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: 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.’ Diego Rivera, together with José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, became known as ‘Los Tres Grandes,’ or ‘The Big Three.’ Despite their differing political beliefs, the three artists played an instrumental role in building a national identity. Their murals found inspiration in the visual remains of the Catholic conquistadores and the wall paintings of Aztec cultures in an artistic vocabulary that united the complex histories of the Mexican people. The actualization of these scenes through art served a social purpose: to establish a public, unrestricted dialogue.