Diego Rivera is very popular for its influence on American modern art. His art has become widespread in the 20th century and was collected by the Rockefellers, used in many galleries, and it remains the most expensive artist from Latin America to date.
Mexican Muralists
Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo were among the most famous artists from Mexico, but they were not the only ones. You need to brush on your art education to rediscover abstract art and mural art as part and parcel of modern art. The Whitney Museum in New York revealed that there was a group of Mexican artists, who in fact shaped post-war modern art in the US.
The Mexican muralists made a very prolific influence on the creation of socially conscious art and modern street art in the year 1925 to 1945. A known curator of art said that they had the idea of an exhibition over ten years ago, however, it was their interest in Mexican art and culture that moved them to get on with the show and put it forward.
Modern Mexican Art Influence
It is a great time to evaluate the aesthetics, creativity, and innovation that sprung from the relationships between artists from the US and Mexico. They placed impetus on the physical and psychological borders that the current US administration is enforcing as between the neighboring countries.
The exhibition is aimed at tracing the Mexican art influence on their American counterparts; such as Jackson Pollock, Isamu Noguchi, Ben Shahn, and Thomas Hart Benton. Also, the groups of notable muralists under the Works Progress Administration, which is part and parcel of the Roosevelt’s New Deal to have Americans working in the Great Depression.
Mexican Muralists
The show comprised of juxtapositioning Jackson Pollock with that of world-renown Mexican painter José Clemente Orozco. Jackson Pollock was highly moved by the latter’s ‘Prometheus’ mural in Pomona, California which he later on dubbed as the best painting in the western hemisphere.
Mexican muralists created art that appeared modern and made subjects that matter most to everyday ordinary people. It was modern art that was widely known as accessible. As it depicts social and political subjects in the government building, seminaries, and schools, muralists were creating art that was 100% relevant and inviting, which is a stark contrast to the abstract expressionism that riled the American art scene for a decade. It is evident in the heroism of the working class people that were immortalized in the fresco called ‘The Uprising 1931.’ It showcases a woman gallantly fending off soldiers to shield her infant at her hips in the event of a labor strike.
After the ten-year Mexican revolution that ended around 1920, the muralist movement from Mexico emerged as President Alvaro Oregon created a public art program. The popular artists from the likes of Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros were provided walls to create murals that in large part cemented and fortified the heroism of Mexicans. The grandfather of street art Siqueiros, together with the 1960s Chicano Mural Movement in Latin America created brilliant frescos filled with fantastic artworks in entire America which were to date are known as the movers and shakers of American modern art.
Photo Attribution:
1st and featured image from https://pixabay.com/photos/museum-art-mural-mus%C3%A9e-d-art-modern-398761/
2nd image from https://pixabay.com/photos/urban-art-graffiti-collage-2143183/
