| Artist: | Rivera, Diego |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | The Conquest and the Heroes of the Revolution, National Palace, Mexico City | |
| Date of Work: | 1929-1935 | |
| Nationality: | Mexican | |
| Context: | Latin American Modernism | |
| Movement: | Mexican Muralism | |
| Medium: | fresco | |
| Subject: "The Conquest and the Heroes of the Revolution" is only a small part of a much larger mural painted for the National Palace in Mexico City. The mural functions as a kind of history lesson in which Rivera sets out to reclaim his country's past and present heritage. In the lower portion, we see the conquest of Mexico by the armored Spanish conquistadors who set out to destroy the rich, native, Indian culture: the scene is one of chaos, showing an almost surreal mix of the historic and the fantastic or mythic. In contrast, up above, order is restored as the heroes of the 1910 Revolution are portrayed as victorious. 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. | ||
