ART-PRESENTATION:Vida Americana

The Mexican mural movement, or Mexican muralism, began as a government-funded form of public art in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20). The Revolution was a massive civil war helmed by a number of factions with charismatic leaders (Francisco Madero, Venustiano Carranza, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata) all of whom had very specific political and social agendas. After the Revolution, then, the government took on the very difficult project of transforming a divided Mexico into a coherent nation of mexicanos. To do so, it needed to create an official history of Mexico in which its citizens would find themselves, and it needed a medium that could propagate this to a largely poor, illiterate populace. Enter Mexican muralism.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Whitney Museum Archive

The murals established a new relationship between art and the public by portraying subjects relevant to people’s lives in an accessible style that synthesized the traditions of Mexico’s many Indigenous peoples with aspects of European art. Enthralled by enthusiastic press reports, U.S. artists flocked to Mexico  to see the murals and work with the muralists. When commissions declined after the inauguration of a new Mexican president in 1924, the leading muralists (José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros)  came to the United States for extended periods to exhibit their art and create easel paintings, lithographs, and large-scale murals. With 200 works by 60 Mexican and American artists, the exhibition “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945”, is revealing the muralists’ seismic influence on the style, subject matter, and ideology of art in the United States between 1925 and 1945. The muralists provided a model for a new visual language  that would reflect contemporary America at a time when U.S. artists were searching for an alternative to European modernism. Further, their conviction that art could be used to forge national identity and fight for social and political change inspired U.S. artists to address the nation’s past and present, including its most urgent crises of unemployment, labor disputes, and racialized violence. Among the most important works of the exhibition are:

David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Zapata” (1931): A leader of the impoverished farmers of the state  of Morelos in Mexico and an advocate of land reform, Emiliano Zapata emerged as one of the most iconic figures of the Mexican Revolution. His assassination in 1919 transformed him into a martyr, elevating him to  a mythic status in both Mexico and the United States  as an idealistic champion of the poor. In this portrait, David Alfaro Siqueiros has depicted Zapata wearing his trademark broad sombrero, white shirt, vest, and jacket. “Photodocumentation of Tropical America” (1932): Four months after Siqueiros arrived in Los Angeles  he was commissioned by a group of civically involved individuals to create a mural for the second-floor outdoor wall of the Italian Hall, located on downtown Los Angeles’s Olvera Street, which had recently  been renovated into a folkloric “Mexican marketplace”.  While his patrons may have expected him to depict a  “continent of happy men surrounded by palm trees,” as the artist later recounted, Siqueiros instead executed  a strident condemnation of the exploitation of Mexico’s Indigenous population by the Mexican ruling class  and American imperialists: an image of a crucified Indigenous figure beneath an eagle symbolizing the United States dominates the mural’s composition. The contradiction between the artist’s indictment and his commissioners’ romanticized vision of California’s Mexican past led to the partial whitewashing of the mural shortly after its unveiling; two years later, it was completely painted over. The documentation on view here is an enlarged image of a black-and-white photograph taken shortly after the work’s completion. In recent years the Getty Conservation Institute has worked to conserve the mural, but the whitewashing and years of exposure to the elements have greatly diminished the mural’s original color palette. “Our Present Image” (1947):  In this painting, which demonstrates how Siqueiros would continue to develop the techniques he pioneered at  the Experimental Workshop long after he left New York, the artist has replaced the face of a man with an oval stone to signify not one specific race or nationality  but all of humanity. Rejecting the fixed perspective of  more traditional painting, Siqueiros employed multiple viewpoints that cause viewers moving through  space to experience the figure in motion. Although the  exact meaning of the figure’s foreshortened arms  and outstretched hands is ambiguous, Siqueiros was  a dedicated Communist who believed in the ultimate triumph of the proletariat. Hands, for him, symbolized the heroic strength of the worker. The people, as he wrote in another context, march from “a distant past of misery and oppression . . . toward industrialization, emancipation, and progress.

José Clemente Orozco, “Reproduction of Prometheus” (1930): Commissioned to create a mural for the Frary Dining Hall  at Pomona College in Claremont, California, Orozco chose  to paint the Greek mythical figure Prometheus, who was condemned by Zeus to eternal suffering for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans. Orozco’s choice of subject matter owed in part to the story’s similarity to the myths surrounding the Mesoamerican deity Quetzalcoatl, who brought education, science, and culture to his people before being driven away by antagonistic forces. When the fresco was completed in June 1930 it caused a sensation in the art world; by the end of the year, Orozco was a household name in the United States. The commission was facilitated by journalist and artist advocate Alma Reed, who was one of a number of women critical to the promotion of the Mexican muralists’ art in the United States.“Barricade” (1931): The work is based on a detail from his 1926 mural “The Trench” in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria at San Ildefonso, an elite preparatory high school in Mexico City. This strategy of making smaller, portable works based on details of larger pieces was  a way for the artist to disseminate his work in the United States, as was lithography, some examples of which  are also on view in the exhibition. More pessimistic and dubious about the gains of revolutionary activity than his  fellow muralists, Orozco used a dark palette, a dramatic structure of sharp diagonals, and an iconography  of violence and bloodshed to communicate resignation and the senseless inhumanity of war. “Christ Destroying His Cross: (1943): This painting mirrors the Modern Migration of the  Spirit panel from Orozco’s “Dartmouth” mural (1932–34).  In both works, Orozco portrays Christ as rejecting his sacrificial destiny by chopping down his cross. The Christian tradition was an important source of imagery for Orozco, but rather than assert its assumption of cosmic order, he transformed it into an image of torment and outrage, one inflected with revolutionary political overtones. He introduced the theme in 1923, in his first mural in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria at San Ildefonso. Politically conservative students destroyed the panel shortly after its completion.

Alfredo Ramos Martínez, “The Malinche (Young Girl of Yalala, Oaxaca)” (c. 1940):  La Malinche, or Malintzin in her native Nahuatl, is one of the most important women in Mexican history. Sold  into slavery as a child, she and nineteen other women were given to the Spanish conquistadors by the Chontal Mayans after the Spaniards defeated them in battle  in 1519. A gifted linguist in Mayan, Nahuatl, and Spanish, Malintzin played a major role in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire as the chief interpreter and advisor  to Hernán Cortés, with whom she bore a son. Her legacy  is complex. Some consider her a traitor to her people, a view sufficiently widespread that it gave rise to the word malinchism to pejoratively refer to someone who disdains their own culture in favor of foreign things and foreign culture. In postrevolutionary Mexico, with its valorization of Indigeneity, her reputation underwent a transformation. As the mother of one of the first mestizos (people of mixed European and Mexican ancestry), she was revered as Mexico’s “First Mother.” Here, Ramos Martínez presents her as a figure of dignity and power, highlighting her symbolism as a founding figure of the Mexican nation by linking her in the title to a contemporary “young girl” from Oaxaca.

Luis Arenal «The Fanatic¨(c. 1935): The kneeling figure in this work, clad in white with his arms extended, could represent religious zealotry, but it could also depict political martyrdom. A staunch Stalinist, Luis Arenal was himself a political extremist. He moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1924  at age sixteen and after Siqueiros arrived in the city  in 1932, Arenal became part of the older artist’s  Bloc of Mural Painters. In the mid-1930s, around the  time Arenal painted “The Fanatic” Siqueiros began  a relationship with Arenal’s sister, Angélica, whom he would later marry. A lifelong friend of Siqueiros, who shared his political views, Arenal returned to Mexico  in 1933, where seven years later he and Siqueiros attempted to assassinate the influential Soviet revolutionary and anti-Stalinist Leon Trotsky. Trotsky escaped unscathed, but his security guard, Robert Sheldon Harte, was abducted and murdered by Arenal and his brother Leopoldo.

Jackson Pollock, “The Flame” (1934-38):  Pollock traveled from Los Angeles to Pomona College  in Claremont, California, to view Orozco’s “Prometheus” shortly after the mural’s completion in mid-June 1930.  He called Prometheus “the greatest painting done in modern times” and kept a photograph of it on his studio wall throughout the 1930s. In the work Pollock adapted Orozco’s violent, expressive brushwork and  his subject matter of fiery sacrifice, especially in  the foreground, where a semi-abstract network of lines suggests a skeletal form consumed by an inferno. Philip Guston “Bombardment” (1937-38): Philip Guston painted this workafter learning that the warplanes of General Francisco Franco were dropping bombs on innocent civilians in the Spanish Civil War. The writhing and distorted bodies in this terrifying scene and the graphic nature of the work reflect the influence of Siqueiros, with whom Guston had worked  as an assistant in Los Angeles five years earlier. Everett Gee Jackson, “Embarkation” (1938): The artist moved to Mexico in 1923, living for the next four years in a variety of rural villages. During  a brief visit to Mexico City, he met Orozco through Anita Brenner, one of the most important writers on Mexican art and culture whose best-selling book “Idols behind Altars” introduced American audiences to the Mexican muralists; a copy is on view in this exhibition. Back in  the United States, Jackson channeled his encounter with Orozco’s art in works such as Embarkation, which depicts an abstracted march of soldiers, identifiable by their white caps, boarding a warship laden with canons. As  the figures progress toward the boat, they become increasingly mechanical, losing their individuality and merging into weapons of war.

Info: Curator Barbara Haskel, Assistant Curators: Marcela Guerrero, Sarah Humphreville and Alana Hernandez, Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, Duration: 17/2-17/5/20, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:30-18:00, Fri 10:30-22:00, https://whitney.org

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