Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, through May 17
Prepare to rethink the history of modernism, said Jerry Saltz in New York magazine. “Vida Americana,” easily “the most relevant show of the 21st century,” makes the case that we have for too long forgotten the greatest flowering of art during the pre– World War II era. While artists in Europe largely devoted themselves to aesthetic experimentation, a generation of painters in post-revolutionary Mexico created a way to be modern that borrowed from cubism but gave art new purpose and generated “entirely new aesthetic languages that still offer possibilities today.” The politically engaged work of the muralists known as “Los Tres Grandes”—Diego Rivera,
José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—thrilled artists in the U.S. When Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros all moved north in the early 1930s, they produced commissioned murals all over this country and became mentors as well. One “mindboggling” gallery in this exhibition demonstrates that we have Siqueiros and Orozco to thank for the large, game-changing drip paintings of Jackson Pollock.
Several lesser-known artists also shine in this “thumpingly great” show, said Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker. Every Mexican artist seems to have taken a crack at portraying the martyred peasant leader Emiliano Zapata or his sombrero-wearing followers, and Alfredo Ramos Martínez’s Zapatistas (1932) might be even better than Orozco’s. Rivera, meanwhile, who was once thoroughly eclipsed by his wife, Frida Kahlo, “keeps looking better in retrospect.”
“The debt was forgotten fast,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. When Pollock broke through, he didn’t mention his Mexican influences, and by the late 1940s, “the United States didn’t want to know from anti-capitalist leftists, or immigrants, particularly brown-skinned ones.” Fortunately, the Whitney exhibition “reshapes a stretch of art history to give credit where credit is due.” Not that other institutions haven’t already mounted exhibitions that highlight the Mexican muralists’ influence, said Barbara Calderón in ArtNet. com. The Whitney’s show is important, but it’s neither the first nor the last word on this subject; “the layers of buried histories have only begun to be unearthed.”