Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals (review)

Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco's Public Murals. By Anthony W. Lee. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Photographs. Plates. Illustrations. Map. Notes. Index. xx, 264 pp. Cloth, $50.00. Paper, $24.95.

With this new study by Anthony W. Lee we have an example of a trend that has been developing in Mexican historical studies for the last fifteen years or so, that being the focus on regional developments, or what has also been called "microhistory." Because a good deal of this book concerns the activities and paintings of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in San Francisco in 1931 and 1940, students and scholars of modern Mexican art will find this investigation highly valuable from that point of view, and will understand Rivera's entire production much better for this deep immersion into the California episodes. But Lee has layered the book with so many points of reference that it would be a mistake to see this only as a branch of Mexican art history. Rivera becomes an agent of intersecting histories, ideologies, and styles of painting, all of which add up to a sociocultural history of San Francisco from 1915 to the late 1940s. Lee weaves Rivera (the paintings, the personality, the political iconicity) into an ongoing narrative of the look and fate of mural paintings by Rivera and many others in regard to an erratic development of the politics in this city at a critical time of its development as a model of western urban capitalism.

These politics took on a stressed form of conflict between left and right, especially in terms of organized labor and the influx of Soviet communism, all this as factional interests were assuming a need to represent themselves by means of large public images, the mural paintings. How leftist, radical artists gained access to the city's public walls makes for rather exciting art history. Lee has plumbed the documentary sources, which, coupled with a sophistication of methodology and command of critical theory, tells a story surprising in many ways. For instance, he disproves many ingrained ideas of how mural painting in the U.S. during the 1930s was administered by the federal government and assumed its reformist assumptions. This he does by arguing for conditions and dynamics that were exclusive to San Francisco, "a local arena where several different versions of 'public art' had been in practice and in contention for years, long before any New Deal programs were ever conceived" (p. 128).

The issue of style becomes thoroughly engrossing as Lee proposes that a certain visual presentation practiced by the leftist painters was ideologically loaded so as to render their political enemies inarticulate when viewing them, actually unable to grasp their revolutionary content because the style was illegible and confusing to them. "The visual language of radicalism emphasized details and parts over narrative consistency or compositional unity" (p. 157). This style further constructed radical viewers and deconstructed conservative ones, as it "did not ask them to tease out authorial or preferred readings based on pictorial order" (p. 157).

Had Lee provided only these two insights he would have made a major contribution to studies of public and political art. But he does so much more. The many quotes from critics of the day, biographies of political players and of little-known artists, illustrations of previously unpublished images, facts and insights culled from interviews, and the remarkable control of the abundance of evidence to build and sustain a compelling explanation ("interpretation" seems a weak word here) makes one feel encouraged as to the current condition of the social history of art. Also, Lee has such a facility with language that the logic of the narrative seems to sink in more deeply and permanently than with obstructive or jargon-laden writing (see the first full paragraph on p. 111).

Leonard...