Thrilling new exhibition shows modern Mexican art is bigger than murals

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In 1921, as the bloody, decade-long Mexican revolution drew to an exhausted close, the distinguished intellectual José Vasconcelos was named to head a new Ministry of Public Education. In that post, Vasconcelos was instrumental in making a fateful decision: There would be murals — public murals, funded by the state and painted on community walls as an educational tool.

As reflected in the national budget, Mexico’s post-Revolution government made its highest priorities spending for the military and for schools. The first would bring order, the second would bring education for all.

Successful self-government demanded both. An unfolding transformation from the socially stratified dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to an egalitarian socialist ideal would be visualized — and sanctified — in magnificent civic paintings.

Ever since, the art of revolutionary Mexico has been synonymous with the sensational murals produced by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, the big three of the movement. Los Tres Grandes cast an enormous shadow.

More recently, the easel paintings of Frida Kahlo have been added as an essential codicil to the story, and she has gone on to eclipse the muralists in fame. But the extraordinary narrative begins with murals — a fact that has made for some difficulty in a larger understanding of the achievements of Mexican art in the first half of the 20th century.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art faced the daunting challenge when organizing “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910-1950,” a sprawling — and thrilling — survey of paintings, drawings, photography and prints. There hasn’t been a show like this in more than 60 years. But, attached to walls, murals can’t move. So what is a museum to do?

Take Rivera’s remarkable frescoes for the Neo-Classical courtyard loggia of the education ministry in Mexico City. They are divided into two themes: labor and fiestas.

A densely illustrated pictorial narrative of work and play — of battle, farming, workers’ co-ops, dancing, political protest and more — is united by a continuous crimson banner painted over the doors. “What we say to the rich and lazy is: If you want to eat, then work,” it declares. “Now all the underdogs have bread.” The banner is painted over imagery that ranges from Aztec to Masonic, rendered in wry imitation of stone relief.

The rhythmic regularity of the panels, each in the wall space between sets of double-doors leading to inner ministry offices, led the artist to conceive of the ensemble as a ballad. It’s an epic poem told in popular pictures and verse. The text is the lyric to the visual song below, sung in crowded scenes of men and women pushed up to the shallow picture plane.

But to hear the music, you must go to the mural. The mural cannot come to you.

In Philadelphia, the problem was addressed through digital technology. When I learned that video projections and big touch-screens would be used to articulate three murals, one by each of Los Tres Grandes, I was nervous. Even the finest high-tech format is still a reproduction. A fresco’s reflected light would be projected from behind, creating a wholly different effect, and without the visual tactility of painted surfaces.

The show’s ambitious mural examples are Rivera’s seminal masterpiece for the education ministry; Orozco’s cycle on American civilization painted for a library space at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., demonstrating Mexican Modernism’s internationalism; and, finally, the rabble-rousing theatrics by Siqueiros for a raucous stairwell mural in a union building, painted just at the time the artist also launched an unsuccessful attack on the Mexico City home of Leon Trotsky, the exiled former Soviet leader.

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