Muralism without Walls: Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, 1927–1940 (review)

Early in Muralism without Walls, Anna Indych-López recounts an illuminating anecdote regarding the relationship between the artist José Clemente Orozco and Anita Brenner, a journalist and promoter of Mexican arts in the United States. In order to convince Orozco to produce his Horrores, a series of ink drawings on the Mexican Revolution, Brenner propositioned the muralist in 1926 on behalf of a “mythical gringo,” one “who was writing a book about the Revolution, and who wanted illustrations” (24). With the patronage of this “mythical gringo” in mind, Orozco would produce some sixty drawings focusing on the violence of the Revolution, works that adapted the imagery of his earlier murals in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in Mexico City for a U.S. audience, ultimately drawing critical comparisons to Goya’s Disasters of War. “This mythical gringo,” Brenner would state in her diary, “was me, of course” (24). The anecdote encapsulates the core concerns of Indych-López’s study, which focuses on the intricate and sometimes deceptive web of motivations impelling the promotion and circulation of the work of the Mexican muralists in the United States over the course of the late 1920s and the 1930s. Her project suggests that a widespread “exhibition culture” based on department store aesthetics and driven by American museums, galleries, art critics, and promoters demanded work from the muralists contoured to the specific cultural expectations these publics held. Furthermore, Indych-López asserts, the muralists were more than willing to acquiesce to these demands in order to fulfill their own desires for financial and critical success in the United States.

In order to trace the impulses guiding the marketing of the Mexican muralists over the course of two decades, Indych-López focuses on a variety of first-hand sources—published critiques of exhibitions, catalogues from museum shows, anecdotal sources such as the diary cited above, and correspondence between the artists and their friends, families, promoters, and critics. The study focuses on a number of major events in the circulation of Mexican muralism in the United States, particularly the “Mexican Arts” exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts (which traveled through fourteen U.S. cities from 1930–1932), the contemporaneous 1931 retrospective of Diego Rivera’s work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA’s 1940 exhibition “Twenty Centuries of Mexican Arts,” which Indych-López views as the most successful conveyance of the essence of Mexican muralism to a U.S. audience. While only passing mention is made of perhaps the most famous intervention of Mexican muralism in the United States—Rivera’s Man at the Crossroads, commissioned and ultimately destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller in the RCA building at Rockefeller Center in the early 1930s—Muralism without Walls cultivates new critical terrain by offering detailed analyses of several other works and series of works that created a virtual presence for Mexican muralism in the U.S. despite the absence of major murals. In addition to Orozco’s Horrores, Indych-López examines Diego Rivera’s portable frescoes (a medium invented by the artist and used to present fragmented versions of his Mexican murals in the U.S.), Orozco’s later six-panel portable fresco Dive Bomber and Tank, and a number of profitably reproducible lithographs generated by Rivera, Orozco, and the third of “los tres grandes” upon whom the study focuses, David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Considering the broad and varied array of scholarship on Latin American artistic production, some readers may question the need for yet another book on Mexican muralism. More research has been dedicated to Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros than perhaps all other modern Latin American artists combined, and their collective oeuvre has come to dominate popular impressions of the region’s art at large. However, Muralism without Walls shifts the focus of much of this scholarship by concentrating particularly upon the strategies employed by the three artists in order to adapt...