Title: How Mexico Formed A United National Identity Through Art
Headings: How Mexico Formed A United National Identity Through Art
How Mexico Formed A United National Identity Through Art
Content: Led jointly by elites who had benefited from industrialization as well as farmers, the unemployed, and those whose land had been seized by the government for agricultural use, the rebellion was scattered and unfocused. Without a philosophy or ideology on which to stand, the ongoing contention resembled more of a labor uprising than a political movement. Nevertheless, centuries of oppression – European and otherwise – had catastrophic results. Diego Rivera Dance in Tehuantepec (Baile in Tehuantepec), 1928, Oil on canvas, 200.7 x 163.8 cm Collection of Clarissa and Edgar Bronfman Jr. Photo Collection of Clarissa and Edgar Brontman Jr. | © Sotheby’s, New York / 2013 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / DACS. In a country with an almost 90 percent illiteracy rate, there was a call for artists to depict the desires of the revolution. Born in 1886, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was elected to adorn the walls of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City. As the first mural of this kind, the government paid for the artist to travel to Italy and study the techniques of Renaissance and Baroque masters. While he trained in Europe, Rivera’s style was specifically Mexican. Art under Porfirio Diaz had been tinged with a European aesthetic and sentiment, as though celebratory of the Spanish conquest of Aztec land. Rivera’s murals were a notable divergence from the art of this time, and they were hailed by Soviet poet and renegade futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky as the Communist world’s ‘first frescoes.’