68 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
José Clemente Orozco’s “Zapatistas,” from 1931, lyricizes the revolutionary force.
THEA RT WORLD
WALL POWER
The influence of Mexico’s great muralists.BY PETERSCHJELDAHL
COURTESY MOMA. © ARS, NEW YORK
T
he title of a thumpingly great show
at the Whitney, “Vida Americana:
Mexican Muralists Remake American
Art, 1925-1945,” picks an overdue art-his-
torical fight. The usual story of Ameri-
can art in those two decades revolves
around young, often immigrant Amer-
ican aesthetes striving to absorb Euro-
pean modernism. A triumphalist tale
composed backward from its climax—
the postwar success of Abstract Expres-
sionism—it brushes aside the prevalence,
in the Depression thirties, of politically
themed figurative art: social realism, more
or less, which became ideologically toxic
with the onset of the Cold War. What
to do with the mighty legacy of the time’s
big three Mexican painters, Diego Ri-
vera, José Clemente Orozco, and David
Alfaro Siqueiros? As little as possible
has seemed the rule, despite the semi-
nal influence of Orozco and Siqueiros
on the young Jackson Pollock. Granted,
there’s the problem of appreciating mu-
ralists in the absence of their murals. (A
mural is a picture that is identical with
a wall, and a wall belongs to a building
that, besides not being portable, has
meanings of its own.) But, with some
two hundred works by sixty artists and
abundant documentary material, the
Whitney curator Barbara Haskell re-
weaves the sense and the sensations of
an era to bring it alive.
Start the story with Emiliano Zapata,
the peasant leader from a village in the
central state of Morelos, who was tricked
into a military ambush and martyred in- This was a year before the de-
cade-long, staggeringly bloody Mexican
Revolution, which had begun with an at-
tempt to overthrow the dictatorial and
oligarchic President Porfirio Díaz, finally
culminated in the election of Álvaro
Obregón. (At least a million of the coun-
try’s fifteen million citizens lost their
lives.) The agrarian rebel Zapata became
an iconic figure for a new order that was
merging social reform with a celebration
of folkways and traditions—in striking
contrast to the urban-industrial charac-
ter of the Russian Revolution. (Shifting
views of the Soviet Union regularly roiled
the Mexican intelligentsia, many of whom
welcomed the exiled Leon Trotsky to the
capital, in 1937, before some effectively
condoned his murder by a Stalinist agent,
in 1940.) Nearly every artist had a go at
exalting Zapata for his deep rootedness
in native soil as well as for his dashing
militance. Orozco’s “Zapatistas” (1931)
lyricizes the rural force. A “Zapatistas”
made the following year, by Alfredo
Ramos Martínez, conveys a lot with witty
economy: a packed composition of over-
lapping sombreros affording incomplete
glimpses of peasant faces and rifle bar-
rels. It radiates a sort of ecstatic menace.
Ramos Martínez, who immigrated to
Los Angeles in 1930, is one of a number
of lesser-known artists who impress in
the show’s opening sections. The Ital-
ian-born photographer Tina Modotti,
who journeyed the opposite way, from
Los Angeles to Mexico, in 1923, is repre-
sented with crisp images, including a still-
life of a sickle, a loaded bandolier, and an
ear of corn. But the exhibition centers on
the three leaders of the mural movement
and their galvanizing effects north of the
border. The star, of course, is Rivera, whose
panache in an epic style of sophisticated
populism won him world fame. In 1931,
he was given the newly founded Mu-
seum of Modern Art’s second mono-
graphic show (the first was devoted to
Matisse) and created a remarkable suite
of portable frescoes. Among them were
a magnificent portrayal of Zapata appro-
priating the white horse of a slain foe
and “The Uprising,” in which a woman
with a baby defends a worker from a
sword-wielding soldier. I once underrated
that work, but this time it affected me
with its cinematic immediacy. Rivera
keeps looking better in retrospect, after
a long period in which his standing de-
clined while that of his wife, Frida Kahlo,
soared. I prefer Kahlo myself, though by
a narrower margin now. The show in-
cludes only two works by her. One jolts.
The self-portrait “Me and My Parrots”
(1941) communicates a force of person-
hood beyond that of any of the hundreds
of other faces on view here.
Rivera notoriously enchanted Amer-
ican financiers and industrialists, engag-