Vida Mexicana
Mexican Muralists Remake Art, 1925 to 1945 opens at New York’s Whitney Museum
When discussing the trajectory of American art over the last century, the date most often celebrated is 1913, the year of the International Exhibition of Modern Art (The Armory Show) in New York City, which is often referred to as the “dawn of Modernism in America” and is the first time the phrase “avant-garde” was used to describe painting and sculpture. It was the singular event where American artists and audiences were first introduced to their European counterparts such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and, of course, Duchamp.
Until now, that is.the Whitney Museum of American Art’s recently opened Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 poses another source of influence and inspiration for American artists during the early part of the 20th century—mexico.
“This exhibition is really rewriting art history,” says Barbara Haskell, curator of the exhibition. “There’s been the common assumption that the French were the influence on American art during the first half of the 20th century. Vida Americana changes that narrative to show that it was the
Mexican artists who had the most profound, pervasive influence on the art of this country.”
Vida Americana includes approximately 200 works of art by 60 U.S. and Mexican artists including the three great Mexican muralists—josé Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera— alongside their American compatriots Thomas
Hart Benton, Elizabeth Catlett, Philip Guston,
Jacob Lawrence, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn and Charles White.the exhibition will consist of paintings, portable frescoes, films, sculptures, prints, photographs and drawings as well as life-size photographic reproductions of murals.
Haskell’s latest curatorial offering has roots in the cultural and political history of the exchange between the two countries, starting in the early 1920s when American photographers like Paul Strand and Edward Weston began traveling to Mexico.american artists journeyed south in order to connect with a cultural, political and artistic movement of the time that favored agrarian life as an alternative version to the American urbanism and industrialism of the day. Once in Mexico,american artists, writers and photographers saw monumental public murals by
Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera commissioned by President Álvaro Obregón that “depicted the history and everyday life of the nation’s people.”
“By portraying social and political subject matter with a pictorial vocabulary that celebrated the country’s pre-hispanic traditions, the murals invested the age-old technique of fresco painting with a bold new vitality that rivaled the avant-garde trends sweeping through Europe, while at the same time establishing a new relationship between art and the public by telling stories that were relevant to ordinary women and men,” says Haskell. “nothing in the United States compared.”
Unfortunately, this golden age or “new efflorescence” came to somewhat of a halt when Obregón was succeeded by Plutarco Elías Calles, so the three great Mexican muralists looked north to find patronage in the United States.
“There was little to hold me in Mexico in 1927 and I resolved to go to New York,” Orozco later recalled. “i knew nobody and I proposed to begin all over.”
Orozco’s story in America parallels the connections found in this exhibition and shows the influence he, as well as Siqueiros and Rivera, had on American artists. through connections, Orozco met American heiress Eva Palmer-sikelianos who was able to secure the Mexican artist a commission, in 1930, for the dining hall at Pomona College located outside Los Angeles. Later that year, Charles Pollock and his younger brother, Jackson, traveled to Pomona College to see the mural, titled Prometheus, “a reproduction of which Jackson would keep tacked to the wall of his
New York studio throughout the 1930s, calling it ‘the greatest painting done in modern times.’”
“Vida Americana will demonstrate the profound impact Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros had on their counterparts in the U.S. from 1925 to 1945,” says Haskell.“their art provided a model for U.S. artists who were searching for alternatives to the art-forart’s-sake, abstract ethos of European modernism and seeking to create socially meaningful art at a time when the U.S. public was grappling with the economic and social injustices of laissez-faire capitalism that had been exposed by the collapse of the U.S. stock market.” Of course, at the core of all this was Rivera himself, who was referred to in the press when he first arrived in San Francisco as “the hero of the Western world.”while Rivera’s famous Rockefeller Center mural was first covered and then later destroyed, the artist re-created the mural at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.this new mural, titled Man, Controller of the Universe, will be represented in this exhibition by a life-size photograph, nearly 15 feet in length.
“What I was struck by when viewing the exhibition is just how contemporary the work feels,” says Haskell.“there is a rhythm to the show and each gallery has a slightly different mood different from the one that proceeds and follows it.the connections are so incredible, Pollock and Orozco, Pollock and Siqueiros, Rivera and Ben Shahn, Siqueiros and Guston and Fletcher Benton. Every room has a connection.”
The exhibition will be on view at the Whitney until May 17, and then travels to the Mcnay Art Museum in San Antonio,texas, where it will be on view from June 25 through October 4.
“By exploring the transformation in art-making that occurred in the United States as a result of the Mexican influence, while also examining the effect the U.S. had one the muralists’ art, Vida Americana will expand our understanding of the rich cultural exchange between our two countries,” says Haskell.