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A Revolution in Modern Art
John Haberin New York City
Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists and American Art
In February 1913, a revolution came to America. With the Armory Show on Lexington Avenue, New York had its first large-scale display of modern art. The public gawked at it, thrilled to it, and derided it, but American art was never the same again.
South of the border, quite another revolution was taking place—and, even more so, there was no going back, for Mexico or for modern art. The country had overthrown its dictator three years before. After 1920 and a decade of civil war, it could hope to recover a unity of purpose and a national identity, and a revolutionary art arose to embody them. It demanded artists able to work on an epic scale, including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. If the Whitney did no more than bring them together, that would be an epic in itself. Yet it has broader claims as well for their influence on North America and place in history, with "Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art." 
Settings for a ritual
When you think of art and revolution, you may not think first of politics. To take again just 1913, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had just shifted from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism, Futurism had come to Italy, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had taken to the streets of Dresden, and Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delauney, and Hilma af Klint were all on the verge of abstraction. If you do think of a political revolution, one was coming soon to Russia, along with early Soviet art. The Whitney's show accords with a renewed attention to Latin American art as well, but past shows have focused on its interchange with Europe. As curators, Barbara Haskell with Marcela Guerrero, Sarah Humphreville, and Alana Hernandez set it well apart. Americans in the 1930s were looking for an alternative to European Modernism, they argue, and Mexico supplied one.
It comes off as at least half a dozen shows, in no particular order, least of all chronological—every one of them worth seeings. A large central section takes up the image of revolution, with Emilano Zapata as its leader and, with his death in 1919, its martyr. The show does not borrow a painting by Diego Rivera from the Museum of Modern Art, of Zapata in white holding the reins of his white horse, but it need not bother. For one thing, it has a full-scale charcoal from 1933 with the economy and function of Renaissance cartoons, or preliminary drawings for fresco. For another, it has Rivera using prints to disseminate his art and his beliefs. His lithographs have the precision of fine pencil.
Other artists weighed in, too, placing Zapata at the head of an agrarian army. Already one can see Mexico as a fiction—the fiction of a broad-based agrarian revolution. Never mind that Zapata himself had at times sided with Mexico's president against the rural Zapatistas. Much the same fiction governs what the Whitney calls "Romantic nationalism," at the price of sexism. Alfredo Ramos Martínez paints a calla lily vendor, while others present men as laborers in a sea of sombreros and women as mothers and teachers. Frida Kahlo appears progressive by comparison, for all her self-obsession.
In no time, the romance is over, as race and class war becomes the darker subject of Mexican art, akin to the darkness of Surrealism in Mexico. Martínez anticipates a growing ambivalence with an iconic image of the Malinche, a woman who assisted the conquistadors while becoming a national obsession. Roberto Montenegro painted his Maya Women in 1926, with notably dark skin. Mardonio Magaña looks to Mexico's artistic heritage, but his coarse stone and hacked wood has a disturbing primitivism. Rivera happily portrays a rural dance, a flower festival, and an open-air school in lithos, but soon enough he moves on to the industrial economy and Communism. Can you forget that he destroyed his mural for Rockefeller Center rather than remove a portrait of V. I. Lenin?
Already in the 1920s, Americans are heading south to check out the action—like Everett Gee Jackson, a painter from Texas, or the publishers of five years of Mexican Folkways, with a cover illustration by Rivera. Edward Weston photographed cactus and the Pyramid of the Sun, while Paul Strand, the photographer, made a short film. Sergei Eisenstein left an unfinished movie, too, ¡Que Viva Mexico! Tina Modotti from Italy settled in for life. (Raise your hand if you remember her as Mexican.) She shows her dedication to revolution with a photograph of a bandolier, an ear of corn, and a sickle.
With the 1930s, in turn, Mexican murals are heading north. José Clemente Orozco brought his Epic of American Civilization to Dartmouth and his Prometheus to the dining hall of Pomona College. The New Deal brought Rivera to the Detroit Museum of Art for twenty-seven fresco panels of Ford Motors. Tropical America, by David Alfaro Siqueiros in downtown LA, spans biomorphic Cubist fragments, a crucifixion, and a mass movement, all before a great pyramid. These epics attest to the death of a god, human sacrifice, and the discovery of fire, with one more fiery than the next. They are also settings for a ritual.
The industrial epic
As an industrial epic or American epic, these artists found a ready audience in the United States and among American artists. Thomas Hart Benton had already had his American Historical Epic in the mid-1920s—with panels for clearing the land, the struggle for the wilderness, a mine strike, and a religious revival. Jackson Pollock attended the Art Students League in New York City to study with Benton. He also heard about the Pomona mural from his brother. He was sold. He must have admired, too, a painting of a brute, blind god by Siqueiros, as Our Present Image.
Isamu Noguchi joined with others to decorate the Abelardo L. Rodriguez Market in Mexico City, while Philip Guston teamed up with Reuben Kadish and Jules Langsner for a two-story wall painting in Mexico as well. Henrietta Shore, a Canadian, painted Women of Oaxaco. Just as often, though, the turn to murals bore fruit in the United States. Edward Millman painted the contribution of women to progress in America for a Chicago high school, William Gropper the auto industry in Michigan, Henry Bernstein steelmakers for a post office in Michigan, and Fletcher Martin a mine rescue for a post office in Idaho. Muralists left a greater mark still on New York City. Marion Greenwood painted in Red Hook, Harold Lehman on Rikers Island, and Guston for Queensbridge, the housing project just north of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge.
The voice of protest had particular resonance for African Americans—and not just in murals. Charles Alston painted for a Harlem Hospital, but Elizabeth Catlett worked in prints, and Progress of the American Negro by Charles White and a series on the Amistad slave mutiny by Hale Woodruff have entered museums. Aaron Douglas turned black history into dreamy, ghostly canvases. They show America as a shining industrial city on a hill, but forever out of reach. Mexicans found echoes of their own scarred history in race in America, too. Jesús Escobedo painted a lynching.
The show reaches a tentative conclusion almost a floor away, with The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence. It may come as a double surprise in a show of muralists, between each panel's small scale and their recent showing in the expanded Museum of Modern Art. Look again, though, and their inclusion seems dead on. Lawrence learned from Alston, and the small panels add up to an epic indeed. Their reds and yellows are not so very far from Orozco's flames just a wall away. Adjacent walls make the case for Jackson Pollock as Orozco's heir as well.
The show has an alternative ending in the very opposite direction, to the east, with Rivera at Rockefeller Center. You may have been waiting for it all along. You know that he stuck to his principles with his painting of Man at the Crossroads in 1932. For him at the depth of the Depression, the man was the working man, square jawed and in overalls, and the crossroads was between Marxism and capitalism. In a typed letter on display, Nelson Rockeller says only that the portrait of Lenin might offend someone—not, you see, necessarily him. You can only imagine Rivera's righteous anger at the hypocrisy, and you can imagine, too, why he then destroyed the mural rather than accept change.
Then again, the preliminary drawing has not a sign of Lenin, no more than in the replacement by José Maria Sert on view in midtown New York today. The crossroads are for you to determine. No wonder Rockefeller was in for a surprise. And when Rivera executed his own replacement in Mexico City, Lenin only grows in prominence, while the laborer has become a master of the universe at the helm of a high-tech future. If Rivera had made it to a fourth version, Lenin might have been himself at the helm, and the industrial heartland might have become obsolete. It would have been a fitting parable for globalism and America today—and a fitting ending for the long journey from Modernism to Mexico and from Mexico to postmodern American art.
A two-way crossing
As it is, the show is overwhelming in a very good way indeed. Any one of those half a dozen or so narratives would keep one guessing. They come eight years after a show of Rivera's murals on commission in the 1930s for the Museum of Modern Art (and I invite you to check out the link for a fuller assessment). They complete the picture with other Mexican muralists, and then they go on to rethink mid-century and postwar American art. They place them at another kind of crossroads, between European and Latin American art. They also have to overcome some formidable obstacles.
Obviously the walls of Rockefeller Center, Mexico City, or anywhere else are not moving to the Meatpacking District, and the expanded Whitney finds a variety of expedients. The mural from downtown LA appears in black and white, while others appear in color and the Detroit Institute of Arts in a slow pan around all sides of the museum room. The mural from Pomona College in reproduction nestles into a version of its architecture, like an installation. Rockefeller Center appears not in reproduction, but in Rivera's full-scale studies. The inclusion of smaller works could miss the whole point, but here they instead make the missing work conceivable. They are also among the highlights.
Is the old line about how New York stole the idea of the avant-garde intact, then, only now with the theft from Mexico and not Europe? Not really. For one thing, the Americans need not concede priority. As with Benton, they had their own epic underway in the 1920s, and they were willing and able to continue. No wonder Mexican muralists found an audience in the United States. Besides, artists crossed the border in both directions, and influences ran every which way.
Political art everywhere was alive and well, as with Ben Shahn on The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti—on display here with no obvious roots in Mexico. Pollock's The Flame actually precedes Orozco's The Fire. Nor would the Mexicans see their art as simply an alternative to Europe. Rivera spent quite some time there, where he revered Giotto and the early Renaissance. He insisted on true fresco rather than canvas on the wall because he saw the Renaissance and Modernism alike as his heritage. He had only the second show at the Museum of Modern Art, and he devised his own portable frames to support plaster so that he could bring his fresco to New York.
The powerful male bodies in Orozco and Siqueiros build on European tradition as well, and Pollock's nudes emulate their three-quarter turn. In fact, one strength of the show is in the evolving space of the mural from Mexican art to the shallow, indefinite space of Abstract Expressionism. If Pollock's spatters and colors look like those of the Mexicans, too, they were pioneering late modern artists, too. They pursued independently as well their connection to folk art, much like Lawrence in black America. They also made their own choices, like Rufino Tamayo with his volumes and planes or Siqueiros with his Echo of a Scream, between Cubism and Surrealism—earning him the admiration of a black American, Dewey Crumpler.
The show excels where its message cannot—in conveying the tension and evolution within Mexican or modern art. After the hopes of building on tradition to discover unity, they found themselves in the reality of Depression, bondage, and war. They found themselves in the literal darkness of a mine shaft and the flames of a sacrifice or a lynching. When Orozco pictures an end to suffering, it is in the violence of Jesus destroying his cross. Maybe Rivera could still imagine a worker as a master of the universe. He just may have lost control of Mexico City or midtown New York.
"Vida Americana" ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through January 31, 2021. A related review looks at Rivera's murals for the Museum of Modern Art.