this slide cast treats muralism and social art in the 1920s we're going to focus on Mexico because of course it is Mexico uh that had the uh social Revolution and political revolution called the Mexican Revolution between about 1910 and 1920 and in fact it is Mexican muralism in the 1920s uh that expresses the the nature and the gains of that Revolution it is in fact the visual language in which the government the state then couches uh the the language of Revolution the first image we're going to look at is uh done by one of the critical proponents of what is going to become Mexican muralism Diego Riva but Riva didn't start out painting in what is going to be termed the social realist manner uh nor did he start out painting on walls which is of course what muralism refers to uh but he was always interested in the intersection of painting and politics and one can see that here in the zapatista landscape from 1915 which refers directly to a hero of the Mexican Revolution uh emilano Zapata uh when the Revolution was actually going on it should be noted here that Riva was uh in sconed in Paris France while he was painting this uh and while the Mexican Revolution was going on he never really experienced uh the revolution itself he left before it really got going and then didn't come back until uh it had run its course now that said he is a great poet and painter of the revolution in the sense that when he gets back to Mexico in the 20s uh he really forges along with two other painters uh the visual language that will be Associated from that time forward with the goals the desires of the Mexican Revolution but before we get to that let's let's look at this here we see what is is pretty much a classically Cubist composition in fact it's even synthetic C cubism it's that sort of cubism after they uh start using Color again and of course he is uh in 1915 in the thick of it this would have been a fairly Advanced painting style in 1915 although Picasso and Brock had been doing it uh for some time earlier this was definitely uh not your average uh painting style and one of the things that uh Clues you to this is the fact that it's everything's faceted it really looks as if you might be seeing things from several different angles and while there are easily recognizable Snippets of thing indigenous cloth a gun uh perhaps a hat everything is put through a sort of blender of facting that uh the cubis were very fond of when Riva turn returned to Mexico it was to embody the Mexican Revolution uh in art this is a conscious a mindful goal that he sat with the um the minister of education and others for or the the painting post Revolution uh and this is not again something that would fit neatly into a sort of story of cubism and other Avant guard movements in Europe that are not meant to communicate with large numbers of people and are not meant to uh embody or frame uh a large uh ongoing social Revolution at least not one like the one that had just happened in Mexico and so before he goes back Rivera actually goes on a tour of Italy and looks at the great Christian murals of the Middle Ages especially the late Middle Ages and moreover specifically that of jotto and he learned quite a lot from The Narrative uh strategies and the style of jotto he doesn't talk about that a lot later in fact he's much more interested in talking about indigenous or Indian art styles and Mexican soul but in fact what he does is really transplant a a very old very vener venerable uh mural style in central Italy to uh the Mexican to the cause of the Mexican Revolution uh this is a a work that is in fact for The Bu building of the Secretary of public education for that person who was in fact um charged with uh embodying the revolution in visual culture and in education and here you see a fairly typical Diego Rivera revolutionary mural or Mexican mural in which um the all the figures are done certainly with recognizable uh proportions Etc but there's little or no interest in uh a lot of fussy detail the forms are are monumentalized really they they are they are painted in just enough detail so that one easily recognizes them without getting into uh fuss or sort of into the weeds as it were of the details of people's uh jeans and shorts and even their faces this was something that he took directly from uh jotto uh the on the the other hand uh the the iconography is not Christian uh it is fairly uh canonical Marxist in that the workers are the heroes uh there is a the idea of Communism or socialism Leading the People out of their oppression uh is seen here throughout uh and the idea that uh the the Great people or the the sorts of leaders are backgrounded or not seen as all because they are in Marxist thinking not the people who make history and in fact we are talking about history painting at this point now the this is um already in the past largely and what Rivera wants to do is to encode the Mexican Revolution as a revolution of the people and thus a socialist Revolution to overthrow the oppressive regime uh that had kept them uh down and to unleash uh the power and the creativity and the energy of the workers onto the Mexican landscape and one sees factories in the distance one sees uh Mexican revolutionary slogans like tier libertad in a flag waving in the very far distance one sees the hammer and sickle of the Communist party uh in the mid foreground and in the the very front foreground one sees uh Diego Rivera's consort Freda Colo then passing out guns to those who would fight and eventually defend the revolution we've already talked a lot about Freda Koo in this class and it is certain that uh by the 1920s uh both she and Diego were more than happy to cultivate a cult of personality around themselves and their mission to uphold and further the Mexican Revolution and to embody it in art specifically in murals in the case of Diego but as we talked about a little in the case of Freda uh she was not a muralist and this was not her um this was not her calling this was not her goal that in fact uh she was bent on Excavating 19th century very humble um often self-taught artistic practices that were occurrent Mexico only a hundred years earlier and she was much more about exploring herself and her own Persona uh rather than exploring a very definitive version of history and an encoding of the Revolutionary historical events with this in mind let's compare the painting Styles and the iconographies of Diego Rivera on the left and Freda Colo on the right these are these are not contemporary what the Koo was it's about 10 years later than the Rivera but they are they're certainly comparable the the Rivera on the left of course is a mural while the col is a payt on a support so it was portable uh and not meant for one particular public place with the uh Rivera on the left you see again these Monumental forms there they're almost caricatures really of people they're meant to embody certain Concepts each person is meant to embody body is sort of concept and here we the the sort of decadence of the rich is in full display as the heroic and much more businesslike uh military revolutionaries are hovering above them and uh one would assume about to then uh flush them out and take over Mexico uh as a sort of allegory of the Revolution but you see that uh even in the close in the fine clo that he's not really interested in a lot of detail I mean the the most detail one gets is in the uh rendering of all the bullets that the Revolutionary figures wear while on the right Koo uh first of all is not painting history or or social classes or economic classes as we see on the left but instead she is investigating herself and her own identity split that is as a Mexican woman and here we do get a lot more detail a lot more interest in detail because she's very interested in uh the clothes and the signing system that is the clothes what what do these clothes mean uh what does this mean to have all this Lacy garment stuff on uh she's going to draw that out for us in in some detail and in fact that goes directly with the fact that on the left you know we're talking about a Spanish Colonial or Spanish 19th century bis woman or middle class woman uh and or or I should say European or Creo and then on the right we're talking about more indigenous dress those that uh Native Americans especially from the ismos of tantek in Waka would wear so that we get on the left a vision of History Monumental forms that really try to encapsulate certain um big Concepts like rich bad and um revolutionary figures good and active they are above the the rich sort of decadent falling about uh there below whereas with KO uh we're not presented with anything like that sort of historical thesis instead we're given um two versions of herself which are inextricably linked I mentioned at the beginning of the slide cast that there were uh not one but three important murales well we've met one uh at some link Diego Rivera uh the the most important uh secondary figure behind Rivera is certainly Jose Clement Orosco uh composition from whom you see here uh this is part of a much larger mural cycle in the hospicio cavanas in guara Mexico uh done a lot later than Rivera's great work in the 20s the Orosco really came into his own in the 30s and the thing about Orosco is that like Rivera he was very very comfortable working on these Grand mural projects for public consumption and like Rivera he was very very interested in communicating uh a certain overarching view of history but unlike Rivera he did not buy the sort of neat clean Marxist vision of the rise of the working class and its eventual Ascension in the Mexican Revolution and in fact Orosco comes back time and again as he does here to this the troubling aspects of Mexico's history and not not that Rivera wasn't wasn't quite comfortable in denigrating the conquest uh but Orosco seems to find man's struggle against other man everywhere including in Revolutionary times including amongst indigenous people and he's able he seems to be able to create a visual vocabulary that is especially productive and especially effective in communicating these struggles and this slightly ominous view of human relations and here we see of course the horse which was not native to the Americas it had died out much much earlier being brought back by the Spanish as a sort of animal of war and he is really turn the horse into this metallic War Machine thing I'm not exactly certain how it's supposed to work but it does look very very ominous indeed in this last slide we'll look at the third U muralist David SOS and this is his echo of a scream from 1937 SOS was by far the most flamboyant the most uh sort of dramatic in actor of revolutionary things and of a sort of revolutionary lifestyle uh while Rivera loved his um his Revolution he also loved his comfort zos seems to have been fairly paretic he went everywhere uh would teach anybody uh and he was also ve very much the flamboyant revolutionary in the sense that he he loved to play on the fact that he was um something of a tough guy who would then uh you know s ferment Revolution uh wherever he went in the but his art really oftentimes doesn't for me hold up uh to all that desire and all that energy and all that drama uh well it's certainly dramatic and SOS is nothing if not consistently dramatic with the changes of scales with uh very expressive for shortening uh with things that actually come out of the the canvas or the wall in the in terms of murals uh and more than anything though his iconography is so simplistic is so incredibly good and evil uh that it's hard to talk about it much but what what he did create that I think is fairly powerful is this it's it's really the iconography of suffering the iconography of the poor who suffer and this this echo of a scream is a great example whether one wants to turn one's head away or look at it full stop and really um get to the bottom of it uh most people admit that this is a very disturbing image and can be a very powerful image again cetto didn't have anything like the impact that Rivera did either in his in his uh sort of artistic life or in the artworks himself and nor did he have the sort of subtlety and I would say humanism of Orosco but he did know how to Stage this this sort of visual assault on poverty and so when we look back on the entire Mexican muralism movement itself especially as it unrolled in the 20s and 30s after that of course it gets sort of it gets bloated it gets really too big for him for itself and it starts just feeding off uh the large um patronage of the State uh but in the 20s and 30s it really developed a language and narrative of social revolution in art that many many others looked to including the United States during the Depression many others look to uh for inspiration for how to a communicate with large numbers of people via art and B um how to involve oneself in an uplifting story of renewal and or change or or redemption in what was the very turbulent early part of the 20th Century now and I do want to before I leave you I want to speak just a little bit on patronage because uh there were very few individuals who were willing to uh patronize or to pay for these murals uh with the exception of the federal governments certainly in Mexico uh where Rivera did almost all his great work and then in um in the United States uh Orosco also did some great work for Dartmouth which is actually a private a private university but uh for for municipal uh governments as well and in general in in in the large picture it's really governments that sponsor this and with the when the government started to retract their patronage in the late 30s in the United States and then throughout the 40s in Mexico muralism really had a hard time staying uh a viable artistic Enterprise to say nothing of staying the the juggernut or of remaining the juggernut of Latin American Art making and so what happens is you get this sort of slow death of muralism that leads to what we talked about earlier in La ruptura when Mexican artists and artists all over Latin America realized that uh the particular combination of style and and social social likeon graphy that muralism embodied had perhaps run its course