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Paint the Revolution
‘Paint the Revolution’ Offers Mexican Muralist Muscle and Delicate Beauty
By HOLLAND COTTER
OCT. 27, 2016
PHILADELPHIA — Politics or beauty? Take your choice. Conventional wisdom says they don’t mix. But “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art argues, with reservations, otherwise. The show is the first all-out attempt in the United States in seven decades to grapple with the contradictions of early-20th-century Mexican political art. (The last one was also at this museum.) It has plenty of pumped muralist muscle — all those clenched fists — but offsets it with pictures as pretty as valentines.
Organized with the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where it will travel in February, the show focuses on pioneers of the Mexican movement for artistic nationalism, following the timeline of revolutionary events. In 1911, the country’s longtime president, Porfirio Díaz, was chased out of office. He had kept peace for decades by pampering the elite, enriching the army, and treating the poor, which meant practically everyone else, like dirt. Finally, dirt said no, and everything changed, including art.
The initial changes look mild. Under Díaz, European cultural taste prevailed, and after he was gone it still did for awhile, though with infusions of Mexican flavor, mexicanidad. You see it in soft-textured paintings of peasants by Saturnino Herrán and the young David Alfaro Siqueiros from around 1913, though the pictures give no hint of the violence tearing the country apart as rebel leaders like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa fought for control of it.
Soon, however, art did reflect events. In 1914, Francisco Goitia was turning out horror-show scenes of atrocities that he said he had seen on battlefields. José Clemente Orozco tried to outdo Goya in grotesque newspaper cartoons. Diego Rivera weighed in, long-distance, from Paris, with Mexican-accented Cubism. And Gerardo Murillo, the avant-gardist firebrand from the Díaz years who called himself Dr. Atl, took a dramatic nationalist stand with a self-portrait in which his head and an image of Mexico’s most active volcano merge.
By 1921, the carnage had pretty much stopped. It was time to mop up and organize, to turn revolution from a passing event into an institution. Art was very much part of the plan. Mural painting, billboard-big and bold, was designated the official art form. And three artist-workers — Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera (back from Paris that year) — were its stars.
For many people, they are Mexican modernism: three giants calling from peak to peak. As befits that status, they take up a lot of space in this show, in paintings, drawings and prints. But aside from a pair of portable Rivera murals, and some wall reliefs by Siqueiros, the architecturally scaled art for which they’re famed is here only as digital projections. No surprise. The originals are in Mexico City and elsewhere, and even in reproduction their browbeating dynamic comes through. They’re political church art, designed to overpower, to look superhuman, to confuse you into believing their vision. They’ve shouldered out of the history books almost all other art from the time.
But there was other art. In 1921, the same year Rivera returned to claim a local-boy crown, the Mexican government initiated a countrywide art education program for primary schools. Designed by the artist and art historian Adolfo Best Maugard, the hands-on method blended elements of European-style abstraction and indigenous art, ancient and new.
Best Maugard had studied ethnographic artifacts with the German anthropologist Franz Boas. And he based his own teaching on linear motifs — squiggles, circles and so on — derived from pre-Columbian pottery shards. From those primordial forms, children of any cultural background or education level could compose new images of any kind — Best Maugard encouraged fantasy — and on a personal scale. They could make, from very ancient sources, a modernism of their own.
Last edited by Goose (10/28/2016 6:51 am)
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.