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Issue Number: 120
For the best wall paintings in Mexico City take a tour with Adrian Locke, curator of the RA’s ‘Mexico’ exhibition
For anyone visiting Mexico City it is virtually impossible to avoid public art: murals are quite simply everywhere. In 1921, the Education Minister José Vasconcelos funded an ambitious mural programme, employing artists to decorate public walls across the city with subjects designed to inspire Mexicans with apolitical, universal themes. The very first examples can be seen at the 18th-century Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, in particular Diego Rivera’s Italianate semi- religious Creation (1922) and numerous individual works by José Clemente Orozco. Among them is Orozco’s The Trench (1926), a later canvas version of which is currently included in the RA’s ‘Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940’. There is also a fine historical mural, The Massacre in the Templo Mayor (1922-23), by the French-born artist Jean Charlot, who initially worked as Rivera’s assistant. The subject matter of Mexico City’s murals, however, soon embraced a radical political agenda as artists celebrated the events of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20) and nationalist themes.
The best place to start on a tour of these murals is the Palacio de Bellas Artes, where works include those by the three artists most associated with this period – Rivera, Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – as well as significant painters such as Rufino Tamayo and Jorge González Camarena. The variety of murals here serves as an introduction to the different styles, which range from Rivera’s narrative Socialist Realism through to Tamayo’s abstraction and Siqueiros’s expressionism. Deciding on your favourite flavour of mural here can help determine what you take in across the city.
Diego Rivera, 'Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park' (detail), 1947-48, a mural for the Hotel del Prado, Mexico City. © 2013/Photo Art Resource/Bob/Schalkwijk/Scala, Florence.
Those who like Rivera should not miss the vast The History of Mexico (1929-35) at the Palacio Nacional, which heralds a bright new, socialist future while simultaneously criticising the exploitation of indigenous Mexicans at the hands of the colonial masters, as well as the Museo Diego Rivera’s Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park (1947), a private commission that once graced the dining-room walls of the Hotel del Prado opposite the alameda (central park).
For more of Siqueiros, From the Porfiriato to the Revolution (1957– 66) at Museo Nacional de Historia at Chapultepec Castle is a must. This vibrant cycle looms above you and sweeps you round with its extraordinary breathless vitality.
The challenge of marrying a modern painting to a historic setting is demonstrated at the 16th- century colonial Iglesia de Jesús Nazareno, where the remains of Hernán Cortés were originally buried. The building hosts Orozco’s mural Apocalypse (1944), which explores the horrors of the Second World War.
Watch a video of Mexico City, including curator Adrian Locke discussing its murals
A hidden gem is at the Abelardo R. Rodríguez Market, a few blocks from the Zócalo, the main square in the historic centre. Here one can find works by American artists who were commissioned in 1936 to decorate the newly constructed food market. The market provides a glimpse of the ‘real’ Mexico, where you can see murals by Isamu Noguchi as well as Marion and Grace Greenwood, whose work attacked Fascism and the exploitation of the working class.
And at the end of a long day, why not relax with a margarita sitting beneath a mural? A 17th- century private residence in the historic centre has been converted into the chic hotel Downtown México, which means its 1944-45 mural by Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, The Holocaust, in which shrouded women lament the death of a prostrate man, can now be fully appreciated by visitors to the hotel’s bar. Meanwhile, the luxurious Hotel Camino Real in the Polanco neighbourhood boasts Rufino Tamayo’s Man Before the Infinite (1971), in which a large silhouetted figure stands on a hill watching a lunar eclipse.
Mexican culture is celebrated in several shows this autumn. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas looks at how Mexico’s political and social issues have been addressed in its art since 1990, in ‘Mexico: Inside Out’ (www.themodern.org; 15 Sep- 5 Jan, 2014). An extraordinary artistic relationship is explored at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, in ‘Frida Kahlo/Diego Rivera: Art in Fusion’ (www.musee- orangerie.fr; 9 Oct–13 Jan, 2014). Kahlo is also the focus of a show at the Arken Museum, Copenhagen (www. arken.dk; 7 Sep-12 Jan, 2014), which includes work by her contemporaries. And the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin shows work by the British Surrealist Leonora Carrington (www.imma.ie; 18 Sep–26 Jan, 2014), who moved to Mexico in 1942. – Sarah Bolwell
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