“Mexican artists were a more creative influence in American painting than the modernist

French masters.....They have brought painting back to its vital function in society
(Charmion von Wiegand).”1934 [In Haskell’s Essay].

We went for a walk on the High Line on Presidents’s Day - and made an
unplanned visit to the Whitney Museum, where we happened upon the
opening day of “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art,
1925-45”. It was early so we had a quick look around before the crowds
started milling in. This is a mighty yin yang, beauty and the beast, Russian-
doll sort of an exhibition; it hosts smaller exhibitions of work by one group
of artists (the influenced) woven through a much larger exhibition of the
work of another set of artists (the influencers). I was viewing the exhibition
through so many different lenses simultaneously, that I had to pause and
vow to return. I hope we all can return to this exhibition because its theme
and content are even more relevant to us now, and of course, I wish to
took more photos of the American artists.

The “Vida Americana” exhibition could not have happened without the
cultural transformation that occurred in Mexico at the end of the revolution
in 1920. In her catalogue essay “America: Mexican Muralists and Art in the
United States, 1925-1945”, curator Barbara Haskell writes that many
considered it “the greatest Renaissance in the world.” At the end of the
Mexican revolution in 1920, the new government administration under
President Alvaro Obregon, wanted to “construct a shared understanding of
Mexican history and national identity”. At the center of this “new
efflorescence” were the monumental public murals commissioned by the
government. The murals invested the technique of fresco painting with a
bold new vitality, establishing a relationship between art and the general
public. This vibrant pictorial vocabulary displayed not just the everyday life
of the Mexican people in the 1920s but also the country’s pre-Hispanic
traditions. Fascinated American journalists and artists descended on
Mexico to see the work themselves and work with the muralists.

However, it all came to a full stop in 1924, when President Obregon’s term
ended, along with the commissions for the muralists, causing them to
come to the United States for patronage. “Their influence would prove
decisive for American artists searching for alternatives to European
modernism and seeking to connect with a public deeply shaken by the
Great Depression and the economic and social injustices exposed by the
collapse of the U.S. stock market (Haskell).” The leaders were Jose
Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros who came to
the US between 1927 and 1940 to “execute lithographs and easel
paintings, exhibit their art, and create large-scale murals on both the East
and West coasts and in Detroit (Haskell).”

Even though it was the height of the Great Depression, they got lots of
corporate commissions and up-and-coming American artists got paid to
assist and apprentice with them because of President Roosevelt’s WPA
program. Jackson Pollack, who features in the exhibition, began as a
mural assistant - see photo of his painting “The Flame”. Jacob
Laurence’s “Migration Series” a pictorial narrative of the shift of the African
American population from the country to the city, and from the South to
the North, demonstrates how he was influenced by the narrative style of
the Mexican Muralists. There are many more American artists featured in
the exhibition; their work addresses “new technologies and productivity,
economic disparities and labor rights, along with the racialized violence
and the rise of fascism in the 1930s (Haskell).” I became a member of The
Whitney with the intention of visiting this exhibition many times, so
hopefully, The Whitney will get an extension on this exhibition. Since I took
so few photos, I took the liberty of typing up some descriptions, so that
this blog would have some content.

Soon after arriving in the US, Diego Rivera was commissioned by The Ford
Motor Company to complete a mural about its industry. The mural covers
four walls - see photo of it and make sure to pan around. Diego must have
been delighted to get this commission because, according to Mark Castro
(Jorge Baldor Curator of Latin American Art at the Dallas Museum of Art),
“Diego was fascinated by the ways in which man and machinery meet,
and the ways in which they change the world together....one of the first
things he saw when he came to New York, was a group of men at work,
digging and excavating around what was becoming the Rockefeller
Center.” See “Pneumatic Drilling” photo. When Diego was planning a
mural “he would go through various stages of drawing it out in different
forms, often starting with small scale drawings and sketches, and then
moving on to full scale cartoons (Castro).” Many of his images have
broad, muscular figures i.e. the workers that he felt were the builders of
society. He also believed that artists were workers because they worked
with their hands to produce something. He crafted a persona or an idea of
himself as an artist worker wearing overalls, often covered with plaster
from his work on fresco. There are black and white videos in the exhibition
where we can see him working on his projects dressed in his overalls.

I made a little video of the panoramic view of the mural that Rivera
completed for the Detroit Institute of Arts and retyped the description here.

“Here you will see a panoramic view of “Detroit Industry, 1932-33” . Rivera
began this mural for the Detroit Institute of Arts in the spring of 1932.
What started as a commission to paint two large panels depicting the
city’s history and industries grew into a twenty-seven-panel mural
decorating all our walls of the museums courtyard. The two main walls
depict the Ford Motor Company’s production of its Model V8 automobile,
other sections show Detroit’s pharmaceutical, medical, and chemical
industries while also highlighting the relations between modern industry
and nature. The project was funded by Edsel Ford, the president of the
Ford Motor Company, who granted Rivera access to the company’s
sprawling River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, at that time the largest and
most advanced manufacturing plant in the world.”

Frida Kahlo, Me and my Parrots, 1941. Oil on canvas. In this painting,

Frida Kahlo wears a white top, traditional for Zapotec women in the
Oaxaca city of Tehuantepec. Tehuantepec was a favorite subject of
Mexican artists during the years covered by this exhibition - you’ll see it
featured in many works in this gallery, and even in a tourism commercial.
Kahlo often drew on Tehuantepec’s traditions in her intense, expressive
self-portraits that often reflected on mortality and other existential
questions. Judith Baca, a muralist and a leader in the Chicano arts
movement, which combines art and activism to celebrate Mexican-
American identity opines: “I think what Freda was doing was using what
she had at hand, and she was creating a kind of magical realism that is
absolutely within the folk history, absolutely within the Mexican sensibility.
Also a belief that there is a very thin veil between the moment we are living
in and the other side and the relationship to death, not to be feared, but to
be understood as the natural condition of living, of what it means to be
human.”

Jose Clemente Orozoco, “Zapatistas”, 1931. Oil on Canvas.

Here, Jose Clemente Orozco depicts the sort of scene he might have
witnessed working as a cartoonist during the Mexican Revolution. A
group of campesinos - impoverished farmers, male and female - march
across the canvass. The men’s white sombreros identify them as
Zapatistas, followers of Emiliano Zapata. Zapata was an agrarian leader
and revolutionary hero who was assassinated near the end of the war.
After the revolution, many artists idealized him and his fight for land
reform. “Orozco had actually seen the war up front because he was a
cartoonist during the revolution, so he witnessed the brutality. Therefore,
he didn’t have any sense of the heroism of the revolution, because he’d
seen the oppression and the bestiality, and the egotism of the revolution.
He saw the reality of the revolution on people, on the women, on the
families, and on the soldiers. He portrays them not in this heroic victory of
battle but trudging along. And also the difference between the leaders that
are on horseback who aren’t so tired, and the contrast between that and
these peasants that are fighting for land, but who are the instruments of
some other person’s vision (Haskell).”

Jose Clemente Orozco, “Prometheus”, 1930.

This installation reproduces Prometheus, the first mural painted by a

Mexican artist in the United States. Jose Clemente Orozco painted the
Greek mythic figure in the cafeteria of what is now Pomona College in
California. “Prometheus is the Titan that stole fire from the gods, which for
many people symbolizes education. On the left panel are Zeus and Hera
and they are angry. In the story Prometheus was punished by having his
liver pecked out by an eagle, only to have it regenerate and have it go on
for eternity. The other panel is Orozco’s poetic idea about the past being
consumed by the future, and so you have a satyr and other mythological
figures that are behind kind of pulled down by this large snake figure. The
full narrative cycle kind of completes itself as you journey up to the barrel
and look around, and then above the Godhead is kind of an abstraction
(Steve Comba, Pomona College Museum of Art).”

There are several works in the exhibition by artists who were deeply
influenced by Orozco’s vigorous brushwork and his tendency towards
expressive figuration. The young Jackson Pollock was especially moved
by “Prometheus”. He made a pilgrimage to see it soon after Orozco
completed it, and kept a photograph of the work in his studio throughout
the 1930s. There is a series of paintings by Pollack in the exhibition near
Orozco’s “Prometheus”.

Diego Rivera originally painted “Man, Controller of the Universe” in the

Rockefeller Center. During his time in the United States, Rivera became
increasingly fascinated by the ways in which humanity’s own ambitions
and ability intersected with technology and modern industry. This was
reflected in much of his work, especially in the mural he began to paint at
the Rockefeller Center. He was given the theme “man at the crossroads”
and the mural has a man sitting in the center guiding a machine that has
long elliptical shapes that act as viewpoints toward science and
technology etc. Rivera felt that “technology and science would someday
intersect with political change, and that these things together were what
was going to remake humanity into something better (Castro).”

There are newspapers articles and documents in a glass case near this
reproduction, telling of the ultimate fate of the mural. Rivera was a
communist sympathizer and he painted an image of Vladimir Lenin into the
composition on the right. When Nelson Rockefeller asked him to paint
over it with an anonymous figure, Rivera refused and he was removed from
the job and the mural was erased. However, Rivera who received full
compensation for the work, re-created it for the Palace of Fine Arts in
Mexico City, and this reproduction is from the that work. You’ll may notice
that the left side of the mural includes all the wealthy people and the right
side includes Vladimir Lenin and the working people.

Diego Rivera, Reproduction of “Man, Controller of the Universe”, 1934

If you go to see this exhibition, “Tropical America”, 1932 by David Alfaro

Siqueiros is another mural that was whitewashed by it’s patrons soon after
it was painted. Siqueiros was commissioned to make the mural for a faux-
historic Mexican market, being constructed in Los Angeles, to celebrate
Los Angeles’s Mexican roots. However, Siqueiros “presented the
relationship between California and Mexico as an imperial occupation”
with a crucified indigenous figure in the middle with an American eagle
looking like a vulture over his head. This a reproduction of is a black-and-
white faded reproduction of the original which has been restored by the
Getty Museum. Too many people around it to take a photo of this one, I
found the story too interesting to leave it out.



Jose Clemente Orozco, Zapatistas, 1934

Jose Clemente Orozco, Reproduction of Prometheus 1930

Jackson Pollock, The Flame