In the 1920s, the Mexican government, newly formed after the recent revolution, started to employ painters for public art projects. These artists were supposed to glorify the past revolution and build an image of independent Mexico through art and visual propaganda. The movement of Mexican muralists blended Western influences with traditional Mexican motifs of the pre-Columbian era and communicated with their audience through expressive and easy-to-interpret images. Read on to learn more about the most important works from the Mexican Muralism movement.
1. The Earliest Work by Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera: “The Creation”
After a decade of civil war that lasted from 1910 to 1920, the new Mexican government, led by General Alvaro Obregon, aimed at revolutionizing the country’s image and building a new national identity. To break off from the colonial past, they decided to focus on the legacy of the pre-Columbian era, namely on the art and culture of Indigenous populations of Olmec civilizations and other peoples. At the same time, low literacy rates stood in the way of effective communication. Diego Rivera was one of the first artists hired by the government to convey political messages to the wider public. His first mural, titled The Creation, represented a Christian subject matter yet had an important ideological feature. Adam and Eve, as well as saints present during the world’s creation, were painted as Indigenous Mexicans, thus sending a message of racial equality in the new state.
Muralists argued against complicated hidden meanings in art: the symbols and narratives had to be straightforward, simple, and easily understandable. Mexican Muralism was not only a form of art but a method of communication with the poorest and illiterate public which normally was not susceptible to high art in museums. The movement’s goal was to have no class borders and no entry fee and to deliver its message directly to its audience without institutional mediators. In a way, Mexican Muralism was a precursor to street art as we know it – publicly accessible, class-free, interactive, and relying on general public tastes.
2. Aurora Reyes Flores’s “Attack on the Rural Teachers”
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterAttack on The Rural Teachers was the first mural ever painted by then-aspiring muralist Aurora Reyes Flores. It immediately became one of the movement’s key works and reflected on one of the lesser-known yet terrifying events following the Mexican Revolution. With changes in ideological course came changes in the educational system. Thousands of educated teachers, most of them women, were sent to rural areas of Mexico to teach children and adults, replacing the traditionally dominant church education.
Priests, who often were the only literate people in remote villages, were ineffective in terms of education, only fueling ignorance and prejudice. Professional teachers, on the contrary, were supposed to teach languages and sciences, developing the country’s poorest areas. Yet, not all locals were enthusiastic about this reform. In rural areas, they attacked hundreds of teachers and even murdered some of them. The focal point of Reyes’ work is the inability of the rigid system to accept change, the violent backlash against women and their initiatives, and the compromised safety of women.
Aurora Reyes Flores was one of the pioneers of the muralist movement yet, unfortunately, did not enjoy the same level of popularity as her male colleagues did. The government often refused to fund her projects allegedly due to the explicit feminist agenda in them. Moreover, generally, the movement of Mexican Muralism was perceived as a masculine domain due to the large scale of works, expressive imagery, and strong political inclinations. During her life, Aurora Reyes Flores created only six murals, focusing more on poetry, teaching, and political activism.
3. Diego Rivera, “The Detroit Industry Frescos”
Paradoxically, many of the most important works of the Mexican muralist movement were located not within Mexican borders but in the United States. As the movement gained popularity, some of the outstanding artists received invitations to work for American commissioners. Diego Rivera, the most famous of muralists, became the icon of the movement despite being the most westernized of the group. His experience of the Mexican Revolution was almost theoretical since he spent most of it abroad. For that reason, his art focused on the glorification of war heroes and workers in an idealized way, omitting gore, suffering, and hardship. Stylistically, his paintings blended influences of European modernism with Mexican tradition, making him the most understandable of muralists for the rest of the world.
In the 1930s, Rivera created several important murals in the United States, including the scandalous Man at The Crossroads and the series of frescos for the Detroit Institute of Arts. Overall, Rivera designed and painted twenty-seven murals depicting industry work. Like in many of his other works, he represented the duality of progress and the possibility of the disastrous aftermath of mechanization. One of the murals juxtaposes scientists developing vaccines with those working on lethal poisonous gases: the origins of their work were the same, but the final results turned dramatically opposite. The interaction of man with machinery and the blurred distinction between them was the central motif of Diego Rivera’s monumental work. However, upon its unveiling, the murals caused immediate controversy, with some Detroit officials reading them as a communist manifesto that had somehow crept into the heart of the capitalist industrial wonder.
4. David Alfaro Siqueiros, “Portrait of The Bourgeoisie”
David Alfaro Siqueiros was the most radical of all muralists, both in politics and in his uncompromising and often gruesome subject matter. Apart from the Mexican Revolution, Siqueiros fought in the Spanish Civil War and was greatly influenced and traumatized by combat. That trauma often found its expression in his works, notably in the mural Portrait of The Bourgeoisie, created for the Mexican Electric Syndicate.
Originally titled Portrait of Fascism, the mural was a dramatic and nauseating apocalyptic scene, almost surrealist in nature. Anonymous figures in gas masks line among collapsing buildings, and mechanical plane-like birds attack what was left of humanity and the old world. At the center of it, a machine is grinding coins into streams of blood, flooding the streets, symbolizing endless greed and cruelty. Despite his decisive role in creating the mural, Siqueiros never got to finish it. Before completing the work, he had to urgently flee Mexico after a failed attempt to assassinate the famous Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
5. Jose Clemente Orozco, “Prometheus”
Together with Rivera and Siqueiros, Jose Clemente Orozco formed the so-called Great Three of Mexican Muralism—a triumvirate of the most prominent and respected muralists. Art critics usually named Orozco as the most conservative of them all, although it did not affect his popularity. Orozco created the Prometheus mural for Pomona College in California, illustrating the famous Greek legend of the hero Prometheus stealing fire from gods to share it with humans.
For his audacity, the gods punished him. For eternity, Prometheus would be chained to a rock, and every day an eagle would eat his liver, which would heal only to be eaten again the next day, causing him endless pain. For Orozco, Prometheus symbolized the suffering of those ready to bring knowledge and progress to humanity. The mural took three months to complete, not only because of its size and complexity but due to the artist’s disability. In his youth, Orozco lost his left hand in an accident involving gunpowder.
6. Mexican Muralist Rufino Tamayo, “Children Playing with Fire”
One of the dominant aesthetic traits of Mexican Muralism was its tendency towards primitivism and expressive distortion of figures and faces at the expense of conventionally realistic images. Apart from the communicative purposes of murals, such style worked to demonstrate the hereditary artistic tradition lasting from the pre-Hispanic era.
Rufino Tamayo was the fourth of the greatest Mexican muralists, isolated from the rest for refusing to comply with the new ideology completely. Of all the movement’s artists, Tamayo most closely identified himself with the historical tradition and Mexican identity and was rightly cautious about the revolution. He started his artistic career by recreating lost artifacts for museum exhibitions in Mexico City before moving on to present his own work, keeping the link between traditional art and his contemporary era as direct as possible. One of his most famous paintings, Children Playing with Fire, was both an illustration of the horrors of World War II and a commentary on the bloodshed of the Mexican Revolution.
The children, playing with the power they could not possibly harness, represent a metaphor for the revolutionary change spiraling out of control. Tamayo’s critical approach did not find admiration among other muralists and Mexican officials. To express his creative ideals freely, in 1926, the artist moved to the US and spent most of his mature career there, painting Mexican animals and nature.
