 "Photo: National Museum of Mexican Art")
If you are a minimalist who doesn’t enjoy looking at visuals with bold form and color, you might want to stay away from the new exhibition at the National Museum of Mexican Art. In Translating Revolution: U.S. Artists Interpret Mexican Muralists, grand gestures and overwhelming emotions take precedence over subtlety of any shape or form.
The exhibition, which opened Feb. 12 and runs through Aug. 1, contains American artwork inspired by the Mexican Muralist movement as well as some pieces created by “los tres grandes”—“the three greats” — of the scene themselves. Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and a large number of artists who they influenced depicted images of suffering, oppression, resistance and the everyday life of their home countries. Most of the paintings directly involve Mexican culture or society in some way, while others draw parallels to life in the U.S. and even the Pilsen neighborhood where the museum is located. The works in the gallery contain everything from richly painted frescoes to lithographs to sketches. Every piece in the gallery is relevant to the exhibit as a whole.
One particularly moving work in the gallery is Philip “Estaño” Stein’s “Battered,” 1983. It portrays a nude, dark-skinned woman trying to deflect blows with her hands. Her twisted body and contorted face — painted in Stein’s almost geometric style — elicit a sense of anguish and horror in the viewer. “The Porter,” created in 1945 by Pablo O’Higgins, shows a poverty-stricken, wraithlike man hunched over with his face obscured: It utilizes bold, curved brushstrokes. While not every painting strikes the viewer as visually appealing, each manages to elicit a sense of empathy for its subjects.
Racism, poverty and social injustice in general are common topics in the exhibit, but others include empowerment to the victims of injustice as well as Mexican traditions such as the Day of the Dead. A pair of paintings offer different takes on unity: One depicts a group of oppressed Latin Americans while the other shows a multitude of ethnically diverse yet unified Americans. Some pieces were originally intended for high schools, such as Edward Millman’s 1936 cartoon for the mural “Contribution of Women to the Progress of Mankind.” Motifs such as the ones previously mentioned make even more sense if viewed within the context of the ’30s and early ’40s, when the Great Depression was in full swing. Modernist art took on more experimental methods and more realistic subjects, and Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration sponsored the arts, especially to make murals.
A final highlight is the one the Museum used to advertise for the exhibition. Jackson Pollock’s “Untitled (Bald Woman With Skeleton)” from 1941 is a dark, murky painting of a woman and a skeleton surrounded by a crowd of people with indistinct faces, a tribute to a mural panel originally done by Orozco.
While the exhibit mainly focuses on American perspectives on Mexican art, it also includes some original works from the Mexican muralist movement itself. Perhaps the original pieces by “los tres grandes” should have been organized in a separate room so that people could see the American works afterwards, making the different contrasts and new perspectives more noticeable. However, the current arrangement emphasizes the similarities, which are possibly even more important. The different methods used, the emotions evoked and the messages of hope, awareness and empowerment conveyed allow the entire exhibition to flow from one end to the other. It’s curious to note how art focused mainly on one specific ethnic group shows the universality of many different aspects of human nature. I highly recommend you go, either for the anthropological perspective or for the love of art in general.
Translating Revolution runs through Aug. 1 at 1852 W. 19th St.
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