Occupy MoMA: Diego Rivera’s Populist Murals Reunited

During his lifetime, Diego Rivera stood as one of the most important and controversial artists in the world. Today, thanks to the international feminist phenomenon of Frida Kahlo (who stood in her husband’s considerable shadow while alive), Rivera finds himself, at best, “Mr. Frida Kahlo” and, at worst, the philandering lout who only added emotional pain to Frida’s physical suffering. Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York through May 14, 2012, reminds us of the artistic genius and political passion that attracted both Kahlo and patrons to Rivera’s art. As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to find venues to occupy around the world, it seems only fitting that Rivera’s murals first created for a MoMA retrospective in 1931—as the Mexican Revolution and Great Depression weighed heavily on the world—reunite to inspire a new generation of revolutionaries facing a new time of economic turmoil. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Occupy MoMA: Diego Rivera’s Populist Murals Reunited."

[Image: Diego Rivera. The Uprising. 1931. Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanized-steel framework, 74 x 94 1/8” (188 x 239 cm). Private collection, Mexico. © 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for providing me with the image above and other press materials for Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art, which runs through May 14, 2012.]

Burning Man

Of the big three of the Golden Age of Mexican Mural Painting—Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco—Orozco burns with an intensity and singularity of purpose beyond even his intense contemporaries. Born November 23, 1883, Orozco passionately believed in the freedom of the Mexican people but never compromised those ideals in the following of false liberators. As a young man, Orozco lost his right hand and some sight in his right eye in an accident. Taking the surgically removed hand home, Orozco placed it in a container filled with alcohol and set it aflame. Even in his 1940 Self-Portrait (above), Orozco seems to be burning with passion. Perhaps Orozco’s most famous work, the 1939 ceiling mural titled Man of Fire, shows a man literally burning but still walking forward towards his destiny. For Orozco, fire purified by its destructive power, heated the blood to action, and lit the way to a clear path to freedom.

One of the sadder aspects of Rivera and Siqueiros’ lives and art is their continuous falling for false leaders and false hopes that set Mexico back as it strove to move forward. Orozco, however, always viewed potential saviors with a cynical eye. In the painting Zapata (above, from 1930), Orozco shows Emiliano Zapata, leader of the Mexican Revolution. Rather than place Zapata front and center as the central hero, Orozco pushes Zapata to the back of the picture. Peasants and soldiers dominate the front of the image, just as the conflict between the ruthless enemy army and the defenseless Mexican poor caught up in the conflict dominated Orozco’s mind more than the capering of a self-proclaimed hero. The dagger aimed at Zapata’s eye foreshadows his bloody end in which he who lived by the sword, died by it. There’s a great similarity between Orozco’s style and that of the German Expressionists, especially Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Both artists searched for ways to express the harsh realities around them in a simple, arresting style that all levels of society could rally around.

When Orozco painted murals for the National Preparatory School in Mexico City in the early 1920s, one of the most controversial was his Christ Destroying his Cross (above, a different version from 1943). Orozco returned to this theme over and over, including a version in his largest work, the 24-panel, 3,200-square-foot-long series of murals known as The Epic of American Civilization at Dartmouth University. Instead of painting the meek, suffering servant version of Christ, Orozco paints an axe-wielding Jesus chopping down the cross as a symbol of all forms of authoritarian oppression throughout history. Meek acceptance of anything just wasn’t something Orozco could do, and he could never envision a savior who was less of a warrior than he was. It’s amazing to think that Orozco accomplished such tremendous physical feats of art with a single hand and diminished eyesight, but the fires that burned inside his soul fueled a mighty engine that refused to quit as long as someone, somewhere did not enjoy the light of freedom.

Demon Child

Girl with a Mask, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1945. Oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 39 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1947.

“In 1920 was born this fragile, sickly demon,” the Mexican poet Octavio G. Barreda wrote of the Mexican artist Juan Soriano in 1945. Borrowing that phrase for the title of the first exhibition of Soriano’s work in the United States at the PMA, Edward J. Sullivan’s Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 brings this well-known name in his native country out of obscurity for an American audience. In doing so, Sullivan not only presents a unique, multi-dimensional artist, but also a whole new way of looking at the perception of Mexican art as primarily the domain of the grand muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco. The same alternate “reality” found in pseudo-Surreal works such as Girl with a Mask (above) surrounds the story of Soriano—homosexual and conservative—versus the Marxist machismo of the muralists.

The Dead Girl, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1938. Oil on panel, 18 1/2 x 31 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Clifford, 1947.

Born a sickly child, Soriano’s family encouraged him to paint and draw his fantasies. That encouragement and the imaginative material supplied by the religious processions, home altars, and other sacred rites of his native Guadalajara shaped Soriano’s unique sensibilities. Soriano’s small stature and slight build gave him a child-like air even as an adult. “An eternal child, ageless, bitter, cynical, naïve, malicious, hardened, helpless,” the poet Octavio Paz writes in a 1941 meditation on his friend reproduced by Sullivan in the catalogue. Soriano the demon child finds painting children irresistible. “Soriano’s children are often unruly, misbehaving, fighting, or about to get into some other form of trouble,” Sullivan writes, demonstrating Soriano’s imp of the perverse in multiple works. When Soriano’s children aren’t getting into mischief, they’re dead. The Dead Girl (above) represents just one of many depictions Soriano made of the emotion and spirituality surrounding the death of a child in Mexico. He painted The Dead Girl after seeing a freshly dead girl displayed in the window of a home. A tiny piece of cotton peeks out of her nostril, placed there to hold back post mortem excretions. Disembodied hands hover over the girl, standing in for the devout mourners. Six years later, Soriano titled another painting The Dead Girl, creating a more elaborate setting for the deceased child featuring angels bearing flowered crosses. In such works Soriano taps into the same native spirituality and fascination with death that Frida Kahlo does explicitly in works such as The Dead Dimas and less explicitly in the more macabre elements of her self-portraits. “Death imagery nourished and entertained him,” Sullivan writes of Soriano’s fixation on these dead children, “and he later portrayed death as an amusement, a challenge as well as an inevitability.” Soriano both genuflects and laughs in the graveyard, living up to the collection of contradictions ascribed to him by Paz and others.

Still Life, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1942. Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 27 5/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph J. Gersten, 1951.

Sullivan excels in presenting Soriano as outside the mainstream of twentieth century Mexican art dominated by Rivera and his brethren, surpassing even Kahlo in straying from that center. While Rivera, Kahlo, and other artists embraced Marxism as Mexico’s best hope, welcoming even Trotsky into their home, Soriano resisted accepting any ideological savior. His political conservatism hurt his chances at obtaining commissions in that politically charged atmosphere. Barreda, the man who called Soriano a “demon” in print, linked Soriano with similar non-political artists who still retained a sense of Mexican-ness in their art. The non-political art of Still Life (above) and other works placed him in a category with Kahlo, whom Soriano loved, in spite of her marriage to Rivera, whom he loathed. “She had a tremendous personality,” Soriano once said of Frida, “like a little child full of life.” Soriano’s homosexuality also marked him as radically different from the macho muralists and mainstream Mexican culture. “Soriano’s frank affirmation of his sexuality in his paintings, drawings, writings, and interviews would remain a hallmark of his personality throughout his life,” Sullivan asserts. Saint Jerome (1942) shows Soriano’s lover, Diego de Mesa, posed nude before a mirror containing a skeleton assuming the same pose as Diego, linking desire and death. Guardian Angel (1941) depicts a falling male nude saved by a winged, male, nude angel in another homoerotic exercise by Soriano. Critic Jose Luis Martinez encapsulated Soriano’s ex-centric (i.e., out of the center) qualities in 1941: “He does not paint, nor does he pretend to illustrate social themes… His painting evidences three themes: eroticism, religiosity, and death, whose expression comes about with the intimate sensibility of the Mexican.” Soriano pushes the envelope of what being “Mexican” could mean in the larger context of the art and society of his time.

Girl with a Bouquet, Juan Soriano (Mexican, 1920 – 2006), 1946. Oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 23 3/4 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Cameron Morris, 1957.

Soriano’s friendship with Henry Clifford, a long-time curator at the PMA, makes the PMA the idea place for this exhibition. Sullivan credits the 30-year correspondence between Soriano and Clifford archived at the PMA with providing the basis of his research. Clifford and his wife donated the four Soriano paintings that make up the core of the exhibition, which offers a fascinating postscript to the epic Frida Kahlo exhibition also running at the PMA. Sullivan concentrates on the period from Soriano’s arrival in Mexico City in 1934 to his departure for Europe in 1951, when Soriano becomes more “universalist” in his themes, although he always carries his own private Mexico with him in his heart. Soriano’s slipperiness arises from his rejection of all convenient labels, even the tag of Surrealist that he resisted placing on works such as Girl with a Bouquet, arguing that the Surrealists practiced a brand of “self-indulgence” he couldn’t abide. Sullivan agrees with Soriano’s self-assessment, arguing that these works “incorporate dream-like or otherwise surprising elements,” but never fully realize the status of Surrealist art. Despite this absence of handles, Sullivan retains a firm grasp on the elusive demon Soriano and brings him vibrantly back to life for us today. As the novelist Carlos Fuentes says in his essay “The Eye of Dawn: Juan Soriano,“ “Soriano, like all great painters, is present in this present that doesn’t sacrifice its past or its future… Soriano in himself is dawning: a beginning charged with pasts, a daybreak that does not deceive us with the promise of an innocent future.” Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 allows Juan Soriano to live again as he once did—fully in the present moment, free of the lies of the past and the false promises of the future.


[Many thanks to the PMA for providing me with a review copy of Edward J. Sullivan’s Fragile Demon: Juan Soriano in Mexico 1935 to 1950 and for the images above from the exhibition.]

A Fighting Education

"Art must no longer be the expression of individual satisfaction that it is today, but should aim to become a fighting educative art for all," David Alfaro Siqueiros once said, emphasizing the political activism behind so much of his work. Born December 29, 1896, Siqueiros lambasted the rich ruling classes in murals for the masses such as Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (above, from 1939-1940). With fellow muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Siqueiros revitalized the mural as a medium for public political protest. Siqueiros centered much of his imagery on the history of the Mexican Revolution, using that period’s violence and chaos to provide a language through which he could express his ideas of an ideal society, based heavily on his own Marxist ideals. Rivera and Orozco both loved their country passionately, but Siqueiros took that passion to another, perhaps dangerous level.


In The New Democracy (above, from 1944) a woman carrying the torch of freedom explodes from the center of the mural as she shatters the chains of oppression. The idealized classical bodies that Siqueiros depicts lend a timelessness to his message, which is basically the eternal struggle between the powerless many and the powerful few. Siqueiros preached his universal message beyond Mexico, traveling to South America, Europe, Russia, and even America to spread his vision and paint more ideologically charged murals. While in America in the late 1930s, Siqueiros ran a political art workshop attended by many young American artists, including Jackson Pollock, who saw the expressive potential of liquid paint in Siqueiros’ hands and later used that potential to create his own Abstract Expressionist works.


During that period in America, Siqueiros painted many smaller works, including Echo of a Scream (above, from 1937). It’s hard to imagine a more excessively disturbing scene than the bizarre infant of Echo of a Scream. As much as Siqueiros strove to bring light to the workers’ world, he fostered a dark side as well, particularly in his possible involvement in the assassination plot against Leon Trotsky that led to his 1940 exile from Mexico. Fighting against the excesses of capitalism and fascism, which he wed in the imagery of Portrait of the Bourgeoisie that he barely finished before his 1940 exile, Siqueiros fell into an excessiveness of his own. Like many artists of the early twentieth century, Siqueiros looked to Socialism as a solution to the ills of the exploitive capitalism sucking their country dry. Sadly, that promise soon disappeared as Communism became the next incarnation of authoritarianism and oppression. To the end, Siqueiros fiery passion for social justice could never be quenched, and his scream echoes on today.

Against the Wall

Few artists aroused such passions during his life as Diego Rivera. Born December 8, 1886, Rivera stirred political passions with his art during his life as well as the amorous passions of many women, including fellow artist Frida Kahlo. Perhaps the highlight (or lowlight, depending on how you look at it) of Rivera’s career was the infamous 1933 episode in which Rivera painted Vladimir Lenin into the mural Nelson Rockefeller commissioned for Rockefeller Center, titled Man at the Crossroads. Rockefeller ordered the fresco destroyed after Rivera, an avid Communist at the time, refused to remove the portrait. A year later, Rivera recreated the mural (above) at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Arte in Mexico City, renaming it Man, Controller of the Universe. As chaotic as his personal life became, Rivera was always the master of his artistic universe.

Rivera's role in the Mexican Mural Renaissance beside fellow muralists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros justly takes pride of place in memories of Diego. However, Rivera shouldn’t be labeled as just a muralist or just a Mexican artist. In his travels to Europe before 1920, Rivera saw and embraced Cubism, painting works such as Two Women (above, from 1914), showing that even then he had ladies on his mind. Cezanne’s bright colors and reduction of images to simple shapes inspired Rivera in his later murals. Travels through Italy and first-hand exposure to the great frescoes of the masters certainly provided material for Rivera to digest and transform into his native idiom.

Rivera’s pride in his native Mexico shines through much of his work. Kahlo absorbed much of that pride into her own work and even her personal dress, selecting native Mexican dress to please her Diego. Sadly, Rivera’s philandering brought much pain to Kahlo’s already painful life. Around the same time that Rivera painted Detroit Industry (above, detail of south wall, from 1932 to 1933), Kahlo suffered another miscarriage, which inspired her painting Henry Ford Hospital. After Kahlo’s death, Rivera told others that only then he realized that she had been the love of his life. Judging on appearances alone, Rivera makes for one of the unlikeliest of lotharios, but the passion and charisma of his life and art drew others to him magnetically and continues to inspire Latin American artists today.

Under the Volcano

Born at the foot of a volcano, Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco played in the yard as a young boy as the volcanic ash would waft down. In recently aired episode of the PBS American Masters series on Orozco, we learn that he was in many ways a “man on fire” full of spiritual, political, and artistic convictions. Unjustly overshadowed by his contemporaries Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Orozco’s reputation gets a great boost in this beautifully produced documentary, full of the life, humor, and horror Orozco experienced and transformed into art. Like his Prometheus mural (above, from 1930) at Pomona College in California, Orozco brought down a fiery spark from the heavens for the benefit of his fellow man and woman.


I confess that I knew little about Orozco before seeing this documentary, which is still being run on PBS channels across America. After seeing Orozco’s stunning work, which combines Expressionist technique with the baroque spirituality and humor of Mexico, you’ll agree that his name belongs right there beside those of Rivera, Siqueiros , and Frida Kahlo in the pantheon of Mexican artists of the twentieth century. The sensibility that portrays Jesus as Liberator (above), from the Modern Migration of the Spirit mural at Dartmouth College in Hannover, New Hampshire, deserves greater fame. Orozco shows Jesus sprung from the cross, wielding the axe he has just used to chop down his cross as a sign that he is no longer the meek Lamb of God, hero of the suffering masses, but the Lion of God, leading those masses to freedom. Amazingly, Orozco did all of this with one hand, having lost the other in a tragic fireworks accident. Orozco actually burned the amputated hand to ashes himself, making a ritual of the loss and seeing it as a sign that fate had destined him to be a painter by making him unsuited for anything else. This PBS American Masters documentary shows how Orozco seized that destiny and turned his disability into a liberating vision for all.