Mexican Muralists Bravely Depict Social Issues That Scream Relevance Today, At Stunning Museo Del Palacio De Bellas Artes

A controller gazes sternly upward, his two oversized gloved hands operating machinery, as an enormous fist grasps an orb depicting the recombination of atoms and dividing cells in acts of chemical and biological generation. Diego Rivera described the four propellor-like shapes flanking the worker as “elongated ellipses”, adorned with cosmological and biological forces such as exploding suns and cell-forms visible by telescope and microscope.

Affluent women play cards and smoke cigarettes to the controller’s left, while Vladimir Lenin holds hands with a group of a multi-racial workers to the controller’s right. Armed soldiers in gas masks ready their weapons from the upper left corner, while ordinary Russians wave red flags above Lenin to commemorate May Day. Monumental classical statues occupy each side: a seething Jupiter wielding a thunderbolt struck off by lightning on the left, and a decapitated Caesar on the right.

I was drawn to my knees the first time I viewed a replica of Rivera’s tendentious Man, Controller of the Universe at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 in February 2020, before the pandemic shuttered the global art world. Rivera was commissioned to portray “man at the crossroads, uncertain but hopeful for a better future,” to celebrate John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s technological innovation.

A decade of research led Whitney curator and art historian Barbara Haskell to the conclusion that “Mexican artists had the most profound and pervasive influence on American art of the 20th century,” forever informing my gaze of Mexican art. I was awestruck and humbled when my son Michael Alexander and I visited Valencia, Spain, two years later this February and viewed the original El hombre controlador del universo (1934) mural at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes.

Mexico’s first art museum, opened in 1934 and housed in Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) which is located on the western side of the historic city center adjacent to the Alameda Central public urban park, is a must-see during your visit to Mexico City.

The exquisite building is a divine marriage of Art Nouveau exterior designed by Italian civil engineer and architect Adamo Boari, and Art Deco interior completed by Mexican architect Federico Mariscal. The main facade facing Avenida Juárez is made of white Italian Carrara marble, and the interior hosts sculptures by Italian sculptor Leonardo Bistolfi. The plaza front designed by Boari boats four Pegasus sculptures by Catalan sculptor Agustí Querol i Subirats. The domed roof is adorned with crystal designed by Hungarian architect, sculptor, painter, and applied artist Géza Maróti and depicts the muses with Apollo.

A grinning, naked prostitute reclines on the ground, knees bent, and alongside other distressed figures and weaponry, as flames rage in the background. José Clemente Orozco’s Katharsis (Catharsis) (1934-1935), painted for the museum, depicts a dystopian collapse of humanity. We cannot look away, compelled to confront society oppressed by systems of power and control and to recognize how little has changed.

A later addition to the museum’s permanent collection, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano’s La piedad en el desierto (Piety in the desert) (1942), a fresco on a transportable frame, was created while the artist was in prison in Lecumberri the northeast Mexico City, accused of stealing engravings by German Renaissance painter, printmaker, and theorist, Albrecht Dürer, and italian painter of the Baroque period, Guido Reno, while serving as director of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (now known as the Faculty of Arts and Design). Rodríguez Lozano was released after four months and engravings reappeared without explanations in 1966.

Emblematic of Rodríguez Lozano’s “white” period, the austere mural relies on cold colors to depict skeletal or ghost-like figures, a stylistic contrast to the visceral and bold figures of Rivera and Orozco. This work was moved to the Palacio de Bellas Artes and restored in 1967.

Our mood shifts dramatically as we encounter the vivid colors of Jorge González Camarena’s Liberación (1957-1963), exploring themes of martyrdom, fascism, war, and national identity.

We’re reminded of the museum’ s Art Deco interior as we view the precise lines of Roberto Montenegro’s Alegoría del viento o El ángel de la paz (1928). Known both as Allegory of the Wind and The Angel of Peace, the mural was originally part of a series of fresco figures painted in the corridors of the former Colegio Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo (now known as the Museum of Light). Commissioned by Mexican educator, politician, essayist, and philosopher, José Vasconcelos, Montenegro painted a series of murals in public buildings using a range of styles. Alegoría del viento o El ángel de la paz was transferred in 1965 to the museum by the National Center for the Conservation of Artistic Works.

The breathtaking size and scope of these murals underscores their timeliness, as we languish in a world ravaged by war, systems of power and oppression, and social, ethnic, and political strife. Indulge in the revolutionary spirit of these brave mutualists who speak the human condition.