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'Mexican Modernism' at the PMA: Dynamism, common voice, future visions

Diego Rivera's large fresco The Liberation of the Peon (1931) occupies a climactic position about halfway through "Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950," which opens Tuesday following member previews this weekend.

"Liberation of the Peon" (1931) by Diego Rivera. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris. This large portable fresco has been in the great stairhall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art since the 1940s. It is now part of the new exhibit, “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950.”
"Liberation of the Peon" (1931) by Diego Rivera. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris. This large portable fresco has been in the great stairhall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art since the 1940s. It is now part of the new exhibit, “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950.”Read more

Diego Rivera's large fresco The Liberation of the Peon (1931) occupies a climactic position about halfway through "Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910-1950," which opens Tuesday following member previews this weekend.

The work epitomizes much of what is enduringly popular about an art that sought to mobilize the technique and the moral seriousness of historic masters like Giotto to evoke, celebrate, and shape the upheavals of the 20th century. It shows us faces that remind us of those who were here before Columbus, and faces that might have emerged from the mixing that followed. Its color is vivid and deep.

If it looks familiar to you, that's not surprising, since the Philadelphia Museum of Art has owned the approximately six-by-eight-foot work for seven decades, and it has long been shown, behind plastic, at the side of the building's grand staircase. It took me a moment to recognize it, shown in a new light and a new context.

What a special exhibition ought to do is show things we haven't seen before, but also to encourage a renewed look at things that have become too familiar or simply overlooked. This show, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and billed as the first on its subject in 70 years, does both very well.

The well-known story of this period is of the mural movement that emerged after Mexico's decade of revolution that ended in 1920. Especially at the outset, these monumental works were intended to help define a Mexican identity after years of struggle. Indigenous people and the motifs of their art were incorporated into these complex compositions, along with a kind of modernist classicism that was becoming popular in Europe at the time, and the recollection of Italian renaissance that is inherent in the fresco technique.

The three acknowledged masters of the mural - Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros - were highly sophisticated artists familiar with the most advanced ideas of their time. The exhibition includes some cubist-influenced paintings done by Rivera in Paris, expressionist influenced graphics by Orozco, and a beautiful impressionist pastel by Siqueiros, all done before 1914. Their murals often sought to tie Mexico and its ancient past to a vision for its future.

As Matthew Affron, curator of modern art at the PMA and chief curator of the show in Philadelphia, notes in his catalog essay, the mural movement presents a real challenge for a museum exhibition because most of the murals cannot be moved. The curators followed two approaches.

The first was to demonstrate that Mexican art of the time was more than the three great muralists, and other well-known figures such as Frida Kahlo and Rufino Tomayo, whose 16-by-13 foot Homage to the Indian Race (1952) is the largest scale work on view. Some of the most striking works in the show are by María Izquierdo, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, one of the few artists represented by a fresco.

There are also works by artists who disagreed with the muralists, including a group that called for celebration of the industrial and modern, along with three wonderful portraits that document gay male dissent to the machismo all around. (Orozco drew a cartoon, included in the catalog, calling them fascists.)

The mural movement was about communication with a broad public, so it makes sense to have a very large selection of political cartoons, publications and broadsides - things that went up on the walls unofficially.

Still, the three muralists (plus Kahlo) are the chief attractions of such a show. Fortunately, each made a lot of other paintings, drawings, prints, and preliminary sketches for their murals, all of which are here in quantity. The curators have also sought to deal with the immobility of the murals by devoting a room-size video installation to one mural apiece by Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros. They are useful, but they also demonstrate the limitations of the mural form.

The Rivera murals at the Ministry of Education in Mexico City are shown at almost full size, one by one, along the bureaucratic cloister. Orozco's The Epic of American Civilization is in what appears to be an ordinary-looking office at Dartmouth College. The camera pans around, and we can sense that those who live with them every day have learned to ignore them. The best video documents Siqueiros' Portrait of the Bourgeoisie at the Mexican Electricians Union headquarters in Mexico City. This mural fills the walls and ceiling of a stairway, and its imagery unfolds and appears as you walk up the stairs. One senses that this mélange of violence and transcendence might be difficult to ignore, because new images keep popping out as you ascend.

The show dramatizes how different the three were from one another. Rivera's scenes, though complex, always seem to be carefully balanced and composed. Orozco was a great draftsman, and his work seems a bit diminished by being translated to the wall. His spiky abstract paintings and his almost cartoonish view of overcoated men in New York feel more compelling.

Siqueiros, even in his earliest work, seems preoccupied with fluidity and dynamism, the desire for the picture to go beyond itself. I was particularly struck by one wall of works, all from the 1930s, whose surfaces are essentially reliefs. Although they are scenes of apocalypse, they still seduce. They try to put the viewer into the picture. Siqueiros, probably the least known of the three, is probably the show's greatest revelation.

I was going to end this piece by observing that the attraction of this art is that it is about forging a common vision, rather than about individual expression. But that leaves the problem of Kahlo, nowadays probably the best-known artist in the show. She kept painting herself as a faux folkloric religious image, though in Self-Portrait on the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States (1931) she dramatizes her ambition to bestride both cultures. She depicted herself as an icon, and over time became one. Branding trumps all.

tom@thomashine.com