Whitney Museum of American Art
February 17 through May 17, 2020
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas
June 25 through October 4, 2020
The cultural renaissance that emerged in Mexico in 1920 at the end of
that country’s revolution dramatically changed art not just in Mexico
but also in the United States. Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945
will explore the profound influence Mexican artists had on the
direction American art would take. With approximately 200 works by sixty
American and Mexican artists, Vida Americana reorients art
history, acknowledging the wide-ranging and profound influence of
Mexico’s three leading muralists—José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and
David Alfaro Siqueiros—on the style, subject matter, and ideology of
art in the United States made between 1925 and 1945.
Curated by Barbara
Haskell, with Marcela Guerrero, assistant curator; Sarah Humphreville,
senior curatorial assistant; and Alana Hernandez, former curatorial
project assistant, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945
will be on view at the Whitney from February 17 through May 17, 2020
and will travel to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, where it
will be on display from June 25 through October 4, 2020.
By presenting the art of the Mexican muralists alongside that of their American contemporaries, Vida Americana reveals the seismic impact of Mexican art, particularly on those looking for inspiration and models beyond European modernism and the School of Paris. At the same time that American artists and their audiences were grappling with the Great Depression and the economic injustices it exposed, the Mexican artists provided a compelling model for portraying social and political subject matter that was relevant to people’s lives, thereby establishing a new relationship between art and the public.
Works by both well-known and underrecognized American
artists will be exhibited, including Thomas Hart Benton, Elizabeth
Catlett, Aaron Douglas, Marion Greenwood, William Gropper, Philip
Guston, Eitarō Ishigaki, Jacob Lawrence, Harold Lehman, Fletcher Martin,
Isamu Noguchi, Jackson Pollock, Ben Shahn, Thelma Johnson Streat,
Charles White, and Hale Woodruff. In addition to Orozco, Rivera, and
Siqueiros, other key Mexican artists included in the exhibition include
Miguel Covarrubias, María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Mardonio Magaña,
Alfredo Ramos Martínez, and Rufino Tamayo.
This
historic exhibition will feature works that have not been exhibited in
the United States in decades. Two of Rivera’s 1932 studies for Man at the Crossroads,
his destroyed and infamous Rockefeller Center mural, will be lent by
the Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City.
They also will lend Rivera’s study from his Portrait of America series (c. 1933).
The Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil will lend several key works by both Orozco and Siqueiros that have never been or are rarely seen in the United States, including
Orozco’s Christ Destroying His Cross (1931),
Pancho Villa (1931),
and Landscape of Peaks (1943);
and Siqueiros’s Intertropical (1946), Resurrection (1946), and Cain in the United States (1947).
Other important Mexican loans include Siqueiros’s Our Present Image (1947) from the Museo de Arte Moderno;
and María Izquierdo’s My Nieces (1940)
and Siqueiros’s Proletarian Mother (1929) from the Museo Nacional de Arte.
Two paintings by Japanese-born artist Eitarō Ishigaki will also be on loan from Japan’s Museum of Modern Art in Wakayama.
They also will lend Rivera’s study from his Portrait of America series (c. 1933).
The Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil will lend several key works by both Orozco and Siqueiros that have never been or are rarely seen in the United States, including
Orozco’s Christ Destroying His Cross (1931),
Pancho Villa (1931),
and Landscape of Peaks (1943);
and Siqueiros’s Intertropical (1946), Resurrection (1946), and Cain in the United States (1947).
Other important Mexican loans include Siqueiros’s Our Present Image (1947) from the Museo de Arte Moderno;
and María Izquierdo’s My Nieces (1940)
and Siqueiros’s Proletarian Mother (1929) from the Museo Nacional de Arte.
Two paintings by Japanese-born artist Eitarō Ishigaki will also be on loan from Japan’s Museum of Modern Art in Wakayama.
“The
panoramic Mexican murals of the post-revolutionary period depicting
national history and everyday life used a pictorial vocabulary that was
simultaneously modern and distinctly Mexican. Combined with the radical
socialist subject matter of the works the Mexican muralists created
while living in the United States, their influence on artists in this
country was profound,” explained Barbara Haskell, the exhibition’s
curator. “Largely excluded from the predominant canonical narrative of
modern art that emerged in the United States, the muralists’ legacy and
enduring impact shapes a more expansive vision of modernism. By
exploring the transformation in artmaking that occurred in the United
States as a result of the Mexican influence, while also examining the
effect the U.S. had on the muralists’ art, Vida Americana will expand our understanding of the rich cultural exchange between our two countries.”
“Vida Americana
is an enormously important undertaking for the Whitney and could not be
more timely given its entwined aesthetic and political concerns," said
Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family
Chief Curator. "It not only represents the culmination of nearly a
decade of scholarly research and generous international collaboration
but also demonstrates our commitment to presenting a more comprehensive
and inclusive view of twentieth-century and contemporary art in the
United States.”
The
Whitney Museum’s own connection to the Mexican muralists dates back to
1924 when the Museum’s founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney presented an
exhibition of the work of three Mexican artists—José Clemente Orozco,
Luis Hidalgo, and Miguel Covarrubias—at the Whitney Studio Club,
organized by artist Alexander Brook. It was Orozco’s first exhibition in
the United States. A few years later, in 1926, Orozco also showed
watercolors from his House of Tears series at the Studio Club;
and the following year Juliana Force, Mrs. Whitney’s executive assistant
and future director of the Whitney Museum, provided critical support
for Orozco at a time when he desperately needed it by acquiring ten of
his drawings. The Mexican muralists had a profound influence on many
artists who were mainstays of the Studio Club, and eventually the
Whitney Museum, including several American artists featured in Vida Americana, such as Thomas Hart Benton, William Gropper, Isamu Noguchi, and Ben Shahn.
Comprised
of paintings, portable frescoes, films, sculptures, prints,
photographs, and drawings, as well as reproductions of in-situ murals, Vida Americana
will be divided into nine thematic sections and will occupy the
entirety of the Whitney’s fifth-floor Neil Bluhm Family Galleries. This
unprecedented installation, and the catalogue that accompanies it, will
provide the first opportunity to reconsider this cultural history,
revealing the immense influence of Mexican artists on their American
counterparts between 1925 and 1945.
|
CATALOGUE
Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945
will be accompanied by a full-color, 256-page, scholarly catalogue
edited by Barbara Haskell. Co-published by the Whitney Museum and Yale
University Press, the catalogue will include eleven essays by scholars
in the United States and Mexico. Drawing on recent research by the
curatorial team at the Whitney and the contributing authors, the
publication includes a foundational essay by Haskell and is complemented
by a series of insightful contributions from Mark A. Castro, Dafne Cruz
Porchini, Renato González Mello, Marcela Guerrero, Andrew Hemingway,
Anna Indych-López, Michael K. Schuessler, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, ShiPu
Wang, and James Wechsler. Also included are 139 color and fifty-seven
black and white illustrations, as well as a list of artists included in
the exhibition.
Images
Jackson Pollock, Landscape with Steer, c. 1936–37. Lithograph with airbrushed enamel
additions, sheet: 16 1/8 × 23 3/8 in. (41 × 59.3 cm); image: 13 13/16 × 18 9/16
in. (35.1 × 47.1 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Lee Krasner
Pollock. © 2019 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
.jpg!Large.jpg)
