Mexican Muralism Reconsidered

This chapter analyses Mexican mural painting as a counterpoint to the dominant model of Western modernist art in the 1920s and 190s. The key figures here are the artists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, all of whom worked both in Mexico and, later, in the United States. Here it is argued that the usual flow of traffic from the Third World to the First was momentarily reversed as Mexican artists appropriated devices from modern European art, which they incorporated into their own monumental wall paintings.