Mexican Art in the Twentieth Century

Carlos Molina

The history of art in Mexico in the twentieth Century can best be understood by focusing on three moments: the prolific creativity of the Mural Renaissance of the 1920s; the reaction to this discourse among the younger generation of artists in the 1950s, which took the form of intense artistic debate over national reality; and, in the last decade or so, a new struggle to define identity in contemporary Mexico.

The Mexican School of Painting, as the Muralists were known, focused on the illustration of heroic revolutionary deeds. Appointed by the Ministry of Education, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco (ever since then known as the 3 Grandes) painted the walls of government offices in Mexico City. Despite being conversant with European avant-gardes, these artists chose instead a figurative mode to represent Mexican history, culture and society. They drew on Pre-Columbian iconography and its traces on contemporary society - the strong traditions of popular art and craft - to establish a distinctive national identity.

Officially, this representation of Mexicanness was intended to be enlightening and educational for illiterate masses, to articulate an ideology that recognised the Indian element of society as essential to the construction of nationality. Muralism reminded Mexicans of their indigenous roots, but it also compelled them to recognise the necessity of progress, of evolution towards full 'civilisation'. While the State used art to legitimise its own rhetoric, artists aimed more at a leftist articulation of the class struggle. In a 1923 manifesto, the muralists made a political statement by demanding that they were toilers and not artists.

By the time that Novedades newspaper published José Luis Cuevas's letter, sardonically referring to the States' Muralist mythology as a cactus curtain, (March 1958) contemporary art in Mexico was no longer realist in orientation. In the late 1950s critics labelled a number of artists working in Mexico City as a group who, although they did not have an explicit aesthetic agenda at least agreed upon the rejection of Muralism, and shared a condition of being institutionally excluded. While the State promoted a false disjuncture between realist patriotism and frivolous abstract cosmopolitanism, this ruptura generation felt closer to Rufino Tamayo, who was also a dissenting voice to the myth of the 3 Grandes. By the fifties young artists were no longer funded by the State, and strove to conform to an incipient private gallery-based market (G.A.M., Misrachi, Juan Martin). Artists of this generation included Manuel Felguérez, Lilia Carrillo, José Luis Cuevas, Fernando García Ponce, Alberto Gironella, Cordelia Urueta, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, Arnold Belkin, Arnaldo Coen, Vicente Rojo, Carlos Mérida, Vlady, Enrique Echeverría, Pedro and Rafael Coronel.

Mexicans could broadly characterize the last decade of the twentieth century as an assault on art under conditions set by post-modernism and globalisation. Born after the 1960s this generation resorts to nihilism and provocation in their themes. They recycle stylistic features from others in an embrace of vernacular iconography and love for nationalistic kitsch. Hyperrealism has become a tool to laugh at middle-class lifestyles; consumerism is a constant topic. Their works are halfway between original artworks, handcrafts and mechanically reproduced imagery. Private and corporative collectors have become their buyers. Viewed from abroad, contemporary Mexican art appears as a series of local collectives with an international impact, an impression exemplified by the international reception of Gabriel Orozco, Jishai Jusidman, Francis Alÿs, and SEMEFO, and often created by shrewd partnerships between artist and curator.