| Artist: | Rivera, Diego |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Man at the Crossroads | |
| Date of Work: | 1934 | |
| Nationality: | Mexican | |
| Context: | Latin American Modernism | |
| Movement: | Mexican Muralism | |
| Medium: | fresco | |
| Subject: man at the crossroads between past and present, capitalism and communism in the modern machine-age. A mural that tries to bridge "primitive" myths of nature with modern advances in technology. Plants grow up from the soil at bottom; a machine looms up overhead. Faceless figures wearing gas masks and marching in military formation carry rifles in the upper left corner; they are flanked on the right by workers wearing Communist red scarfs and joining together as a collective, raising their voices in song. The left side of the painting is dominated by exploiters and wall street high society, while the right side contrasts sharply with figures clustered in solidarity around Lenin, the father of the Communist Revolution. In a way, the mural is a secular Last Judgment: the left represents the damned in Rivera's opinion; the right shows the blessed, those who uphold the Communist party's heroic ideals of social justice and a classless society. The man at center must determine how to steer a course into the future between these two poles. Style: Rivera rejects his early experiments with Cubism and abstract formalism to make a return to a more academic tradition, but this is by no means a regressive move on his part. His shift away from Cubism after WWI is as radical as shifting to Cubism was before the war. His decision corresponds to a conscious and determined idealism that followed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and that led to his own radicalized political agenda. Mexico had had its own revolution in 1910; Rivera decides after WWI to make an art for the people and of the people. He adopts a symbolic-representational style and a large-scale mural format that would serve a didactic, public function by teaching the Mexican people how to reclaim and embrace their own heritage and history. His style is best termed New Realism, because it is far removed from the academic, Old World naturalism. The densely packed murals are almost montages of fragmentary figures and symbolic elements located within fictive spaces. It is still abstract, thus, in some ways, but emphasis is on making the revolutionary content clearly readable and understandable by the masses. The figures may be simplified, but there is nothing simple about these complex, allegorical compositions that are overwhelmingly powerful both visually and in terms of their invented iconography or symbolic program. Context: Rivera revolutionizes the mural tradition of Mexico, using his New Realism to reclaim his peoples' cultural identity and history. The Mexican mural tradition that follows the 1910 Mexican Revolution emerges as part of a new educational reform. Americans did not always appreciate the revolutionary lessons that made up Rivera's iconography; when Rivera refused Nelson Rockefeller's request to remove a portrait of Lenin from a NY mural he had painted, Rockefeller had the mural destroyed. Rivera's Mexican mural painting is a wonderful example of cultural self-identification; it also shows how realistic art and a traditional format--the mural--can be made as revolutionary as anything painted by Europe's experimental, abstract avant-garde. | ||
