Palace in Mexico City, the headquarters of the government, address the political leadership of the nation and also, in their composition, the shape of the walls and the fact that the walls encase a stairway.
With the Mexican government as patron of many of these murals, they are no one person's private property but rather belong to the nation and to each of its citizens equally. Publicly owned images were to give a sense of empowerment to a citizenry badly in need of such after so many years of laboring under the Díaz dictatorship and after a decade of frustrated and dashed hopes since the Revolution of 1910. In 1920, it was felt that the government would finally lead its people to an attainment of the goals of the revolution. The mural paintings were expected to play a major role in convincing the Mexican nation of the virtues of this process. As one writer claimed, “It is natural that the State should be a partisan of an artistic form that would be useful for its political ends” (Cardoza y Aragón 1940, p. 18).
1.2.1 Diego Rivera
Rivera is the best known and most productive of the Mexican mural painters. He presented himself as the leader of the muralists and this myth was accepted to the detriment of dozens of other important painters.
Rivera had been in Europe, mostly in Paris, from 1907 to 1921 and was called back by the government to initiate the visual arts program. Before his return to Mexico, Rivera took a trip throughout Italy in order to study examples of mural painting from the Renaissance. There he learned lessons of large‐scale composition, such as how to arrange many figures in landscape and architectural settings, how to organize the important episodes of a historical narrative, and how to master the technique of fresco.
For his first project under Vasconcelos, however, in 1922, Rivera chose the medium of encaustic. This was the mural painting titled La creación (The Creation) (illustrated in Rodríguez 1969, p. 169, and Rochfort 1993, p. 34), located in the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. It was painted on the rear of the stage of the auditorium, directly facing the audience for lectures and performances.
At the bottom of both corners, we see nude brown‐skinned figures, a woman and a man respectively. Behind and above them are many colorfully dressed figures whose role is to educate these Mexican Indians, Adam and Eve, as it were, according to the dictates of European knowledge. The primitive and culturally “empty” indigenous Mexicans would be molded into civilized, Europeanized citizens, to be clothed in finery and taught to recite poetry. They would become a hybrid race, brown on the exterior, white inside. This meaning is in line with Vasconcelos' own ideas on the subject, which he articulated in his book La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race), in 1925, of a race that “would form a type infinitely superior to any previous ones …, the lower forms of the species will be absorbed by the superior one.”1
Although generally realistic in style, this mural also hints at cubism in some details, the traces of Rivera's time with Picasso in Paris (see Favela 1984).
Another key image painted for Vasconcelos, in the headquarters for the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City, is the fresco panel titled El maestro rural (The Rural Teacher) (illustrated in Rodríguez 1969, p. 210, and Rochfort 1993, p. 55), completed in the period 1923–1924, during which Rivera produced images more in line with contemporary issues and with his own increasingly leftist politics, depicting real Mexicans in local costume and recognizable landscapes.
We see a barren landscape where campesinos (peasants) till the land, build a simple structure, and sit in a circle with a teacher who holds an open book. A mounted guard scans the countryside, rifle at the ready. At this time, the government was under attack by counterrevolutionaries who targeted the “socialist” rural school. This painting gives equal importance to various kinds of constructive labor. One of Vasconcelos' slogans at this time was to join “working brains” with “working hands” (Vasconcelos 1950, pp. 23–25). The work to produce food from the land, to construct housing, to “plant” and to “grow” knowledge, and to defend these with arms all fall within the vested interest of the government to advertise its programs and to survive political and militant challenges to its rule.
In this context, a quotation from an official publication of the Ministry at this time is relevant. It stresses “cooperation in social life as a means of awakening a spirit of fraternity and mutual service which is the preparation of a future social order” (Secretaría de Educación Pública 1923–1924, pp. 294–295). Notice how the circle of students offers an opening where a hat lies on the ground. This is clearly an invitation for the viewer to be absorbed into this circle, to join this “future social order.” The history lesson and its moral implications point both to the past and to the future, characterizing the present regime as the crucial agency of an enlightened and free society. As one writer of the day responded to this painting, “Perhaps the best symbol of Mexico today is the vigorous fresco of Diego Rivera, in which…the rural teacher is shown surrounded by children, poorly dressed as herself, but animated with a vision of the future” (Enríquez Ureña 1925, p. 35).
1.2.2 José Clemente Orozco
A fierce individualist, Orozco displayed a high degree of pessimism in regard to the Mexican government, whose office holders he saw as self‐serving and hypocritical. Orozco serves as the unrelenting critic of Mexican political and social developments at this time and his paintings as pointed barbs of outright sarcasm and poignant satire to remind his viewers of how much still needs to be done to right social wrongs. His targets are ignorance, greed, corruption, and violence, represented along the entire spectrum from far left to far right, especially clericalism.
This bitterness was forged in recollections of and meditations upon the bloodiest fighting of the revolution. In the Horrores de la Revolución (Horrors of the Revolution), produced in the mid‐1920s, Orozco made explicitly graphic black and white drawings of atrocities that had not lessened in his historical memory.2 During this time, he also illustrated for La Vanguardia, an anarcho‐syndicalist periodical.
In the mid to late 1930s, Orozco painted a group of large frescoes in the city of Guadalajara. By this time he had become completely disenchanted with what he saw as the corruption of the ideals of the Revolution of 1910. He also at this time began to participate in antifascist organizations, such as the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, LEAR, founded in 1933), an allegiance quite atypical of him but telling of these years of response to the rise of international fascism.3
Of two important details in the Guadalajara murals, one is a monumental portrait of Father Miguel Hidalgo, leader of the independence movement of the early nineteenth century, when Mexico freed itself from the colonial control of Spain. This super‐scaled figure hovers dramatically over the main staircase of the Governor's Palace, wielding a flaming torch (illustrated in Rodríguez 1969, p. 325 and Rochfort 1993, p. 142). The importance of choosing Hidalgo as his hero is that Orozco in 1937 is turning away from contemporary figures. His own present could not be idealized. In this case, the flames are a symbol of mythical and cleansing power, purifying the violence of armed struggle.
The other major image from Guadalajara is El hombre en llamas (Man in Flames), painted inside the dome of the Cabañas Orphanage in 1938–1939 (illustrated in Rodríguez 1969, p. 333 and Rochfort 1993, p. 118). The central figure is one of four human forms who represent the four elements; earth, wind, and water being the other three. The flaming, nude male body floats in space directly above the viewer, pulling the eye and mind into a contemplation of philosophical and spiritual questions. There is nothing about the body that is either Mexican or of a specific time and place. The thematic context, being purely abstract, demonstrates how far Orozco has moved from the objective meanings of his earlier work. Here, the question of national identity, of the revolution, or of any relevance