AHIS BC 3626y Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, Abstract Expressionism
25 Aug 2016
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February 16th, 2016
Art of the Mexican Revolution
• There was the new formation of the New York School
o abstract expressionism
o carried with it the legacy of surrealism and European art
o so many of these artists went through Mexico on their way to New York
o Andre Breton left Europe, went to Mexico and then NY
o Breton meets Frida Kahlo in 1938
o Breton goes to Mexico to meet Leon Trotsky who is in exile
• Breton had to contemplate a question surrealism hadn’t faced in Europe—the
concept of the Public definition of Art
o In Mexico, this means large pictures the size of walls that take over
architecture
Diego Rivera, The Flower Carrier, 1935
• Indigenismo—the only way to relate to the
people is to relate to the indigenous
cultures of the people
• In Mexico this means connecting to the
Azteca’s and creoles
• Images from daily life and pre-Columbian
history would be continuously displaced
along with images of modernity
• This would retrieve culture and moments
prior to modernity and industrialization
• It was obviously a very problematic
project because partook in a larger project
of a return to pictorial realism
• There is a retro move to return to a
pictorial language that goes against
modernity
• The return to fictions and regional identity is drawing from the retrieval of
neoclassical realism as well as photography
• This peculiar synthesis is a return to realism and idealism in the pre modern mode.
To what degree can we speak of a progressive Indigenismo?
• This figuration and geometric representation is very renaissance, and very elitist
• Giotto’s public was for the wealthy church goers, not the field workers
• This art isn’t nearly as elitist, but its not proletariat
• Is there a possibility of communicating a revolutionary message using a
prerevolutionary pictorial language?
• Or do you need to become as abstract and productivist as the Soviets?
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