As our Dear Leader declaims that everything coming across our southern
border is inferior and dangerous, it behooves us to remember that
American culture has often taken its cues from Mexico. One notable
instance is the subject of this ambitious, sprawling exhibition about
the influence of Mexican painters on the art of the United States
during the first half of the 20th century. Spearheaded by the
museum’s longtime historical curator Barbara Haskell, the
exceptionally timely Vida Americana proves in turns engrossing,
inspiring and confounding. The latter arises from the exhibition’s
lack of a chronological or linear narrative. Instead, thematic
groupings provide dynamic comparisons of artworks to one another, but
little sense of the order in which developments occurred or why they
progressed as they did. Yet the meandering nature of this approach
seems like a minor annoyance given the surfeit of terrific Mexican
works that inspired American artists to forcefully address the social
and economic ills of our nation. The story begins after the Mexican
Revolution in the early 1920s, when the Mexican government
commissioned artists to help unify the country by decorating
buildings. Led by los tres grandes , “the big three”—Diego
Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros—these
artists achieved international fame by covering vast walls with murals
depicting historical, cultural and political themes. Americans
flocked to Mexico to document, assist and study with the muralists. By
decade’s end, however, public commissions in Mexico dried up, so los
tres grandes came north to paint murals for schools, museums, civic
groups and even millionaires. While these massive artworks can’t
be moved, of course, the Whitney compensates with gorgeous charcoal
studies, huge photo-reproductions, wall-filling video projections and
easel paintings of similar subjects. Rivera, fortunately, made
“portable murals,” and the two fresco panels on view make clear
his style’s appeal. The Uprising shows class struggle with the
legibility of a political cartoon: In front of a confrontation between
the military striking Marxist workers, a woman holding a baby stops a
soldier with a sword from striking a male laborer in blue overalls.
Rivera and Siqueiros, in fact, were both card-carrying Communists.
They shared the political commitment of their art with their American
followers, who, in the face of the Great Depression at home and the
rise of fascism abroad, began painting Social Realist images of
progressive themes. Artists such as Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston,
Jacob Lawrence, Charles White and Thomas Hart Benton emulated
Rivera’s epic scale, Orozco’s humanistic expressionism and
Siqueiros’s experimental techniques. Some later turned to
abstraction when the Cold War changed the political climate; others
never gave up on trying to better the world through figurative art.
The stirring works in Vida Americana show the vibrant possibilities
for art when borders are crossed and social justice drives the engine.
culture
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11/04/2020 Last update