Art, Revolution, and Social Reform: The Relationship between Artistic Vision and Reality in the work of Diego Rivera
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2018
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
Diego Rivera’s murals explicitly called for political action on the part of the spectator, and his vision accelerated the formulation of a class conscious proletariat in Mexico which wished to advocate for its own interests over and above those of the bourgeoisie. Rivera’s understanding of muralism began in Italy with his appreciation of frescoes, but it grew when he was tasked by José Vasconcelos to create a new revolutionary art. He and other artists were inspired by the Mexican Revolution, and they wished to capture the spirit of a new mexicanidad, a spirit of the people of Mexico. Porfirio Díaz, who was an avowed positivist and President of Mexico in the latter nineteenth century, had reshaped Mexico by transforming the economy from a quasi-feudal system to a more centralized market economy. Just as the project of modernization had begun before the Revolution, so had the efforts of artists to capture modernity on canvas. After the Revolution, however, Rivera’s and other artists’ conceptions of modernity became infused, as the decade went on, with an overtly political character. Rivera’s in particular built his own ‘epic modernist’ aesthetic which, like the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht, challenged viewers to question how they might play a role in the political change going on all around them. Rivera’s message of class-consciousness and action took root in Mexico in ways that it did not in the United States. In the 1930s Leon Trotsky found himself in Mexico, reeling from the Terror, and the ways that the U.S.S.R. had compromised the values of the October, compromised art, and created a leader cult; in contrast, Mexico’s artistic freedom, made manifest in reality the dynamic, democratic political action that Rivera called for in his murals and, in combination with the political advocacy of Lazaro Cárdenas, allowed for the enactment of broad, sweeping reforms.