Mexican Muralists Today

Vida Americana:  Mexican Muralists Re-make American Art, 1925-1945

Whitney Museum of American Art, February 17 - May 17, 2020

Madre Proletaria -- children at her feet, and around her shoulders -- looks out at us from a narrow cinder-block cell, in dungeon light. The walls have closed in on this family, they have nowhere to go.

David Alfaro Siquieros made this painting in 1929, but it is as current as today's headline -- TRUMP BUDGET: CUT SAFETY NET, ADD TO MILITARY.  If you care to see homeless families in real life, just go to a big-city railroad or bus station in the world's richest nation.

Mexico's revolutionary muralists -- Siquieros, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera -- are the stars of this show unveiled yesterday at the Whitney Museum of American Art.  Of course there's an essential problem in showing the work of muralists; their major pieces exist in situ and can't be removed to a museum. Murals attain their power largely through their scale and public place.

Doing its best, the Whitney has represented the monumental works of los tres grandes with photographs and videos. These are supplemented with some of their best paintings, along with works by artists who followed them on both sides of the Rio Grande. Rivera's astounding panorama of American industry, on the walls of the Detroit Art Institute, is reproduced as a video show, mimicking the way the eye might travel over the walls, but missing the freedom and scope of the actual experience. (I've been there, it's worth the trip.)

Still, the paintings speak for themselves, as do a pair of wooden sculptures by Mardonio Magana -- another cornered mother enfolding her children, and a peasant concealed except for his eyes, peering out between a sarape and sombrero. These are Mexico's revolutionary masses who rose up to demand land reform in the 1920s. When Siquieros paints the rebel leader Zapata, he encloses him in the same cinder-block walls that imprison the Madre Proletaria. 

The Whitney doesn't say so, but lionizing Mexican artists today can be taken as a response to the Un-welcome sign the US government has held up to Mexicans.  Whitney curators accompany the show with an art-history narrative stressing the influence these muralists had on US modern artists such as Jackson Pollock.  The show includes several early Pollock paintings from the Thirties that resemble the Mexicans' agonistic images. Pollock was part of Siquieros' Experimental Workshop in Union Square, where paint-splattering was one of the experimental techniques.

Other American artists from Thomas Hart Benton to Jacob Lawrence adopted the Mexicans' bold brushwork to  tell stories of oppression and resistance in US history.  The most artistic is a series of small canvases by Lawrence, with captions describing the Great Migration of blacks from south to north in the Twenties. Wise and understated, these scenes -- an attic in a rooming house, a bucket of molten steel -- evoke a struggle that's still going on, for equal status in the Land of Opportunity. .

There's a much bigger story left unsaid about the US and Mexico. A huge chunk of the continental United States, from Texas to Colorado to California, used to be Mexican territory.  When the US -- citing its "Manifest Destiny" -- seized all that in the 1840's, it incorporated a Mexican culture that has continued growing on both sides of the border ever since.

Sorry Mr. President, but Spanish is an American language. Tacos are more popular than apple pie. Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros don't need to be seen as Mexican artists who influenced Americans. They are American artists who worked on both sides of a political border. And their revolutionary message has never been more urgent in the US than today.

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips