Great walls

Jackson Pollock, who symbolized American individualism during the mid-20th century, learned to lay his canvases on the floor and drip paint on them from a Mexican muralist. Pollock observed these practices at David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Experimental Workshop in New York, which he joined in 1936. Three of the Abstract Expressionist’s paintings appear in “Translating Revolution: U.S. Artists Interpret Mexican Muralists” at the National Museum of Mexican Art (NMMA). Curated by Amy Galpin, the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings and photographs by more than 40 modern artists whose exposure to Mexican murals shaped their subsequent careers.

Galpin, who worked at Chicago’s Woman Made Gallery before joining the San Diego Museum of Art last fall, tells us by phone that Mexican murals tend to be omitted from the modern-art canon because they’re “criticized for not being innovative stylistically.” True, the monumental realistic figures in Edward Millman’s 1936 study (pictured) for Contribution of Women to the Progress of Mankind—a mural at Garfield Park’s Al Raby School for Community and Environment—might strike contemporary viewers as old-fashioned.

But Galpin believes the movement led by Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco still has resonance for American viewers. It sparked the creation of a mural division within the Depression-era Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Art Project, which employed Pollock, Millman, Ben Shahn and other artists in “Translating Revolution.” Their murals survive in public buildings across the United States.

The Mexican muralists also inspired the 1960s Chicano art movement and contemporary murals in Pilsen and Little Village, Galpin says. The show’s most recent piece—a colorful sketch Francisco Mendoza made in 1999—is a study for exterior mosaics at the NMMA’s Pilsen neighbor, Orozco Fine Arts & Sciences Elementary School.

Many American artists learned from Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera (known as los tres grandes) as they worked on commissions north of the border. A 1933 photo in “Translating Revolution” by Rivera’s protégée Lucienne Bloch is the only record of the artist’s Rockefeller Center mural Man at the Crossroads, which was demolished after Rivera, a Communist, refused to remove a prominent depiction of Vladimir Lenin.

The artists in “Translating Revolution” also studied in Mexico, drawn by the country’s support for culture and Mexican artists’ liberal politics. (Millman’s mural was painted over in 1941 due to concerns about his “leftist” leanings. It was restored in 1998.) Printmaker and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett stayed for decades.

“Mexico City was cosmopolitan and had a really strong art program in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s,” Galpin explains. “The mural movement at times was government-supported. So, just as New York and Paris were welcoming for an artist, Mexico City was as well.” American artists found work assisting mural painters or joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, which specialized in prints—another medium prized for its accessibility to the masses. Compare Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters to Catlett’s 1947 linocut of anti-slavery activist Sojourner Truth, or to Leopoldo Méndez’s equally stark, black-and-white portrait of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata from 1934: Their remarkably similar aesthetics offer more evidence of the Mexican artists’ continuing relevance.

Some works on view simply celebrate Mexico’s landscape or everyday life, but most call for communal action against oppression. Today, Chicagoan Morris Topchevsky’s 1943 painting Factory Workers comes off as sentimental. But as its laborers of various races gather in solidarity, they’re poignant reminders of a time when artists wanted to change the world.

“Translating Revolution” runs through August 1 at the National Museum of Mexican Art.

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