Mexico beyond the Murals

It’s funny how one’s schooldays sometimes come back.    More years ago than I care to count, back when I was still a schoolboy in Scotland, we had Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory” as a set book in English.  It was a rather daring choice- Greens would still have been very much a living author and his rather obtrusive if complex Catholicism wouldn’t have endeared him to everybody in late 1960’s Scotland (I went to a “normal” state school, not a denominationally defined Catholic one).  I actually enjoyed it- unusually for something inflicted on one at school, especially as I don’t always like Greene’s work.  Even back then I tended to look at the world though history-tinted lenses and was prompted to do a bit of reading about Mexico in the first half of the 20^th Century.  There wasn’t much, and I was left with an ongoing curiosity about the background to Greene’s story of persecution, moral weakness and redemption in the steamy tropical lowlands of Tabasco State.

These memories of long ago schooldays were prompted by the current Royal Academy exhibition on art in Revolutionary Mexico.  In all honesty this is a faintly unsatisfactory affair, rather crammed into the “secondary” exhibition space of the Sackler Galleries while the Summer Exhibition fills the main space.  As every review I’ve seen points out, the biggest problem is that the most important Mexican artistic movement of this period- Muralism- is not represented.  This isn’t exactly the RA’s fault- how exactly do you set about displaying paintings which, like medieval frescoes, are an integral part of the buildings on which they’re painted?- but it is a problem.   Given her feminist icon status, I’m surprised that more hasn’t been made of the virtual absence of the individual Mexican artist who probably has the highest name recognition these days, Frida Kahlo.  She’s represented by one tiny self portrait about the size of an Elizabethan miniature- painted as a keepsake for Leon Trotsky after the end of their brief affair but left behind when the Trotskys moved out of the home Kahlo shared with her husband Diego Rivera.  It’s an exquisite little piece and its history symbolises several of the sub-themes of the exhibition but it would have been nice if there had been a bit more of her work included.

The Muralist issue is just one facet of a more general problem with the exhibition.   Inside one fairly small show there are at least three separate themes all intertwined.  One concerns the trajectory of Mexican art and artists in the period 1910-40- from the conventional starting date of the Mexican Revolution(s) to the quite possibly fraudulent presidential election in 1940 which saw General Camacho of the ruling Mexican Revolutionary Party (PRM) installed in office amid violent scenes recorded by Robert Capa’s photographs, a point equally conventionally taken to mark the end of the genuinely radical era.   A second covers the responses of the large number of foreign artists who visited Mexico in the 1920’s and 30’s to what they found there.  As a kind of cross-cutting theme, the development of photography of Mexican subjects by locals and foreigners alike also gets a large slice of the limited space- a mix of reportage pictures (many from the decade of violence in the 1910’s) and more self-consciously artistic efforts.   Capa’s images of the 1940 election perhaps tick both the reportage of violence and artistic boxes.

Of the three shows within the show, the second gets by far the most satisfactory coverage- to such an extent that I wonder if it might have been a better idea to focus entirely on art made by foreigners in or in response to Mexico.  This is also true of the catalogue.  This isn’t actually a catalogue in the normal sense of that term; authored by Adrian Locke, it’s more of a book length study of the exhibition’s themes, with a lot of illustrations which aren’t part of the hang and coverage of artists and art forms which don’t fit into an art gallery- novelists, poetry, cinema etc.   By contract to the rather cool critical reception for the exhibition, this has mostly been given favourable reviewer comment.  It’s certainly well worth a read but I found it frustratingly vague and opaque on several issues, all of them to do with the wider Mexican scene in which the artists operated   Like the show, it’s a lot happier dealing with the foreign visitors.

And foreign visitors were not in short supply after Obregon came out on top in the violent chaos of the 1910’s and managed to impose some degree of stability.   They came for a whole range of reasons, often overlapping.  Greene was in Mexico because he was paid to be there- he was on a reporting assignment.   Evelyn Waugh- every bit as Catholic as Green but with very different political views- was also paid to go to Mexico in the late 1930’s.  In his case he was lavishly (if surreptitiously) funded to produce a hatchet job on the Mexican government by people in the UK who had lost out when President Cardenas expropriated their oil interests.   Malcolm Lowry drifted in and stayed because the booze was cheap- tequila tipped him over the edge into chronic alcoholism until the authorities tired of his disorderly antics and kicked him out of the country.   Europeans facing visa issues in the US entered Mexico as a place to stay while their status was fixed- D H Lawrence and Robert Capa both fell into this category.  Americans came to get divorced or to pursue alternative lifestyles (there was a tenacious and entirely false perception in the US and Europe that Mexico was a vastly more open and tolerant society when it came to issues of sexuality than it actually was).   The French playwright and theatre director Antonin Arnaud dabbled in mind bending drugs in an early adumbration of 1960’s drug culture.

Many came because Mexico was perceived to be a cheap place to live, where a small dollar or pound or franc income went a lot further than it did at home.  The very presence of visiting artists encouraged a certain amount of tourism as their friends and acquaintances went off in search of free lodgings- the British artist Edward Burra dropped in on Lowry in Cuernavaca and pushed his tequila consumption up to even more alarming levels than usual. 

There was a complex mix of slightly more elevated reasons at work as well.   For many left-leaning intellectuals, Mexico was a fascinating case study.  It was  revolutionary, run by governments which proclaimed their commitment to progress and equality; a kind of New World counterpoise to the Soviet Union which (its admirers hoped) might be able to reconcile the requirements of economic modernisation in a very poor peasant-dominated society with fairness and social justice but without the coercion and regimentation of the Soviet model.    It’s interesting that, although a few Soviet artists like Mayakovsky and Sergei Eisenstein worked in Mexico (the latter producing an unfinished film of epic proportions and cherishing the ability to work without an NKVD operative overseeing every camera angle and script change), links between the two avowedly revolutionary regimes were never close and the Mexican Communist Party led a precarious semi-clandestine existence even in the periods when it wasn’t banned outright.  The Cardenas regime’s welcome to Trotsky symbolised this rather hostile distancing rather well.  

There were specifically artistic reasons for some outsiders to go to Mexico.  There was a genuine interest in the Muralist movement in certain artistic circles both in the United States and Europe and some (mostly American) artists managed to get public sector commissions to create murals in Mexico themselves.   One of the frustrations of the Locke catalogue indeed is how little it addresses the issues of patronage and who was paying for the elaborate programmes of public art which underpinned Muralism as a movement; the impression given is that money dried up after Jose Vasconcelos stopped being Education Minister in 1924 but it’s apparent that major commissions were available well into the 1930’s.  On the other hand, it seems strange that some of these went to American incomers at a point when the big names of Mexican Muralism were pitching for the Yankee dollar north of the Rio Grande- Rivera, despite his sometimes strident leftism, seems to have had few scruples about taking work from major US corporations, even if the collaborations had a habit of ending in tears.  There’s clearly a back story here, possibly linked to the shifting sands of politics within the PRM at national and state level, but these issues are never really explained in the catalogue.

Another draw, perhaps particularly for Europeans, was a sense that Mexico was (in a wholly positive sense) a more primitive and therefore “authentic” place than Europe, full of interesting archaeology, strange and exotic myths, and colourful peasant communities living a century or so out of synch with the developed world.   For people like the Surrealists this was a major attraction.   Though some Mexicans got rather irritated by the rather patronising tone of passing Europeans (Kahlo was a bit snippy with the French founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton, over this even though they were close politically), this self-conscious primitivism interestingly intertwined with certain priorities of the post-Revolutionary Mexican regime, which found expression in the art it favoured.  

The PRM, though largely run by European-descended Mexican elites, made a very big thing indeed of the indigenous “Indian” and mixed race masses.  In artistic terms, this translated into a fondness for Muralist schemes which selectively glorified the pre-Hispanic civilisations which had grown up on Mexican territory and even claimed that there was something innately “Mexican” about mural art (based on then-newly discovered Maya frescoes in Yucatan).   In a more minor key, this also fed into a fondness for themes majoring on regional folklore.   As a result, a kind of leftish “Blood and Soil” nationalism inflected much art produced by Mexicans in the 1920’s and 30’s.   Not everybody found this persuasive.  D H Lawrence, himself more than a little drawn to blood and soil themes and authoritarian leadership, found the resurrection of pre-Hispanic Mexican themes initially fascinating but ultimately rather scary and alienating and, in the hands of the state, more than a little fraudulent too.  I’m no great fan of Lawrence (and “The Plumed Serpent”, the novel he wrote based on his time in Mexico is virtually unreadable) but I think he was basically right to suggest that much of this amounted to the deployment of a cardboard “Indian” with precious few links to actual indigenous populations.   I find much of the Muralist glorification of the pre-Hispanic past bombastic and even a bit counterproductive in its uncritical idealisation of a generalised “Indian” civilisation which collapses the very different Aztec and Maya and Toltec (etc) cultures into each other (you end up wondering where the human sacrifices central to Aztec cosmology have gone…..).   Even at a slightly more human level I’m not persuaded.  The Rivera painting at the top of this piece was used by the RA to advertise the show; it records a fiesta with traditional dancing in Tehuantepec.   It strikes me as thoroughly creepy- the male dancers look as if they’ve just stepped out of their flying saucer and nobody actually seems to be enjoying themselves.  The whole display, including the rigidly standardised “traditional” costumes, reminds me of the highly structured State Dance troupes from the old Soviet Union and its satellites which use to appear at places like the Sidmouth Folk Festival, presenting a state-approved, professionally choreographed version of folk culture performed by classically trained singers and dancers who hadn’t been quite good enough to get into the national opera or ballet companies.

I can’t believe that there were no tensions between this glorification of an idealised Indian past and peasant present and the desire of the PRM regime to present Mexico as an advanced modern state, or at least one well on the way to modernity under the PRM’s watchful gaze.   There was one blinding obvious friction zone over the role of religion, where a syncretic folk Catholicism was central to large parts of peasant life.  The PRM on the other hand was viscerally anti-clerical, reflecting a hostile view of the social role of the Catholic church in Mexican society.   The massive “Cristero” rebellion of the late 1920’s, which cost tens of thousands of lives and was put down with great brutality on both sides rates on throw-away reference in Locke’s account.  I can’t believe it had absolutely no effect on artistic production- and even if that was the case, it would be an outcome so counter-intuitive as to require some explanation.  

One also senses the Muralism really needs more analysis than it gets.  It appears to have been a movement held together by little more than a desire to paint on a very large scale on the walls of public buildings- and a hunt for state patronage.   There wasn’t much stylistic consensus between the movement’s big names (nor indeed does the PRM and its agencies appear to have tried to create one, tolerating Rivera’s brand of Socialist Realism alongside Siqueiros’s expressionism).  Nor were they exactly a band of brothers in other ways; Rivera welcomed Trotsky into his home while Siqueiros was sent into exile for involvement in a failed attempt to assassinate the exiled revolutionary, Rivera was accused of indirectly encouraging mobs to deface Orozco’s work and so on.  Was there really a movement there at all?

The Mexican works I found most interesting all sat at the chronological ends of the show.  I’m not sure if Jose Guadalupe Posada exactly counts as a “fine artist”, though his work inspired a lot of interest from people like the Surrealists as an example of “primitive” art.   This simply shows how little the Surrealists knew.  Posada’s woodcuts illustrated broadsheet ballads of a kind that would have been instantly recognisable on the streets on London or Paris well into the 19^th century; as publishers like Catnach proved in Britain, this was anything but a primitive form of enterprise, requiring quick turn round of stories into poetic form and sophisticated distribution channels to get them into the hands of the masses before the news went stale.  It could also lead to crass reporting errors.   The broadsheet announcing the death of Zapata (the image is based on an iconic photograph of the general- another indication of how “old” and “new” technologies might intertwine) was wildly wrong; Zapata outlived Posada by a good six years.   Nor can one take it that the skeletal figure galloping out of the following poster was dead- Gomez was also very much alive when Posada created the woodcut (though, ironically, he would face a firing squad in the 1920’s for trying to stage a coup against Obregon) within the context of the All Souls Day “Calaveria” custom in which skeletons are depicted busily engaged in the day to day activities of their lifetimes and the living and dead mingle.

On the other hand the rather gruesome skeletal figures in Francesco Goitia’s painting were well and truly dead.   Goitia had joined up with Pancho Villa’s northern army as a kind of official war artist (typical of Villa, who was an acute self publicist- though he did perhaps take things to extremes when he signed a contract with a US newsreel company committing him to fight battles only in optimal filming conditions….).   The bodies of men hanged for every possible offence, real or imagined, were part of the Mexican landscape during the Revolution.  In this case Goitia claimed that he had exhumed the bodies of soldiers killed at Zacatecas in 1914 and hung them up himself, hiring a watchman to ensure that they weren’t cut down until they had reached a suitable state of quasi-mummification.   Given Goitia’s reputation for bizarre behaviour, this is quite credible- though he was also notorious for “improving” parts of his life story so he may have invented it all.

Non-muralist art led a rather marginal existence in the 1920’s and 30’s but interesting work still got created, especially in the later 1930’s.   By then the PRM had consolidated its position, still given to leftist postures (giving Trotsky a home, nationalising the oil industry, supporting the Spanish Republic to the extent of housing its Government in exile for years after Franco has won the war on the ground) but increasingly authoritarian and reliant on a web of patronage to control the countryside, get out the vote (Mexico never formally became a single party state) and ensure that the masses toed the line.  Grand dreams of land redistribution to the masses led to tightly controlled quasi-collectives dominated by PRM- aligned peasant unions; the only great estates broken up were those that belonged to irreconcilable foes of the party.   Antonio Ruiz’s bicycle race in Texcoco casts a subtly subversive eye over the world of the Mexican countryside.   Cycle racing is clearly modern and to be applauded- but nobody has bothered making up the dirt road the cyclists race over (there would have been a mass strike if you’d expected the riders in the Tour de France or even the Giro d’Italia to race on that kind of surface in the late 1930’s) and a kid grazes ominously close to the riders.  “Official” Mexico fills the stands decked in the national colours- all in their Sunday best from the looks of it.  Presumably that’s where you’ll find the leaders of the PRM-linked unions, petty bureaucrats and the local middle classes (and their wives).   A gaggle of what look to be off duty soldiers in uniform are in the background; one or two onlookers in “modern” city dress prop up the high wall.  The peasantry, however, are literally pushed to the margins; up trees, sitting on the top of the wall, getting ready to do small scale trading in the bottom left corner.   There’s a sense of improvisation, of a gap between rhetoric and reality- even that not a great deal may have changed since the bad old days before the Revolution.

.Finally we have Jorge Covarrubias’s even more overtly satirical depiction of the rural schoolmaster.   Prim, dressed in impeccable “city” clothes whose effect is slightly undermined by the clunky boots on his feet, he clutches his oversized umbrella slightly nervously.  His red-white-green PRM badge is very visible.   One suspects he’s been summoned in to the regional party headquarters to report on developments in his bailiwick.  He’s probably indigenous in origin or at least mixed race- on one level an admirable example of upward social mobility promoted by the Revolution, based on spreading the reach of state education to the remotest hamlets.   The incongruous bone on the floor gives the game away; in Mexican slang a “bone” meant a patronage sinecure job.  One suspects that our man owes his appointment more to his party loyalty than his pedagogical abilities- as long as his village votes the right way it won’t matter too much if the schoolchildren end emerge from his care barely literate or if he fiddles the school funds to his private profit.   It’s not surprising that Covarrubias made his career mostly in the US as an illustrator for the “New Yorker”.

I suppose I know a lot more about Mexico in the 1930’s than I did back in those far away schooldays when I tried to get the background which would put Greene’s whisky priest and the police lieutenant into a wider perspective and help me to understand what drove them.   I still feel I don’t know as much as I’d like to- and the RA exhibition only partly filled the gaps.