The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere

Abstract

This anthology is a generally successful effort to reframe the issues surrounding social realist art of the 1930s in a hemispheric context. This perspective makes sense, if only because of Mexican muralism’s reverberating impact across the hemisphere. The collection’s approach proves quite refreshing, lending more legitimacy to the study of a still-neglected phase of art history. In keeping with HAHR’s focus, this review will concentrate on the 4 essays (out of 14) that deal with Latino or Latin American topics.Juan Martínez’s contribution (“Social and Political Commentary in Cuban Modernist Painting of the 1930s”) brings a great deal of new information concerning a subject that is virtually unknown: Cuban murals. The Cuban mural movement was halting and fragmentary, amounting to barely a half-dozen projects, and thus “failed to claim permanent public space.” Yet the murals “represented workers and peasants, popular culture, and leftist politics that had been excluded from symbolic representation in Cuba” (p. 41). The author demonstrates that the mural movement, though influenced by the Mexican example, also grew logically out of the Grupo Minorista’s agitation against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. The Grupo’s oppositional status led government officials to ignore or reject most mural proposals, but those that were completed showed the influence of cubism and expressionism, along with social commitment. Several other Latin American nations funded murals from time to time (Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia stand out), and most of this work is as unknown to scholars as the Cuban case. I look forward to the day when we have a hemispheric study of mural production; the Martínez study is an excellent starting point.Mexico was indeed the seedbed for mural production across the hemisphere, and Mary K. Coffey’s valuable theoretical essay (“The ‘Mexican Problem’: Nation and ‘Native’ in Mexican Muralism and Cultural Discourse”) elucidates some of the discussions at the core of the mural movement: Should Mexico express and celebrate its indigenous cultures (Manuel Gamio), or could Mexico be the vanguard of a new synthesis of European and American forms (José Vasconcelos)? Coffey’s close examination of Diego Rivera’s early frescoes at the Ministry of Education shows that Rivera’s works aligned more with Vasconcelos’s position, “illustrat[ing] the prevailing logic of early twentieth-century nationalism” (p. 66). That is, his murals fairly represent various indigenous types, but all are subsumed under a comprehensive rhetoric of the governmental benevolence of postrevolutionary Mexico, in which each race adds its voice to the chorus (literally so, in the case of the indigenous musicians that Rivera depicted at the Bolívar Amphitheater). Coffey’s conclusion, that Rivera’s “social egalitarianism is also a visual corollary of the disciplinary rhetoric of postrevolutionary nationalism” (p. 67), is an excellent summation of that phase of his career.Of course, Rivera’s career had many phases, and Anthony W. Lee’s essay (“Workers and Painters: Social Realism and Race in Diego Rivera’s Detroit Murals”) makes several important observations about the artist’s most impressive project north of the border. The essay analyzes Rivera’s Detroit murals against the backdrop of social tension outside the walls, as the nascent United Auto Workers generally excluded minorities from its ranks and supported a campaign to repatriate large numbers of immigrant Mexicans. Rivera’s factory depictions, presented as a “socialist utopia” (p. 213), nevertheless portray few real blacks or Mexicans. Indeed, Rivera depicted nonwhites mostly as allegorical figures. Thus, says Lee, Rivera “paints from a position always already over that of the fray, and yet is deeply dependent upon its tension” (p. 217).Alejandro Anreus’s contribution (“Adapting to Argentinean Reality: The New Realism of Antonio Berni”) focuses on the continent’s other principal social realist thinker, Antonio Berni. Examining paintings of unemployed laborers and working-class soccer teams, the essay credibly alleges that Berni depicted “moments of abandonment and revolt, brutal persecution, but most of all solidarity among the oppressed elements of society” (p. 111). Berni’s New Realism was born in Europe among the surrealists, but he rooted it in Argentine reality and even in the local scene of Rosario, where the artist was a social worker.Other essays in this welcome volume add the issues of race and sexuality to the discussion of social realism in the United States and Canada. Most readers will come away from this book with a clearer view of political art as a hemispheric phenomenon.