Diego Rivera's historical vision
By Nadia Ugalde Gómez. Excerpt from the book 'Rivera. The Complete Murals'
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By the early 1940s, Diego Rivera had painted murals in 15 sites in Mexico and the United States and earned an international reputation. His career as a muralist in the United States came to an end with Pan-American Unity, painted for San Francisco’s International Golden Gate Exposition. It had been a revelatory and enriching experience for Rivera, beginning satisfactorily in San Francisco and Detroit a decade earlier and ending disastrously in New York, with the scandal unleashed by his mural at the Rockefeller Center and his stand-off with capitalist censorship. The immediate consequence of this confrontation was the Portrait of America panels Rivera painted for New Workers’ School in New York. […]
Rivera returned to Mexico in early 1941, newly reconciled with Frida Kahlo. The population of Mexico then stood at 24 million, with the capital accounting for three million of these. The 1940s were straddled by the presidential regimes of General Manuel Ávila Camacho and Miguel Alemán Valdés.When World War II broke out, the Mexican government sent Squadron 201 to the Pacific front and declared war on the Axis Powers - Germany, Italy and Japan - after Mexican oil tankers were sunk by German submarines.
The construction of a new age
The economic upturn experienced by Mexico during the World War created expectations of sustained economic development. Though the reforms put in place by Lázaro Cárdenas in the late 1930s had laid the foundations for the country’s industrialization, growth was largely attributable to the war. Ávila Camacho and Miguel Alemán’s governments promoted industrial growth in a liberal economic framework. The newly-established entrepreneurial classes began to profit from an urban society dependent on industry and supported by agriculture.
One of the principal objectives of the two presidencies of the 1940s was political stabilization. They sought to internationalize the country, combining mexicanidad and progressive notions with anti-Communism. This new variant of Mexican nationalism was, they thought, essential to the construction of a new age.
Cultural policy was necessarily affected. Important institutions were founded: the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana de la Secretaría [Ministry] de Educación Pública in 1942, followed the next year by the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social [Social Security] and the Colegio Nacional, whose founding members included the most prominent figures of the sciences and humanities, notably Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In 1944, the Museo Nacional de Historia was opened in the Castillo de Chapultepec. The modernization of Mexico City accelerated: expressways such as the Viaducto were already in place and the first blocks of flats were built. Leon Trotsky was assassinated at his home in Coyoacán in August 1940, almost four years after being allowed to take up residence in Mexico - largely thanks to Rivera’s appeal to President Cárdenas. The painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, linked to the murder, was imprisoned for five months, then temporarily expelled from the country.
In 1943, the Paricutín volcano erupted. Several painters were fascinated by the spectacle, including Gerardo Murillo ("Doctor Atl") and Rivera himself, who depicted it in several watercolors.
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Página 1 2 3 4 5 6
By the early 1940s, Diego Rivera had painted murals in 15 sites in Mexico and the United States and earned an international reputation. His career as a muralist in the United States came to an end with Pan-American Unity, painted for San Francisco’s International Golden Gate Exposition. It had been a revelatory and enriching experience for Rivera, beginning satisfactorily in San Francisco and Detroit a decade earlier and ending disastrously in New York, with the scandal unleashed by his mural at the Rockefeller Center and his stand-off with capitalist censorship. The immediate consequence of this confrontation was the Portrait of America panels Rivera painted for New Workers’ School in New York. […]
Rivera returned to Mexico in early 1941, newly reconciled with Frida Kahlo. The population of Mexico then stood at 24 million, with the capital accounting for three million of these. The 1940s were straddled by the presidential regimes of General Manuel Ávila Camacho and Miguel Alemán Valdés.When World War II broke out, the Mexican government sent Squadron 201 to the Pacific front and declared war on the Axis Powers - Germany, Italy and Japan - after Mexican oil tankers were sunk by German submarines.
The construction of a new age
The economic upturn experienced by Mexico during the World War created expectations of sustained economic development. Though the reforms put in place by Lázaro Cárdenas in the late 1930s had laid the foundations for the country’s industrialization, growth was largely attributable to the war. Ávila Camacho and Miguel Alemán’s governments promoted industrial growth in a liberal economic framework. The newly-established entrepreneurial classes began to profit from an urban society dependent on industry and supported by agriculture.
One of the principal objectives of the two presidencies of the 1940s was political stabilization. They sought to internationalize the country, combining mexicanidad and progressive notions with anti-Communism. This new variant of Mexican nationalism was, they thought, essential to the construction of a new age.
Cultural policy was necessarily affected. Important institutions were founded: the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana de la Secretaría [Ministry] de Educación Pública in 1942, followed the next year by the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social [Social Security] and the Colegio Nacional, whose founding members included the most prominent figures of the sciences and humanities, notably Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. In 1944, the Museo Nacional de Historia was opened in the Castillo de Chapultepec. The modernization of Mexico City accelerated: expressways such as the Viaducto were already in place and the first blocks of flats were built. Leon Trotsky was assassinated at his home in Coyoacán in August 1940, almost four years after being allowed to take up residence in Mexico - largely thanks to Rivera’s appeal to President Cárdenas. The painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, linked to the murder, was imprisoned for five months, then temporarily expelled from the country.
In 1943, the Paricutín volcano erupted. Several painters were fascinated by the spectacle, including Gerardo Murillo ("Doctor Atl") and Rivera himself, who depicted it in several watercolors.
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Diego Rivera working with paints, 1944. (c) Silvia Salmi/CORBIS
