Prepare to rethink the history of modern-
ism, said Jerry Saltz in New York magazine.
“Vida Americana,” easily “the most rel-
evant 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 “mind-
boggling” gallery in this exhibition demon-
strates that we have Siqueiros and Orozco
to thank for the large, game-changing drip
paintings of Jackson Pollock.
Ramos Martínez’s ZapatistasExhibit of the week
Vida Americana: Mexican
Muralists Remake American Art,
1925–1945
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York City, through May 17
24 ARTS Review of reviews: Art & Music
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.”There’s a “cinematic immediacy” to his
populist style, and it’s hard to fully agree
with his peers who branded him a sellout
to big money, given that he famously let his
mural for New York’s Rockefeller Center
be destroyed rather than agree to erase its
portrait of Vladimir Lenin. Rivera clearly
influenced the work of African-American
artists Charles White and Jacob Lawrence.
Siqueiros, who was more avant-garde, liter-
ally taught Pollock to drip and pour paint.
Around the same time, “Pollock emulated
Orozco’s dark, fierce, rhythmic expression-
ism to the point of making works that are
almost hard to distinguish from it.”“The debt was forgotten fast,” said Holland
Cotter in The New York Times. When
Pollock broke through, he didn’t men-
tion 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 exhibi-
tions 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.”“If something in a song
on a U.S. Girls album
sounds familiar, it’s not
a coincidence,” said
Mark Richardson in
The Wall Street Journal.
Meg Remy, the Toronto-
based artist who fronts
the U.S. Girls project, uses pop music idi-
oms as her building blocks, so from track to
track you might hear touches of disco or the
Ronettes or Springsteen-esque blue- collar
rock. Yet “it’s uncanny” how Remy combines
such components into “a sound that is dis-
tinctly hers.” What’s more, she has never
been better in six previous albums than
she is here: “Her arrangements have grown
sharper and the hooks more pointed, and
accessibility adds a crucial artistic dimen-
sion to her work.” With her lyrics, she’s
often taking stock of her past, said Fred
Thomas in AllMusic.com, and she expands
the theme by successfully reworking several
songs from her back catalog. “Red Ford
Radio,” for example, “becomes a shockingly
clear statement of fear and intensity,” while
“Overtime” in its new guise emerges as the
album’s standout.
“What can’t Bad Bunny
do?” said Isabella
Gomez Sarmiento in
NPR.org. Just 26, the
Puerto Rican native
has become one of the
biggest names in Latin
trap in four short years,
and he’s done it while pushing back against
the genre’s toxic masculinity. His sopho-
more album, which takes its acronym
from a phrase meaning “I do whatever I
want,” feels like the playlist for a throw-
back garage party and “delivers 20 solid
songs for the summer.” At the same time,
it points the way forward for urbano. “The
feeling that anything can happen is present
from minute one of Track 1,” said Craig
Jenkins in NYMag.com. Before the trap
percussion kicks in, Sunny raps over the
melody of “The Girl From Ipanema” as
played on a Casio keyboard, and from
there to the closer, the album “plays like
an alternate-reality classic reggaeton play-
list of the mind.” On the last song, Bunny
vows to release one more album this year,
then retire. And maybe he will. After all,
he does whatever he wants.“No one is writing
better country songs
than Brandy Clark,”
said David Cantwell
in NewYorker.com.
While the Nashville vet
has provided hits for
stars such as Miranda
Lambert and Kacey Musgraves, Clark’s
own solo work has mostly flown under the
radar, but the “lonely and lustrous country-
pop” on her third album deserves to break
through. “Clark writes most often about
luckless characters—women usually—who
are struggling, pissed off, or both.” Here
she turns inward, offering a breakup record
and her most personal lyrics yet. Still, “the
telling details in her songs have a com-
munal rather than idiosyncratic specificity.”
Atop the solid work of a four-piece acoustic
ensemble, producer Jay Joyce and horn-
section arranger Lester Snell “have draped
an unpredictable array of twinkling and
flashing, flaring and fading colors,” said
Carl Wilson in Slate.com. Use your good
headphones, because those touches “cre-
ate spacious sonic environments in which
every revisit offers more to notice.”U.S. Girls
Heavy Light
++++
Bad Bunny
YHLQMDLG
++++Brandy Clark
Your Life Is a Record
++++SFMOMA/Wikipedia