Time International - 02.03.2020

(Jacob Rumans) #1
headspace the artists were in. The commonalities
are striking, with both works adhering to Siqueiros’
philosophy that in order to make truly radical
art, artists must shed old practices and pioneer
completely new methods.


  1. GLORY AND CENSORSHIP
    Impressed by artists’ ability to create such epic
    works with the mission of unifying a war-torn Mexico,
    President Franklin Roosevelt saw the need for a
    similar movement in the U.S. in the midst of the
    Great Depression. Roosevelt established the Works
    Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project in 1935,
    with the aim of making art a part of public life. At the
    Whitney, a mural study of William Gropper’s 1940–41
    Automobile Industry (bottom), which was originally
    installed in a Detroit post office, shows a glorified
    vision of the working class in industrial America, with
    men laboring collaboratively to build a car. The lower
    panel of Diego Rivera’s 1932–33 Detroit Industry
    murals (top) depicts a
    romantic, racially integrated
    vision of the auto industry.
    One chief difference between
    the Mexican works and their
    American successors was the
    ability of the former to hold
    more depth and nuance, as
    they largely went uncensored
    (with the exception of a
    Rivera mural at Rockefeller
    Center, which was destroyed
    in 1934 after the artist
    refused to remove a portrait
    of Vladimir Lenin). Federally
    commissioned works were
    closely scrutinized, with
    controversial content often
    removed in service of an
    unambiguously if also unrealistically positive, and
    often whitewashed, vision of America.

  2. AGITATING FOR CHANGE
    The muralists did not shy away from depicting the
    injustices of their era. Siqueiros was imprisoned
    several times by the Mexican government for his
    radicalism. His 1933 Proletarian Victim (left)
    portrays a woman shot in the head, bound and
    stripped, an apparent casualty of political violence.
    American artists also began to leverage art to agitate
    for social change. Hale Woodruff, an African- American
    artist who apprenticed with Rivera, depicted racial
    terror in a series of block prints. In his 1935 linocut
    Giddap (right), a crowd of white men cheer at the
    lynching of a black man. “We are interested in
    expressing the South as a field, as a territory, its
    peculiar run-down landscape, its social and economic
    problems—the Negro people,” Woodruff told TIME
    in 1942. Like Siqueiros, he hoped his work would
    educate audiences by elucidating, in undeniable
    visuals, the plight of oppressed people.


2. THE ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE


Pollock was never forthcoming about his time
working with Siqueiros. Curator Barbara Haskell
explains this omission by pointing to what Harold
Bloom called the “anxiety of influence.” Pollock
likely struggled to navigate the ambiguous line
between Siquieros’ ideas and his own. The
American painter’s circa 1936–37 Landscape With
Steer (bottom) may have been completed about
two years before Siqueiros’ The Electric Forest
(top), but it speaks to the remarkably similar


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