Mexican Muralists

Diego Rivera (1886–1957), José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) are the most prominent of the Mexican muralists who produced politically charged large-scale works for the public during Mexico's post-Revolution aesthetic renaissance. “Los tres grandes” (the big three), as they are known, received fine art training in the Mexican Academy and sojourned in Europe. There, they were influenced by both historical European and modern art before returning to Mexico to lead the country's mural program of the 1920s and 1930s. The Mexican muralists broke new ground in their merging of the aesthetics of European formalism, Modernism, and pre-Columbian art with the official public discourse of anti-imperialism and social justice, producing work that visually paralleled the radical changes taking place in Mexico.

The Detroit Industry fresco cycle in Rivera Court is one of the finest examples of Mexican muralist work in the United States. This panel depicts a portion of a day in the life of the workers at the Ford River Rouge plant.

Source: Detroit Industry, Detroit Institute of Arts. Photo taken by Robert W. Lane, Art Historian, Saline, Michigan.

The Mexican state gained legitimacy in the 1920s and struggled to achieve ideological resolution in several social and political conflicts till the end of the decade; the state moved toward authoritarianism in the 1930s and embraced ultraconservatism after 1940. During these decades, official policy vacillated between intensity of cultural production and disregard. At this historical juncture, the Mexican muralists developed a revolutionary style, the impetus for which was a substantial public initiative by the minister of public education, José Vasconcelos, to decorate the walls of public buildings, former Jesuit churches, and convents. According to the Vasconcelan scheme, murals designed to consolidate the signs of localism (Hispanoamerican culture as the product of a unique people's response to a unique environment) would not only educate an illiterate workforce about Mexican popular identity but also usher the nation into a new era of identity politics.

The earliest of the muralists' commissions combined elements of European formalism (perspective, allegory, and symbolism) with pre-Columbian signs and symbols in “portraits” of the “real” Mexico. Subsequent murals demonstrate their hallmark social realist aesthetic, which draws on the abstraction of Modernism (expressionism, cubism, and futurism) to monumentalize the struggle of the worker as well as pay homage to the muralists' communist sensibility and burgeoning Marxism. The reception of their murals was mixed, the public at first wary of the controversial yoking of traditional Mexican images with the avantgarde. Further, the early works were viewed with skepticism because they were diametrically opposed to the familiar iconography of high-brow art as represented in European landscape, portrait, and genre paintings.

Nevertheless, international acclaim and important public commissions in the United States followed. New Deal politics and welfare capitalism provided the conceptual framework for the muralists' important New York, Detroit, and San Francisco commissions of the 1930s. Of Rivera's U.S. commission, the Detroit Industry murals (1932–1933) are widely regarded as his most powerful amalgam of allegory and realism; 27 panels portray the relationship between humanity and mechanization. American patrons were infuriated by Rivera's veneration of Marxist iconography; in fact, Rockefeller ordered Rivera's Radio City mural in New York destroyed because of its communist symbols.

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