey Mural, The (Bernal), 247–51, 248f, 249f; sources for, 247–51 demagogic opportunism, 333 democracy, 28f, 29 Demonstration (Berni), 179–81, 180f Departamento del Distrito Federal (DDF). See Public Works Department of Mexico City descriptive geometry, 335 Detroit, 218–23 Detroit Industry (Rivera), 209, 255 Detroit Institute of the Arts, 219–20 direct sales of personal work, 335 Distribution of Arms, The (Rivera), 56, 59f, 67, 72 Distribution of the Land (Rivera), 19, 63, 64, pl. 2 documentary photography and cinema, 334 Domínguez Michael, Christopher, 155, 170n60 Don’t Buy Gallo Wine (Almaraz), 254, 255f Duco (lacquer paint), 185, 186f, 187, 188f, 189f eclecticism, 199, 204–5; of Rivera, 56, 58, 73 egocentrism of modern European art, 333 Ehrenberg, Felipe, 276 Eisenstein, Sergei, 81 el ñero, 232–34, 238 Emiliano Zapata (Rivera), 23–25, 24f emotivism, 334 empiricism, 334 Enlightenment, 2 Epic of American Civilization, The (Orozco), 96f–99f, 102f–105f; use of architecture in, 95–106

Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA). See National Fine Arts School estridentismo (stridentism), 108–11, 116, 119, 121–23 estridentista forms, 121 Europe, Mexico, and the United States (19102003), 285–317 existentialism, 167n16 exterior mural painting, 334 Exterior Scaffolding (Andamios exteriores), 121, 121f, 122 Fabian, Johannes, 114–15 Falcón, Mario, 269–70 fascism, 43, 45, 77, 81–83, 86, 87, 140, 154, 187. See also Art against Fascism; Perón, Juan Domingo Fernández, Justino, 41 First Mass in Brazil, The (Portinari), 196, 197f, 203–5 Folgarait, Leonard, 35n61, 52, 91n22 folk art, 333 Ford, Edsel, 218, 219–20 Fourteenth Street, Manhattan (Orozco), 95 freedom, political, 2 From the Porfiriato to the Revolution (Siqueiros), 51, 52f Gamboa, Fernando, 142 Gamio, Manuel, 112, 151 García Maroto, Gabriel, 148 Gellert, Hugo, 212, 222 General Uprising of the Mexican People Against the Porfirian Regime (Siqueiros), 51 geometry, descriptive, 335 Ghosts of Religion in Alliance with Militarism, The (Orozco), 43–44 “Gods of the Modern World” (Orozco), 102, 102f, 103f Gómez, Mauricio, 276 Gómez Mena, Mária Luisa, 185, 186, 194n40 Gómez Sicre, José, 186–87 Gonzales, Rodolfo “Corky,” 247–48 Gorostiza, José, 149, 152, 156 graphic art, workshop schools of, 334 Greenwood, Grace, 125, 127, 136, 138–39, 139f Greenwood, Marion, 125, 127, 128, 136, 138, 138f Gronk, 251, 253

Index

   •   3 61

grupos, 272–75 Guadarrama, Ramón Alva, 37, 125, 127, 136, 145n37 Havana, Cuba (1943): Siqueiros’ travels and “alternative muralisms” in, 184–90 Hernandez, Alfonso, 232, 236, 237 Hernández Delgadillo, José, 268–69, 269f heroes and anti-heroes, 100, 148, 214 Herrón, Willie, 251–53, 252f–254f, 261nn44–46 Higgins, H. Ralph, 219 Hinojosa, Cosme, 142 “Hispano-America” (Orozco), 97–99, 98f, 99f History as Seen from Mexico in 1936 (Noguchi), 140–42, 141f Horrors of the Revolution (Orozco), 19 humanism, 200–205 “I Am Joaquin” (Gonzales), 247–48 Indian of the Tunas (Maples Arce), 113, 114f indigenismo, 26, 74n15, 78, 151, 159, 243 indigenous communities and populations, 1–5, 70–71, 151, 257n9, 265; Gustavo Chávez and, 276, 277; Orozco and, 16; Rivera and, 7, 25, 46, 49, 57, 62, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 153, 276; Willie Herrón and, 251. See also “primitive” cultures individualism, 88, 320; anarchist, 42, 45, 52 industrial drawing, 335 industrialization, 28 Industrialization of the Countryside (M. Greenwood), 137–38, 138f Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), 167n20, 265, 268 Interior Scaffolding (Andamios interiores), 121–22 Jiménez Rueda, Julio, 149 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 250 Knight, Alan, 27 Krauze, Enrique, 29 Krinsky, Carol, 212 laborers, 47, 220–22. See also Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market: murals and young muralists at; Court of Labor; mining; Soviet Union; Tepito murals land reform, 25, 32n20, 58, 64, 67. See under

3 6 2    •   I n d e x

Zapata, Emiliano Lázaro, Enrique, pl. 7 League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers (LEAR), 43, 77, 79, 130, 142, 154 Leal, Fernando, 114f, 115f, 118–19; The Feast of the Lord of Chalma, 113–16, 118, pl. 3 Lee, Anthony, 220 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 212–14, 326 Liberated Earth with the Natural Forces Controlled by Man (Orozco), 162, 163f Liberation of the Peon, The (Rivera), 56, 58f, 72 liberatory politics and aesthetics, 157 Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR). See League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers Linsley, Robert, 211 López Tijerina, Reies, 250 Los Angeles, 331–32. See also under mestizaje Malcolm X, 250 Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future (Rivera), 208, 209f, 211, 212, 213f. See also Rivera, Diego: mural cycle at Rockefeller Center Man of Fire (Orozco), 158, 159f “Man Released from the Mechanistic to the Creative Life” (Orozco), 95–96, 96f, 97f Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, 37–38, 57, 60, 71, 151–52, 319–21 Manrique, Daniel, 232, 234–37, 241, 271, 273f, pl. 8 manual printing, 334 Maples Arce, Manuel, 108–22; Actual No. 1, 108–11, 109f, 118, 119, 122 March of Humanity (Siqueiros), 29–30, 30f Market/Tianguis, The (Rivera), 63–66, 66f Marx, Karl, 47, 153 Marxism, 4–5, 46, 87, 169n46; Cardenista, 151, 153–54; Catholicism, Christianity, and, 153, 168n42; Catholicism and, 168n42; Contemporáneos and, 151; Cuesta and, 153; dangers in Mexican, 154; Rivera and, 46, 52–53, 56, 157–58, 208, 222; Siqueiros and, 51, 52, 199, 200 Marxist humanism, modernist aesthetics of the post-war French model of, 203

Maternity (Orozco), 15–16, 16f Maximato, 15, 20, 21, 26, 27, 129, 130 May Day (Rivera), 63, 64, 65f, 67 mechanical printing, 334 Mechanization of the Countryside (Rivera), 21, 71, 72f Mérida, Carlos, 142 mestizaje, 15, 62, 68; in an early Chicano mural, 246–51; Chicano/a, 243–46, 256–57; radical mestizaje in East L.A., 251–56 Mexican Americans (1854-1910), 284 Mexican Communist Party (PCM), 168n42; banned by Calles, 19, 46; muralists and, 9n10, 19–20, 76–77; Orozco and, 41; Rivera and, 46–50, 52, 64, 69, 74, 222; Siqueiros and, 49, 52, 76, 77, 129, 177, 199; and Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, 32n21, 41 “Mexican Curious,” 333 Mexican economy, 22 Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (SME), mural for, 79–82. See also Portrait of the Bourgeoisie “Mexican Miracle,” 27, 28, 30 Mexican mural painting, trinity of, 38 Mexican Mural Renaissance, 37, 116 Mexican Mural Renaissance, The (Charlot), 116 Mexican muralism in United States: controversies, paradoxes, and publics, 208–23 Mexican Pueblo (Orozco), 95 Mexican Revolution, 37, 131, 151; aftermath, 15. See also Partido Nacional Revolucionario Mexican School, Mexican muralism after the, 264–78 Mexican Soldiers (Orozco), 95 mexicanidad, 22, 26, 27, 129, 149–51, 159, 160 Mexico City, 229. See also Tepito Mexico City earthquake of 1985, 271–72, 274 Mexico Today and Tomorrow (Rivera), 47, 48f Miliotes, Diane, 214 military, 38 mining, 61, 131–33, 138–40 Mining (G. Greenwood), 138–39, 139f Mining Tragedy (Pujol), 131–32, 132f Ministry of Public Education (SEP), 21, 22, 56, 57, 60, 133, 148, 149 Mitchell, Timothy, 6 “Modern Industrial Man” (Orozco), 103–6, 104f, 105f

modernism, 53, 76, 127, 140, 153, 158, 163–64, 210 modernismo, 108 modernist abstraction. See social realism: vs. abstraction “modernist” realist art, 204 modernization, 18, 22, 68 modernizing state, transition from oligarchic state to, 15, 18 Molina Enríquez, Renato, 120 Montenegro, Roberto, 22–23, 23f Morelos, 24–26 Mujer en la Lucha, La (Hernández Delgadillo), 269, 269f Muñoz García, Antonio, 127 mural movement, 18, 22, 37, 50, 75, 116, 178; decline of, 264–65; ideological radicalization of, 142; overview of, 1–6. See also RiveraSiqueiros debates mural workshops (talleres de muralismo), 276 muraling, 263 muralism, 263; from muralism to muralisms, 268–78; political impact, 18, 22 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 212, 213 mysticism, 153, 154, 158, 196, 201, 203, 204, 334 “nation”: defined, 2, 112; vs. state, 155–57 National Art Prize, 28 National Commission of Mural Painting, 38 National Fine Arts School (ENBA), 129, 131, 135 national sentiment vs. national conscience, 170n58 nationalism, 22, 47, 111–13, 171n69; critical, 148–55; Uruguayan cultural, 201–3. See also “nation”; “revolutionary nationalism” Neruda, Pablo, 184 New Democracy (Siqueiros), 28f, 29 New School for Social Research, 209, 213–15, 222, 223 “New World, New Races and New Art” (Orozco), 94, 321–22 New York City, architecture of, 93–94 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 154–56, 171n65 No Compre Vino Gallo (Don’t Buy Gallo Wine), 254, 255f No Somos Esclavos de la Migra (Almaraz), pl. 8 Noguchi, Isamu, 140, 146n48; History as Seen from Mexico in 1936, 140–42, 141f

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Novo, Salvador, 149, 152, 157 nudity, 61, 70, 178, 181, 185, 219, 238–40 Nuestra Nacionalidad (Tamayo), 29, 29f Obregón, Alvaro, 15, 150; uses of muralism, 18 Obregón Center. See Alvaro Obregón Center O’Higgins, Pablo: Marion Greenwood and, 127–28, 136–37, 139; Rivera and, 127–28; Rodríguez Market and, 125, 127–28, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139; social realism, 126; The Struggle of the Workers Against the Financiers, 134, 134f, pl. 4 Ojos de Lucha, 274–75, 275f Olvera Street, 215–17, 216f. See also Tropical America Orozco, José Clemente, 28–29, 149, 157, 164; anticlericalism, 40, 210; Autobiografía, 39; awards and honors, 28; The Carnival of Ideologies, 43, 44f, 45; Cortés, 26, 160f, 161; criticism and vandalism of his murals, 210; Cuesta and, 158; on dangers of painting, 210; death and funeral, 38; The Epic of American Civilization, 95–106, 96f–99f, 102f–105f; Horrors of the Revolution, 19; Hospicio Cabañas murals, 45; ideology and style, 40–46; Liberated Earth with the Natural Forces Controlled by Man, 162, 163f; Man of Fire, 158, 159f; Maternity, 15–16, 16f; mural cycle at New School for Social Research, 209, 213–15, 222, 223; murals at Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, 210; “New World, New Races and New Art,” 94, 321–22; photograph of, 39f; reactions to and opinions about architecture, 93–94; Revolutionary Trinity, 41, 42f; Rivera and, 38, 39f; Rodríguez Market and, 128; self-imposed exile in United States, 20–21; self-portraits, 149; Siqueiros and, 38, 39f; Struggle in the Occident, 213–14, 214f; Tamayo and, 162; The Trench, 41, 43f; via negativa, 42, 45, 52; Villaurrutia on, 157; vision of humanity, 214 “Orozco ‘Explains’” (Orozco), 335–37 Ortíz, Carlos, 235–37 Our Daily Bread (Rivera), 68, 69f Pan-American Unity (Rivera), 28 Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM). See Mexican Communist Party

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Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), 130–31, 150, 154 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). See Institutional Revolutionary Party Paz, Octavio, 56, 149, 151, 156–57, 164–65, 173nn93–95, 264 peasantry, muralism and the, 18 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 243–44 peripheral modernity, 15 Perón, Juan Domingo, 183 photo-engraving, 334 photo-genic painting, 334 photo-montage, 334 plastic art, workshop schools of, 334 Plastic Exercise, 178, pl. 7 Plaza Art Center, 215. See also Olvera Street Plumed Serpent, The (Herrón), 251, 254f politics and art, 157–58. See also specific topics polychromed engraving, 334 polychromed lithography, 334 polychromed posters, large editions of, 334 polygraphic art, 333 popular monographs, 335 Portinari, Cândido, 197f; as angel in the tempest, 203–5; Marxists on, 207n17; Retirantes (Refugees), 201–2, 202f; in Uruguay, 196–205 Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (Siqueiros), 79–82, 80f, 84f, 85f, 87f, 88, 89; narrative in the original mural, 82–86; transformation of the mural, 86–88 Prevosti, Carlos, 205 “primitive” cultures, 115–16. See also indigenous communities and populations primitivism, 115–16, 160 proletariat. See laborers; Soviet Union Psychological Portrait of Manuel Maples Arce (Charlot), 119 Public Works Department of Mexico City (DDF), 125–28, 133 Pujol, Antonio, 79, 86, 88, 125, 127, 130–33, 136, pl. 3 Quijano, Patricia, 271 Ramos, Samuel, 152–53, 155 RCA Building. See Rivera, Diego: mural cycle at Rockefeller Center

realism, 183, 207n26 rebel, figure of a, 97–101 Reed, Alma, 210 Refugees (Portinari), 201–2, 202f Renau, Josep, 80–82, 80f, 82f, 86–89 Rendón, Pedro, 135, 137f reproducible polychromed sculpture, 334 Retirantes (Refugees), 201–2, 202f “revolutionary nationalism,” ideology and policy of, 2, 14, 22, 133, 156, 265, 277; aesthetics and, 152, 156, 268; Contemporáneos and, 152, 156; Cuevas on, 265; nature of, 31n8; Orozco and, 46; politics of class hidden in the aesthetics of, 152 Revolutionary Trinity (Orozco), 41, 42f Revueltas, Fermín, pl. 1; Allegory of the Virgin of Guadalupe, 119–22, 120f Revueltas, José, 50, 168 Reyes Palma, Francisco, 59–60 Rivera, Diego, 31n2, 56–60; Angel Bracho and, 135; awards, honors, and positions held by, 28, 129; “classicism,” 157–58; combining class and race, 135; Court of Fiestas and, 63–70, 72; Court of Labor and, 60–64, 68, 71, 72; Creation, 16–17, 17f, 46, 61, 70, 110, 119; criticism of, 210, 220, 222; DDF and, 127–28; death, 38–39; “Defense and Attack against the Stalinists,” 49; destruction of his mural cycle at Rockefeller Center, 208; Detroit Industry, 209, 219, 219f, 220, 222, 223, 255; The Distribution of Arms, 56, 59f, 67, 72; Distribution of the Land, 19, 63, 64, pl. 2; eclecticism, 56, 58, 73; Emiliano Zapata, 23–25, 24f; finances, 21; García Maroto’s attack on, 148–49; on his painting, 222; ideology and style, 46–49; indigenous communities and populations and, 7, 25, 46, 49, 57, 62, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 153, 276; José Luis Soto and, 273; as leader of the oppressed, 24; Lenin and, 222; The Liberation of the Peon, 56, 58f, 72; Man at the Crossroads, 208, 209f, 211, 212, 213f; Marion Greenwood and, 136; The Market/Tianguis, 63–66, 66f; Marxism and, 46, 52–53, 56, 157–58, 208, 222; May Day, 63, 64, 65f, 67; Mechanization of the Countryside, 21, 71, 72f; Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and, 46–50, 52, 64, 69, 74, 222; Mexico Today and Tomorrow,

47, 48f; mural cycle at Rockefeller Center, 208–13, 218–23; mural cycle for Ministry of Public Education (SEP), 21–22, 56–58, 58f, 59f, 60–63, 65f, 66f, 68, 69f, 70, 72f, 73, 148–49; O’Higgins and, 127–28; opportunism, 222; Our Daily Bread, 68, 69f; Pan-American Unity, 28; photograph of, 39f; political ideologies, 28; portraits of, 118; revolutionary propaganda, 210; Rodríguez Market and, 127–28; self-portrait, 71; on Siqueiros, 128; “skepticism” of his work, 158; socialist culture, leftist artists, and, 220–22; stairwell cycle and, 70–73; Stalin and, 220; The Teacher, 71; “The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art,” 322–30; Trotsky and, 128, 211, 220; U.S. Communist Party and, 220; “utopian fantasy of the left,” 211; “vision of the truth,” 58, 59, 67; workers/laborers and, 47, 60–62, 221–22; Zapata and, 19, 23–25, 24f, 34n41, 46, 62, 64. See also Rivera-Siqueiros debates Rivera-Siqueiros debates, 126–33, 153, 154 “Rivera’s Counter Revolutionary Road” (Siqueiros), 49, 130 Rockefeller, Abigail Aldrich, 208, 211–12 Rockefeller, John D., 211 Rockefeller, Nelson, 212 Rockefeller Center. See under Rivera, Diego Rodó, José Enrique, 203 Rodríguez Market. See Abelardo L. Rodríguez Market Salazar, Ruben, 244 sales posts, permanent, 335 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, 172n77 scaffolding, 96, 121–22 scenography, 334 science and art, 334 “scientificism,” 136 Search in the Earth for Your Nourishment and in the Book for Your Freedom (Montenegro), 23, 23f self-portraits, 71, 115, 118–19, 149 Senie, Harriet F., 209 Sepelio, El (Soto), 273, 274f Sheeler, Charles, 220, 221f simultaneous exhibitions, 335 Sinister Forces, The (Orozco), 43–44

Index

   •   3 6 5

Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 38–39, 75–77, 80f, 84f, 85f, 87f, 90n8, 177, 202, 205, 267; “A Call to Argentine Artists,” 177, 330–32; Allegory of Racial Equality and Confraternity of the White and Black Races in Cuba, 185, 186f; attempted assassination of Trotsky, 184; Berni and, 178, 184, 190–91; in Buenos Aires (1933), 184–90; Burial of a Worker, 19, 163, 164f; critique of muralism, 77–79; critique of the popular, 216; death, 190–91, 265; first solo exhibition, 157; From the Porfiriato to the Revolution, 51, 52f; General Uprising of the Mexican People Against the Porfirian Regime, 51; in Havana (1943), 184–90; hiding, arrest, and exile, 89, 184–85; ideology and style, 50–53; Los Angeles mural at Chouinard School of Art, 217; manifesto against academicism in painting, 157; March of Humanity, 29–30, 30f; Marxism and, 51, 52, 199, 200; Me llamaban el coronelazo (memoirs), 39; Mexican Communist Party and, 199; in Montevideo, 206n3; mural for Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate (SME), 79–82; New Democracy, 28f, 29; organized labor and, 217; photograph of, 39f; Plastic Exercise, 178, pl. 7; Río de la Plata and, 199; Rivera and, 38–39, 39f; speeches, 187; “The Counter-revolutionary Road of Rivera,” 49, 130; “Toward a Transformation of the Plastic Arts,” 332–35; Tropical America, 209, 215–18, 215f, 218f, 223; Two Mountains of America, 187, 194n41; Uruguayan Communist Party and, 199; Villaurrutia on, 157. See also Portrait of the Bourgeoisie; RiveraSiqueiros debates Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum, 29, 89, 265 SME. See Mexican Electricians’ Syndicate social history of the arts, 335 social movements, independent, 269–78. See also specific movements social realism, 5, 22, 126, 141, 149, 151, 152; vs. abstraction, 29, 140, 141, 197–201; Rivera and, 46, 57, 60, 66, 67, 72, 77, 218; in Uruguay, 201–5 socialism, 66–68, 71–73, 165; of Cárdenas, 15, 27, 28, 126, 129–31; of Mexican art, 333. See also Court of Labor; laborers; Marxism socialist culture, leftist artists and Rivera, 220–22

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Song and Music (Tamayo), pl. 6 Soto, José Luis, 273, 274f Soviet Union, 46, 325–29. See also specific topics Spain, 206n12 Spilimbergo, Lino Enea, 178, 183, pl. 7 stairwell cycle, 70–73 Stalin, Joseph, 213 Street Corner (Orozco), 95 strikers. See laborers Struggle of the Workers Against the Financiers, The (O’Higgins), 134, 134f, pl. 4 Subway Post (Orozco), 95 Sugar Cane Cutters (Carreño), 188–89, 188f Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors: manifesto of, 37–38, 57, 60, 71, 151–52, 319–21 Taller de Arte e Ideología (TIP), 272, 276, 277 talleres de muralismo (mural workshops), 276 Tamayo, Rufino, 29, 29f, 158–65, 171n76; Landscape in the Night, 161, 161f; Song and Music, 161, 162f, 163–64, pl. 6 Teacher, The (Rivera), 71 teatristas, 246, 255 Teatro Campesino in Delano, California, 246– 50, 255, 261n36 Teatro Verdi, 203, 204 Tehuana, 61, 62, 68 Tehuantepec Landscape (Rivera), 71, 72 Tepito, 229–31; defining marginality of, 231–35 Tepito Arte Acá (Tepito Art Here) movement, 232, 271, 272; and the defense of community, 235–38 Tepito murals: meaning and necessity of, 238– 41; strategic plan and survival, 241–42 Terrones, Joaquín, 173n93 Tianguis, The (Rivera). See Market/Tianguis Tibol, Raquel, 49 Tlatelolco Massacre, 30, 270 Tolstoy, Leon, 49, 184 Topete, Everardo, 53n12 Torres García, Joaquín, 196–202, 198f, 204–5 tourist-oriented bureaucracy of Mexican art, 333 Trench, The (Orozco), 41, 43f tres grandes, los (The Big Three), 13, 28, 38, 217, 264–68. See also Orozco, José Clemente; Rivera, Diego; Siqueiros, David Alfaro Tropical America (Siqueiros), 209, 215–18, 215f,

218f, 223 Trotsky, Leon, 27, 79; assassination, 49, 86, 88, 184, 192nn22–23; Rivera and, 39, 48, 50, 128, 130, 211, 220 Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (exhibition), 28 Two Mountains of America (Siqueiros), 187, 194n41 Uccello, Paolo, 116 United Farm Workers (UFW), 246, 247, 249, 250, 254, 255 United States: Mexican relations with, 22; Mexican-US border relations (1836–1854), 283. See also Europe, Mexico, and the United States; Mexican muralism in United States; specific topics universalism, 6, 50, 149, 150, 153, 156, 197, 200–201, 206n12 universalist humanism. See humanism urban social movements. See social movements Uruguayan Communist Party (PCU), 203 Uruguayan cultural nationalism, 201–3 utopianism, 1–2, 4–5, 14, 73, 88, 89, 199, 211 Valdez, Luis, 247, 249 Valentiner, William, 218 Vasconcelos, José, 15, 17, 18, 60, 150, 154, 243, 244, 264

Vélez-Ibañez, Carlos G., 233 via negativa (Orozco), 42, 45, 52 Vigil (Orozco), 95 Villa, Pancho, 40 Villaurrutia, Xavier, 152, 157, 164 Wall That Cracked Open, The (Herrón), 251, 252f weapons, 38 Winter (Orozco), 95 Wolfe, Bertram, 46, 68, 70 workers. See laborers World’s Highest Structure, The (Orozco), 105 Wounded Man, The (Berni), 181–83, 182f “Yo soy Joaquín/I Am Joaquin,” 247–48 Zapata, Emiliano, 40, 101, 102, 234, 270, 275, 276; agrarian reform and, 18, 19, 24–26, 61–62, 64, pl. 2; assassination, 24, 34n41; in Cuernavaca, 24, 24f; Morelos and, 24–26; Obregón and, 25, 40; Orozco and, 40, 101, 214; peasantry and, 23–25, 34n41, 46, 62; public image, 24–25, 34n41, 62; Rivera and, 19, 23–25, 24f, 34n41, 46, 62, 64; United States and, 25 Zapatismo, 60, 62 Zapatista manta (Ojos de Lucha), 275

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Text: 10.25/14 Scala Display: Scala Sans Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore