The Mexican Cultural Renaissance

• Monday January 24 January 2012

• Guy Thomson

Lecture

• Muralism (fresco painting) and Indigenismo• overlapping educational projects/movements• tell us how politicians, artists and intellectuals

were constructing a “populist” idea of the Nation during the 1910s-30s....

• Lecture and Seminar in Week 4: ideas and policies, plus attempt to measure response/reception......

Muralism & Jose Vasconcelos

• Minister of Education 1920-24

• prompted a revolution in Mexican art bringing Indians and Indian History onto Mexico’s walls.....

• Murals: populist wall paintings depicting historical, mythological and contemporary themes – usually of a leftist persuasion – became part of visual culture of Europe and the Americas during the 1920s and 1930s.

• from Moscow to San Francisco, from Toronto to Santiago in Chile..…

Muralism in North America

• Only in two countries did mural painting become a national art that defined an age:

• - Mexico from the early 1920s,

• - USA from 1929 to the 1940s, New Deal Federal Art Programme, inspired by “los tres grandes” (Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros) active in the US during the late 1920s and early 30s…

• See Ch.4 “The Mexican Art Invasion” in Helen Delpar The Enormous Vogue • Lawrence Hurlburt, Mexican Muralists in the United States• Anthony Lee, Painting on the Left, Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San

Francisco’s Murals

Seven explanations for “Mural Renaissance”

• -messianic dreams of Vasconcelos and the civilising project of the state: emulating 16th C Franciscan missionaries, elevating a pre-literate society....belief in the power of images

• - populist objectives of governments, attracting intellectuals, creating citizens and the nation...

• - Franz Boaz’s “culturalist” (anti-Darwinist) revolution in anthropology and archaeology, search for an indigenous aesthetic…

• - Academic tradition (San Carlos, f. 1793) : artists reacted against this during the Revolution...Open Air Schools, Indian subject (Luz Jimenez), Landscape, Propaganda

Seven reasons for Mexico’s Mural renaissance

• direct exposure of artists to European avant garde (Cubism, abstraction and primitivism) during the Revolution: Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro won scholarships to study in Europe in 1912

• interest of US patrons and artists in Mexican folk art and in the Mexican artists …Mexicans better able to express the “American soul”, populist reaction against abstraction...

• Competition between Mexican artists , especially “los Tres Grandes”: Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros  ...

Diego Rivera at the New School for Social Research in New York, 1932

José Clemente Orozco at Baker Library, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, 1932

David Siqueiros in jail Mexico City 1960

Interpretations of Mexican muralism: revived traditions ?

• Anita Brenner in Idols behind Altars (1929)

• mural renaissance: spontaneous welling-up of natural artistic traditions released by the Revolution

• painters responding to what was around them instead of to Europe:

• -Indians and common people, • - archaeological remains, colonial monuments, • -pulquería paintings, • -Guadalupe Posada’s popular broad sheets…

• For Brenner mural renaissance represented rebuilding of a monumental public space – the temple complex - destroyed by the Conquest.

Colonial Frescoes: Huejotzingo (Puebla), 1525

Mexican popular art: pulqueria painting

Interpretations of Mexican muralism: Propaganda ?

• Leonard Folgarait (Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-40 ) rejects view that muralism was natural outgrowth of popular arts spurred by social revolution.

• sees mural renaissance as a “massive propaganda campaign” led by an insecure and power thirsty governing elite:

• “large mural paintings…(served)…as advertisements for its policies….it was central to the health of the Obregon regime to keep the working masses, rural and urban, quiet and under strict control. They had given him his power and could easily take it away.”

• Vasconcelos put in charge of directing national cultural programmes: “to assist the government in creating a system of political control through the unification and classification of the masses.”

Muralism as propaganda

• Poet Octavio Paz would have agreed: • “The Mexican muralists have been turned into

Saints…The walls are not painted surfaces but fetishes that we must venerate. The Mexican government has made muralism a national cult and of course, as in all cults, criticism is outlawed. Mural painting…(is)…the wax museum of Mexican nationalism.”

• Octavio Paz, The Labarynth of Solitude (1958)

Revolutionary art ?

• French painter, Jean Charlot (who painted the first mural in the National Preparatory School in 1921), in The Mexican Mural Renaissance: 1920-1925, and the British mural artist, Desmond Rochfort, in Mexican Muralism, focus on the artists themselves:

• - how they contributed to the collapse Academism during the Mexican Revolution and what they put in its place....

Historiography : revolutionary art ?

• - solidarity among painters and identification with the Mexican Revolution as part of a “world revolution”.

• See manifesto of the “Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors” (1923) in David Siqueiros, Art and Revolution

• artists remained consistently more radical in their message than the government would have liked……

• • Impact ? Revolutionary art ? Hard to measure....

Reaction of Artists to the Revolution: ZapatistasDiego Rivera, Zapatistas, Paris, 1915

Fernando Leal, Zapatistas at rest, 1920

Orozco, Social Revolution, Orizaba Industrial School, 1926

Rivera’s First Mural, Creation, National Preparatory School, 1921

Rivera, Secretaria de Educacion Publica (SEP) 1923

Rivera, Agricultural college at Chapingo 1924

Chapingo: “Agrarian Communion”

Chapingo, Division of the Land, 1924