Prometheus Mural Pomona3/20/2021
Las Pozas: Surreal sculptures hidden in the Mexican jungle Haskell said that rediscovering the genius of Mexican muralists offers an encouraging reminder about a fundamental purpose of art -- especially during a time when a banana can fetch 120,000 at an art fair.Active in the first half of the 20th century, he was collected by the Rockefellers, displayed at leading galleries, and remains the most expensive Latin American artist today.
While he and his wife Frida Kahlo were the most famous artistic exports from their home country of Mexico, they were not the only ones. As an eye-opening new exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York argues, it was a group of Mexican artists -- and not so much the European modernists like Pablo Picasso or the cast of French Impressionists -- who shaped post-war art in the US. Credit: Alfredo Ramos Martnez from the Whitney Museum of American Art Mexican muralists in particular had a seismic influence on the development of socially conscious art and street art, says Barbara Haskell, curator of Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945. ![]() A long-time curator at the Whitney, Haskell first had the idea for the exhibition nearly a decade ago, but it was the recent interest in Mexican culture and politics that propelled the show forward. Its a good time to assess the creativity and aesthetic innovation that came out of the relationships between artists from Mexico and the United States, she explained, framing the show as a counterpoint to the physical and psychological borders that the Trump administration is seeking to enforce between the neighboring nations. Credit: Jos Clemente Orozco from the Whitney Museum of American Art The exhibition traces the Mexican artists influence on the output of their American counterparts, including Thomas Hart Benton, Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, and Ben Shahn -- not to mention the legions of muralists employed under the Works Progress Administration, part of Roosevelts New Deal to get Americans back to work during the Great Depression. The show includes startling juxtapositions between American painter Jackson Pollock and one of the most important 20th century muralists, Mexican painter Jos Clemente Orozco, for example. Pollock was so moved by Orozcos Prometheus mural in Pomona, California, that he called it the best painting in the Western hemisphere. Photographers capture the rise of South Koreas loner culture The Mexican muralists created an art that looked modern and drew on subjects that mattered to everyday people, Haskell said. By depicting political and social subjects on the walls of schools, government buildings and seminaries, the muralists were making art that was inviting and relevant to the public -- an alternative to the non-figurative abstract expressionism that dominated the American art scene at that time. For instance, in a scene that immortalizes the heroism of working class people, Riveras fresco The Uprising (1931) depicts a woman gallantly fending off a soldier to shield the baby at her hip during a labor strike. Credit: David Alfaro Siqueiros from the Whitney Museum of American Art Following the decade-long Mexican Revolution that ended in 1920, the muralist movement emerged when president lvaro Obregns administration established a public art program. Painters such as Rivera, Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros were offered walls to create frescos that in large part lionized the heroism of everyday Mexicans. While many post-war American artists traveled south to take in the street-art sights, the trio became the toast of New York City art circles in the 1930s and exported the homegrown Mexican art form abroad. Siqueiros is the little-known grandfather of street art and the 1960s Chicano Mural Movement in Southwest America. Orozco, a sharp political caricaturist, had large murals in Pomona College, the New School and Dartmouth College, and illustrated the first edition of John Steinbecks novel The Pearl. Unsettling thermal portraits show Fukushima residents returning home US corporations eagerly sought Rivera, whose torrid marriage to fellow artist Frida Kahlo is legendary, and who remains the most famous of the trifecta. His 1931 solo retrospective at the newly established Museum of Modern Art drew large crowds, far eclipsing visitor numbers for the MoMA Henri Matisse exhibition that same year. ![]() Among the must-see pieces in Vida Americana are two studies for Man at the Crossroads, Riveras controversial fresco commissioned for New Yorks Rockefeller Center. Borrowed from Mexico Citys Museo Anahuacalli, the two sketches will be exhibited in the US for the first time.
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