HOW A REVOLUTIONARY ART BECAME OFFICIAL CULTURE

Murals, Museums, and the Mexican StateBy Mary K. Coffey

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5020-0

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………….ixINTRODUCTION…………………………….11 A PALACE FOR THE PEOPLE…………………252 A PATRIOTIC SANCTUARY…………………..783 THE WOMB OF THE PATRIA………………….127CONCLUSION………………………………179Illustration Credits……………………..194Notes…………………………………..197Bibliography…………………………….215Index…………………………………..227

Chapter One

A PALACE FOR THE PEOPLE

Mexican mural painters have been turned into plaster saints. People contemplate their paintings the way devout believers contemplate sacred images. Their walls have become not painted surfaces that we may view but fetishes that we must venerate. OCTAVIO PAZ

In his final presidential address, Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28) made his famous declaration that Mexico would “pass once and for all from the historical condition of being a country of one man to being a nation of institutions and laws.” Calles was referring to the suppression of caudillismo (strong-arm political leadership by military figures) through the creation of a modern political party, the National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional de la Revolución [PNR]). However, his call for national reconstruction through “institutions and laws” also pertained to a broader cultural campaign for social renewal undertaken in the capital city that involved the resurrection of a series of unfinished Porfirian projects. At the heart of this campaign was the completion of the half- built national theater which now became the Palace of Fine Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes) to showcase national dance, theater, music, and fine art (figure 3).

The grand inauguration of the Palace on 29 September 1934 announced the beginning of a sustained state- level investment in an institutional infrastructure for the promotion and dissemination of national culture. As a sign of the government’s renewed commitment to mural art, the sep commissioned José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera to execute permanent frescos in the Palace’s central atrium. Over the next three decades, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo, and Jorge González Camarena would add permanent works to the Palace interior, while frescoes executed elsewhere by Rivera, Roberto Montenegro, and Manuel Rodríguez Lozano would be relocated as acts of state benevolence in the preservation and conservation of what had become a hallowed genre of national patrimony. As a consequence of both the symbolic status of the Palace itself and the evolving logics of federal patronage, the Palace commissions raised political and aesthetic questions for mural artists. Would mural art remain a revolutionary art committed to socializing artistic expression? Or would it be institutionally reconstituted as a form of cultural heritage? Was mural art a political device engaged in local struggles for social and political justice? Or was it a universal fine art engaged in international struggles over the meaning and direction of modern art?

The unified movement that the Palace ensconces today belies a highly contentious struggle over the direction of national art, the legacy of muralism as a revolutionary art form, and the aesthetic politics of the postrevolutionary state that was played out within the Palace and across its walls between 1934 and the late 1960s. As Karen Cordero Reiman argues, even though the works at the Palace are “enveloped in a mythology” that they themselves helped to create, they “do not show a unified vision of Mexico as an essence”; rather each mural exemplifies a moment in the historical and political construction of postrevolutionary mexicanidad. In what follows, I reconstitute the complex and contingent history of these commissions and situate them within the art world disputes, political calculations, and governmental frameworks that informed and incentivized them. To do this, I have divided the chapter into two parts that correspond with the historical shift from the populist gambit of the Maximato and the internecine struggles of the International Left in the 1930s and 1940s to the cosmopolitan orientation of Alemanismo and the aesthetic politics of the cultural cold war in the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, I chronicle the public debates among mural artists over the proper relationship between art and politics in order to better appreciate the goals and limits of their engagement with this institution.

In this way, I show how muralism became the sacralized art form that Paz decries in the epigraph. However, I also demonstrate that Paz played a paradoxical role in the erection of the “wax museum” of Mexican muralism. As a vocal critic of los tres grandes and an advocate of Rufino Tamayo, Paz helped to reconstitute the first generation of Mexican muralism as a monolithic icon of postrevolutionary socialism. Likewise, his criticism of the mural renaissance helped to broker Tamayo’s entry into the ultimate space of cultural consecration, the Palace of Fine Arts. This, ironically, enabled the conversion of mural art from a revolutionary political device to a signifier of Mexico’s claim on artistic modernism, from a socially engaged aesthetic experiment to sacred surfaces venerated by millions who each year pay homage to these “plaster saints.”

The Cultural Politics of the Maximato and the International Left

Resignifying Porfirian Palaces: A “National Mausoleum”?

In his drive to “institutionalize” the revolution, why did Calles erect a palace for the people? What were the political risks and benefits of engaging in such an oxymoronic gambit? Why were murals enlisted to reconcile these contradictions? And, conversely, how did these contradictions affect the practice and reception of mural art?

Like that of so many of Mexico’s cultural institutions, the history of the Palace of Fine Arts reflects the country’s tumultuous past. Its antecedent institution was the Santa Anna Theater, inaugurated in 1844 and demolished in 1901 to make way for a new national theater commissioned by dictator Porfirio Díaz. The Italian architect Adamo Boari was secured for the job. Boari envisioned the national theater as a “Porfirian center of culture” located in the heart of the burgeoning cosmopolitan capital of Mexico City. In keeping with this auspicious vision, the theater was relocated along the east end of the Alameda Park and due west of the Metropolitan Cathedral. This orientation placed the Palace on axis with the city’s historic center, linking its cultured zone of leisure to the seat of federal power (see p. 28).

Boari wanted the new theater to rival Garnier’s opera house in Paris while still conveying Mexican national attributes. Therefore, he used sculptural adornment to design an elaborate decorative cycle inspired by Mexican motifs: coyote masks, eagle warriors, maguey plants, serpents, and so forth. For the auditorium, he commissioned Tiffany’s of New York to build a cantilevered stained-glass curtain depicting a panoramic view of the Valley of Mexico based on a painting by Dr. Atl. The edifice testifies to the Francophilia of the Porfiriato while simultaneously codifying the Creole indigenismo that postrevolutionary artists would radicalize.

The new national theater was to have been inaugurated as part of the centennial celebration commemorating Mexican independence scheduled for 1921. However, construction was interrupted in 1913 because of the upheaval of the revolution. Once the fighting subsided, President Venustiano Carranza (1917–20) appointed Antonio Muñoz to resume building in 1919, but this initiative stalled. In 1928, Eduardo Hory, secretary of communications and public works, formed a committee and public subscription campaign to finish construction, but this too was halted in 1931. The following year, Alberto J. Pani, minister of housing and public credit, was charged with assessing the project to determine if it should be salvaged or abandoned altogether. After almost thirty years and a total cost of thirteen million pesos, the foundation and exterior had been partially completed but the steel framework of the central dome was still exposed, silhouetted against the sky. Pani suggested scaling down the original plan and converting the national theater into “the seat of a national institution of artistic character.” “Let us make due with what we have for the entertainment of all the people,” he argued. “The shell has integrated itself into the skyline and we are now in the process of integrating its inner workings into the man of today.” He secured the architect Federico E. Mariscal to finish the building. Upon its completion, the Palace was placed under the direction of the SEP’s Department of Fine Arts.

In order for the Palace to fulfill the purpose of public education, Pani recommended the inclusion of a museum that would exhibit the best work of Mexican artists along with some representatives of the European schools that had influenced its development. Through these educational displays, he argued, the Palace would exert a powerful influence on a “public whose ignorance in matters of the plastic arts is frequently manifested in a mixture of incomprehension and underappreciation of the pictorial works of our days.” It was a lack of aesthetic training, he posited, that had made Mexicans unable to appreciate modern Mexican art. This, in turn, was a hindrance to the ethical development of the population and, therefore, to national progress. For Pani and other social planners of the day, aesthetic development was the responsibility of both the state and its citizenry. “If the state accepts its moral obligation to safeguard high culture,” he wrote, “our constitution tacitly entrusts the same responsibility to the citizen.”

Pani’s homily to the self-edifying citizen was calculated to rationalize the public subscriptions still required to offset the enormous costs of completing this federal institution—an estimated six million pesos more than had already been spent. Betraying an evident anxiety about the specter of Porfirian excess haunting the contemporary re-animation of its unfinished palaces, the rhetoric surrounding this project emphasized again and again the revolutionary character and civic virtue of fine art. Thus when President Abelardo Rodríguez (1932–34) inaugurated the building before a crowd of more than 20,000 onlookers, he praised it as a “center of cultural divulgation, [and] one of the basic points of the revolutionary program.” He was responding, in particular, to insinuations by the press that the Palace augured a return to the elitist pretensions of the Porfiriato. The headline in Excélsior proclaimed: “Today the Fatuous Palace of Fine Arts Will Be Inaugurated.” The following day, the paper praised the building as a “miracle of marble” that compensated for the “dictatorship of cement” that characterized modern architecture. However, the prose is punctuated with phrases like “impressive grandiosity” and “opulent beauty” that reveal the daily’s penchant for the lost “splendor” and “magnificence” of “our cultivated capital” as well as its skepticism about the current political environment.

This ambivalent praise demonstrates that members of the public understood the genealogy of the Palace. And while the dailies equivocated, the avant-garde was overtly hostile. Francisco Reyes Palma describes a protest penned by former members of the avant-garde group the Estridentistas, in which the signatories decried the resurrection of the Porfirian project as “a shameful symbol, [and] dictatorial inheritance, the recuperation of which establishe[s] a regressive and sumptuary cultural orientation.” Similarly, the leftist League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios [LEAR]) debuted the first issue of its journal Frente a Frente in November of 1934 with a pointed attack on this “National Mausoleum” on its cover (figure 4). Leopoldo Méndez’s print satirizes the authoritarian nature of the postrevolutionary government and the ideological role of cultural populism in its assent. He depicts Rivera and Carlos Riva Palacio, head of the pnr, applauding a performance of Carlos Chávez’s proletarian symphony Llamadas (The Calls) while two diminutive peasants are expelled from the theater by an armed guard, a reference to the actual police dispersal of the “human avalanche” of non-ticketed citizens who “claimed their right of access” to this public institution on opening day. Equating the government and its official party with Nazism, he attacks the cynical use of revolutionary populism as a form of political demagoguery.

During the Maximato the consolidation of federal power was symbolized in the architectural improvements of the capital city. Undertaking the construction of new hospitals, schools, and public housing, the presidents sought to visually manifest the rhetoric of the revolution on the public landscape. However, political and economic power was concentrated within a small elite comprised of politicians and military caudillos as well as local businessmen such as Alberto J. Pani, Aarón Sáenz, and Miguel Alemán who had profited from the chaos of the civil war. These men grew rich from the sale and development of private real estate holdings in their capacity as government functionaries charged with overseeing public projects throughout Mexico City.

The Palace of Fine Arts was therefore more than a cultural institution. It was the fulcrum in a symbolic landscape of power. Located along the Alameda, it was oriented toward not only the Porfirian Paseo de la Reforma but also the new Paseo de la Revolución. A business corridor, the Paseo de la Revolución provides a ritual procession to the Monument to the Revolution, another civic project salvaged from the remains of Díaz’s unfinished Palace of Legislative Power (figure 5). The Palace of Fine Arts, Monument to the Revolution, and Paseo were all of a piece. However, unlike the monument and Paseo, the Palace was tainted by its association with the excesses of the nineteenth-century dictatorship. While its exterior extravagance could not be rectified with a series of socialist sculptural adornments, as had been the case with the monument, its interior could proclaim the democratic orientation of the new state through the inclusion of mural art. In this way, the Palace underwent a process of resignification, allowing the postrevolutionary regime to reclaim the Porfirian dream of progress, but obfuscating its authoritarianism by harnessing the populism of this revolutionary art to its cause.

Orozco was invited to execute a fresco for the third-floor balcony at the west end of the central atrium, and Rivera was granted the east balcony directly opposite to re-create his recently destroyed mural at Rockefeller Center in New York. These highly public commissions represented the first step in the official restructuring of what had been an experimental and ad hoc movement by the new political regime. Each artist had left Mexico frustrated by the public’s hostility and diminishing state support, and the return of federal patronage presented both opportunity and bitter irony. The Maximato had co-opted the rhetoric of popular revolution that muralism had helped to codify, and now a once ambivalent state was eager to have radical artists decorate its new buildings as testimony to these values. For the muralists, however, there was still work to be done through monumental public art.

Orozco still sought a Mexican audience and public approbation after nearly a decade of exile. For him, a prominent federal commission represented belated vindication in his homeland. Likewise, the opportunity to go head to head with his archrival, Rivera, could not be passed up. While Orozco always maintained that his approach to monumental art was superior to what he deemed to be Rivera’s nationalist kitsch, he was personally wounded by Rivera’s fame at home and abroad. Moreover, he would use his Palace commission to critique the political hypocrisy of the postrevolutionary government.

Rivera, on the other hand, had enjoyed steady federal patronage throughout his sojourn north. While he was no stranger to painting in government buildings, the Palace commission provided an opportunity for him to redress his critics on the Left and enact his revenge against the capitalists in the United States who had destroyed his mural for Rockefeller Center. In New York City the mural had been embroiled in a heated battle over corporate patronage and the creative rights of public artists. In Mexico City his Palace fresco became the focal point for a critical debate over mural art’s relationship with a patently corrupt political regime.

(Continues…)

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