Mexican Muralism and the North American Anti-Aesthetics

Abstract

In their work of the 1920s and 1930s, Mexican muralists such as Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros inherited the precolonial muralist tradition and the aesthetic paradigms of the European avant-garde. In Cuba, Wifredo Lam continued this tradition by replacing Christian symbols with Afro-Cuban ones. The connection between precolonial art and aesthetics and the Mexican Revolution is shown in these artists’ frescos and in the iconography and didacticism that define their murals. This essay establishes a triangular relationship between Latin America, the United States, and Eurasia, and shows how Latin American artists challenge European and North American hegemony. North American art institutions have failed to recognize Latin American art’s difference which, in itself, was an act of emancipation of the South from the Northern Hemisphere’s cultural hegemony.

This essay is a chapter in Eduardo Subirats’ forthcoming book Arte y Revolución en América Latina. The present translation was rendered by Ross Karlan.