Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945
Feb 17, 2020–Jan 31, 2021
Romantic Nationalism and the Mexican Revolution
1
In an effort to unify Mexico after ten years of civil war, the country’s new government sought to construct a shared understanding of Mexican identity and national history. Central to this was the celebration of rural Mexico’s landscape, customs, and people—a sharp repudiation of the veneration of European culture that had existed among Mexico’s ruling class before the revolution. Mexican artists began to portray the country’s Indigenous and largely agrarian population as symbols of national pride and to depict Emiliano Zapata, who led the people’s heroic fight for land reform, as the defining hero of postrevolutionary Mexico. From a contemporary perspective, the idealized portraits of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples created by both Mexican artists and those visiting from abroad may be seen as having reduced their subjects to stereotypes that reinforce their marginalized status within a social system that privileged European heritage. At the time, however, painters, photographers, and filmmakers embraced a romanticized vision of rural Mexico as the embodiment of a simpler, more spiritually authentic way of living in contrast to the alienation and isolation of modern urban and industrial life.
Diego Rivera, Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita, 1931
Diego Rivera, Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita, 1931. Encaustic on canvas, 78 1/2 × 64 in. (199.3 × 162.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1936. © 2020 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York
Artists
- Charles Henry Alston
- Ramón Alva Guadarrama
- Lola Álvarez Bravo
- Luis Arenal
- Belle Baranceanu
- Will Barnet
- Carleton Beals
- Thomas Hart Benton
- Henry Bernstein
- Emil Bisttram
- Julius Bloch
- Lucienne Bloch
- Anita Brenner
- Jacob Burck
- Elizabeth Catlett
- Stuart Chase
- Howard Cook
- Miguel Covarrubias
- Aaron Douglas
- Sergei Eisenstein
- Jesús Escobedo
- Philip Evergood
- Seymour Fogel
- Ford Motor Company
- Hugo Gellert
- Xavier Gonzalez
- Marion Greenwood
- William Gropper
- Philip Guston
- Eitarō Ishigaki
- María Izquierdo
- Everett Gee Jackson
- Joe Jones
- Frida Kahlo
- Jacob Lawrence
- Harold Lehman
- Michael Lenson
- Mardonio Magaña
- Bendor Mark
- Fletcher Martin
- Leopoldo Méndez
- Carlos Mérida
- Edward Millman
- Tina Modotti
- Roberto Montenegro
- Emilio Gómez Muriel
- Hideo Benjamin Noda
- José Clemente Orozco
- Jackson Pollock
- Alfredo Ramos Martínez
- Anton Refregier
- Diego Rivera
- Ben Shahn
- Henrietta Shore
- Mitchell Siporin
- David Alfaro Siqueiros
- Harry Sternberg
- Paul Strand
- Thelma Johnson Streat
- Rufino Tamayo
- Edward Weston
- Charles White
- Hale Aspacio Woodruff