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.- 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. - 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