The Mexican Mural Movement

Los Tres Grandes:

Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949)

David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974)

Pancho Villa (1877-1923) Emiliano Zapata (1887-1919)

Soldiers ofthe Revolution

Jose VasconcelosMinister of Education

Mexican Revolution 1910-1920

(left) Diego Rivera (Mexican 1886-1957) The Architect, o/c, 1914(right) Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians, o/c, 1921

Analytic Cubism

Diego Rivera, Woman at the Well, 1913

Diego Rivera, Zapatista Landscape – The Guerilla, 1915

Diego Rivera, Creation, 1922 - 23, encaustic and gold leaf, Amphitheater Bolivar, National Preparatory School, Mexico City

Diego Rivera, Creation, 1922 - 23, encaustic and gold leaf, Amphitheater Bolivar, National Preparatory School, Mexico City

Rivera, Creation, 1922-23 (right) early Renaissance Allegory of Good Government, fresco detail, Sienna, 1338, by Ambrigio Lorenzetti. Rivera had traveled to Italy in 1920 to study Italian Renaissance art

“Only why do the artists of this continent think that they should always assimilate the art of Europe? They should go to the other Americans for their enrichment, because if they copy Europe it will always be something they cannot feel because after all they are not Europeans.”

- Diego RiveraPan-American Unity mural forSan Francisco City College, 1940

Diagram of stone ball court relief from Chichen ItzaAt the invitation of Vasconcelos, Rivera traveled to Yucatán in 1921 to view the Maya pre-Conquest sites of Chichén Itza and Uxmal.

Maya Murals at Bonampak' (on border of Chiapas, Mexico, and Guatemala). This scene records the ascension of a new king in 790 AD, his reception by Mayan lords. Photos are from the complete replica at the National Museum of Anthropology and History in Mexico City

In 1927 Rivera traveled to the Soviet Union as a delegate from the Mexican Communist Party (joined in 1922) to attend the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Watercolor sketches for a mural in the Red Army Club, Moscow, which he never painted. Rivera’s communist views, like those of Orozco and Siqueiros, were independent of party doctrines.

Rivera at the Education Ministry, Mexico City,with one of his murals, 1924. Project began in 1922 and finished in 1928

Rivera, (left) with Frida Kahlo, 1930, (right) In The Arsenal, 1928, fresco, detail, Mexico City Ministry of Education. Frida Kahlo, center, distributes arms. In the right hand side Tina Modotti holds an ammunition belt. Text on the red banner is from a corrido, a song of the agrarian revolution.

Compare (left) Rivera, In The Arsenal, fresco detail, 1928 Giotto, Mourning of Christ, c. 1305, fresco detail, Cappella dell'Arena, Padua

"Giotto was a propagandist of the spirit of Christianity, the weapon of the Franciscan monks of his time against feudal oppression, Bruegel [Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, C.1525-1569] was a propagandist of the struggle of the Dutch artisan petty bourgeoisie against feudal oppression. Every artist who has been worth anything has been a propagandist. . . 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. . ."

The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art, Diego Rivera, 1932

Rivera, Wall Street Banquet, 1928, fresco, 2nd floor, Ministry of Education, MC

Diego Rivera. Death of the Capitalist. 1928. Fresco. South wall, Courtyard of the Fiestas, Ministry of Education, Mexico City, Mexico.

“These works that call themselves revolutionary, and that in the cases of Rivera and Siqueiros expound a simple and Manichean [dualistic] Marxism, were commissioned, sponsored and paid for by a government that was never Marxist and ceased being revolutionary…this painting helped to give it a progressive and revolutionary face.”

- Octovio Paz

Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera, and French Surrealist writer, André Breton, in Coyoacán in 1938

Diego Rivera. The History of Mexico - The Ancient Indian World. 1929-35. Fresco. North wall, National Palace, Mexico City, Mexico. The topic of this mural is the history of Mexico from the fall of Teotihuacan, about 900 BCE to the beginning of the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas in 1935.

Diego Rivera, The History of Mexico. 1929-35. Fresco. West wall, detail of central arch, National Palace, Mexico City, Mexico

Diego Rivera. The History of Mexico. 1929-35. Fresco. West wall, left inner arch, National Palace, Mexico City, Mexico

Rivera, The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos,1929-30. Fresco. Cortez Palace, Cuernavaca, Mexico

Cortez Palace, Cuernavaca, Mexico. The Palace dates back from the colonial era, built in 1533, it served as the summer residence of Hernan Cortes

Rivera, The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos - The Enslavement of the Indian and Constructing the Cortez Palace. Detail. 1929-30. Fresco. Cortez Palace, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Diego Rivera, The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos - The Enslavement of the Indian and Constructing the Cortez Palace. (detail) 1929-30. Fresco. Cortez Palace, Cuernavaca, Mexico

Rivera, The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos: Crossing the Barranca (ravine) 1929-30, fresco detail, Cortez Palace, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Views of the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Art with Diego Rivera’s mural, Detroit Industry, and new water fountain, right.

North wall, Detroit Industry, fresco, 1932, gift of Edsel Ford

Detroit Industry, detail of North Wall showing laborers of all races working in unison for the good of industry.

"The yellow race represents the sand, because it is most numerous. And the red race, the first in this country, is like the iron ore, the first thing necessary for the steel. The black race is like coal, because it has a great native esthetic sense, a real flame of feeling and beauty in its ancient sculpture, its native rhythm and music. So its esthetic sense is like the fire, and its labor furnished the hardness which the carbon in the coal gives to steel. "The white race is like the lime, not only because it is white, but because lime is the organizing agent in the making of steel. It binds together the other elements and so you see the white race as the great organizer of the world."

- Rivera

Detroit murals south wall with figures representing the white race (top left) and Asian race (“like sand,” right).

Rivera’s enthusiasm for industry and machines as gods of the modern world is evident in allusions to

Aztec goddess, Coatlique

Julie Mehretu (Ethiopian, US-based painter, b. 1970) in front of Detroit Industry, November, 2007. Mehretu is a 2005 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius” award)

Julie Mehretu, Black City, ink and acrylic on canvas, 10X16ftDetroit Art Institute, 2007.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/audiosrc/arts/black-city.mp3

Rivera, Diego, A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, 1947-48Fresco, Alameda Hotel, Mexico City. Now located in the Diego Rivera Museum

Diego Rivera, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, 1948, fresco, Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City, Mexico

Current installation

Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe (detail) 1934, fresco, Museo del Palacio de Belas Artes, Mexico City. Recreation of destroyed Rockefeller Center Mural, NYC* Read Rafael Herrarias, “Diego Rivera’s Mural in the Palace of Fine Arts” (Frank)

Diego Rivera, Man, Controller of the Universe (detail with Lenin), 1933, fresco

Rivera, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, 1931, fresco, San Francisco Art Institute

Diego Rivera’s San Francisco Institute fresco

Diego Rivera. Allegory of California, 1930-31. Fresco. Mural on wall and ceiling of main staircase between tenth and eleventh floors. Exchange's Luncheon Club/City Club, Pacific Stock Exchange Tower, San Francisco

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20071104_AUCTIONS_FEATURE/index.html

Fall art auctions, 2007. This 1890 Vincent van Gogh landscape is expected

to sell for $28 to $35 million

Rivera, Pan-American Unity, 1940, fresco, City College of

San Francisco, 5 panels

Rivera, Detail of Pan-American Unity, (the north) 1940

Rivera, Detail of Pan-American Unity, 1940, San Francisco City College

David Alfaro Siqueiros (Mexican Social Realist Muralist, 1896-1974), Tropical America (detail) Oliveras Street, Los Angeles, 1932, Fresco applied with an air gun on cement, 19.7’ x  98.4'

Siqeiros at work on Tropical America mural during his expulsion from Mexico in 1932 for radical political militancy. Siqueiros came to Los Angeles for six months and created three murals.

Siqueiros’ Tropical America fresco in 1930

Siqueiros, New York City Experimental Workshop, 1936

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Echo of a Scream, 1937, enamel on wood, 48/36” NYC MoMA

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Collective Suicide (detail),1936, Enamel on wood with applied sections, 49" x 6‘, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Siqueiros, Revolutionary on a Horse, 1957 Fresco, Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Don Porfirio & His Courtesans, 1957, fresco, Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City

José Clemente Orozco (Mexico, 1883-1949)The Franciscan and the Indian, 1930, lithograph, NYC MoMA

Jose Clemente Orozco The Expulsion of Quetzalcoatl (detail), fresco, of The Epic of American Civilization, 1932-34, mural cycle of 24 massive panels on the walls of the ground floor in the Baker Library reserve reading room, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. 150 feet(right top and bottom) Orozco at work on the north and west walls

Orozco, The Expulsion of Quetzalcoatl (detail), American CivilizationFresco panel, Dartmouth College Library, New Hampshire 1932-4.Quetzalcoatl points toward his prophecy

Quetzalcoatl in human form, Codex Borbonicus

Golden age II Expulsion of Quetzalcoatl (who points to his prophecy)

Prophecy

Orozco, panels 1 (Migration), 2 (Aztec Warriors), and 5 (Golden Age under rule of Quezalcoatl) from Epic of American Civilization, 1932-34

Orozco was a dialectical thinker, not Manichean like Siqueiros and Rivera, but did he truly reject the idea of painting as propaganda as claimed?

Orozco: “A painting should not be a commentary but the thing itself; not a reflection but light itself; not an interpretation but a thing to be interpreted.” (quoted by Ades)

Epic of American Civilization: The Modern World

Orozco, The Modern Migration of the Spirit, 1933, one of 24 fresco panels, Dartmouth Library mural, The Epic of American Civilization, 1932-34. Militant Christ = an aroused and aggressive spirituality.

Orozco, two panels from Dartmouth College Library fresco: (left) Ancient Human Sacrifice

(right) Gods of the Modern World. Matriculated fetal skeletons = the deadening effect of the academy and the perpetuation of institutional authority over education at the service of society.

Both Pre-Conquest and Modern American Gods sacrifice the individual. Orozco was against all ideology, religious or secular

Orozco, (left) Hispano-America (panel 16) and (right) Anglo-America (panel 15), American Civilization fresco panels, 1932-4, Dartmouth College Library, New Hampshire

How does the thesis of this mural compare with Rivera’s underlying thesis in Pan American Unity mural (1940) at San Francisco City College?

“There are as many literary associations as spectators. One of them, when looking at a picture representing a scene of war, for example, may start thinking of murder, another of pacifism, another of anatomy, another of history, and so on. Consequently, to write a story and to say that it is actually TOLD by a painting is wrong and untrue.”

- Orozco “A Note from the Artist,” 1934

Orozco, Prometheus, fresco, 1930, Pomona College Dining Hall, Claremont, California. First mural in the United States by a Mexican muralist. Ceiling panel (top rectangle as shown here) measures 7 x 28.5 ft

Orozco in Pomona College Dining Hall, Claremont, California, c. 1930

Jose Clemente Orozco, Prometheus, 1930, tempera on masonite 61 cm, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City. A version of the mural painted the same year for Pomona College, California

José Clemente Orozco, Dive Bomber and Tank, 1940, fresco, six panels, each 9' x 36," overall 9 x 18‘Painted before the public at MoMA NYC: “working as a clown in a circus.”

“I simply paint the life that is going on at the present—what we are and what the world is at this moment. That is what modern art is.” - Orozco

See “Orozco Explains” in Patrick Frank, Readings in Latin American Modern Art

• For 20-minute quiz next Monday, be prepared to compare Diego Rivera’s Pan-American Unity mural with Jose Clemente Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization. Consider form and content, artists’ political attitudes, location (place and time), as well as patronage. Include all relevant readings from Frank and Ades.