Title: Mexican Muralism | Art History Teaching Resources
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Content: Chronicle Books, 1998) falls into the first category: though it is often used as the go-to survey text, it is strong on Orozco and Rivera, but perhaps unnecessarily critical of the more politically and artistically radical Siqueiros. Leonard Folgarait’s Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) is an excellent alternative treatment of the so-called “heroic period” of Mexican muralism—from the end of the Revolution to the end of the progressive regime of Lazaro Cardenas, at which point the Mexican presidency became much stricter about the course of muralism, limiting artistic choice. The Folgarait, Alejandro Anreus, and Robin Adele Greeley edited Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) also provides shorter thematic essays that cover the main three and also give an idea of how muralism evolved past 1940, until (and beyond) the death of last remaining grande Siqueiros in 1974. Each of the muralists also spent some amount of time in the 1920s and 30s in the United States, and their art and politics possessed a decidedly different value when marshalled outside of the Mexican governmental apparatus. Anthony Lee, “Workers and Painters: Social Realism and Race in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals,” in Alejandro Anreus, ed.,