Painting the Revolution: State, Politics and Ideology in Mexican Muralism

Warren Carter analyzes Mexican Muralism, particularly focusing on the works of Diego Rivera, Jose´ Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
The study examines the relationship between the Mexican state and mural painting from 1920 to 1940.
Carter critiques Leonard Folgarait's interpretation, arguing it presents a deterministic view that diminishes human agency.

Bertram D. Wolfe, a friend and biographer of Diego Rivera, analyzed the Mexican Revolution and Rivera's art in his 1924 article.
Wolfe described the Revolution as 'a very patchy and unsystematic affair.'
He noted the government represented an 'uncertain balance of power' between workers, peasants, and foreign capital.

Folgarait's work is the first comprehensive synthesis of Mexican Muralism from 1920–1940.
He uses diverse theoretical resources, including Antonio Gramsci, Mikhail Bahktin, Stuart Hall, Alex Callinicos, and Terry Eagleton.
Folgarait's reliance on Nicos Poulantzas and Michel Foucault leads to a deterministic account of the relationship between the Mexican state and mural painting.

Folgarait writes about the post-Revolutionary reality in Mexico, using Revolutionary rhetoric to express it.
The Revolution was a catalyst for a modern capitalist state, maintaining cheap labor and benefiting the new elite.
Political power remained centralized, with economic power shifting to a middle class.

Folgarait examines how post-revolutionary governments used wall-paintings as advertisements for their policies.
He focuses on Rivera's History of Mexico and Siqueiros' Portrait of the Bourgeoisie.
Also, he engages with earlier murals by Orozco and Rivera.

Folgarait uses Poulantzas' theory to analyze Rivera's National Palace stairway mural.
He emphasizes a juridical relationship over economic/political ones, obscuring class domination.
Poulantzas' insights explain how the capitalist state embodies the general interest of society.
History is reduced to an accumulation of portraits, disembodying individual qualities.

Poulantzas critiqued Ralph Miliband's approach for reducing the state and social classes to interpersonal relations.
Miliband pointed out the faults of 'hyperstructuralism,' where agents lack freedom of choice.
Poulantzas emphasizes the structural dimension of the state, determined by the mode of production.

Folgarait identifies Alan Knight and John Mason Hart as 'most useful' revisionist accounts.
However, Knight and Hart oppose revisionist accounts, asserting the importance of the Mexican peasantry and industrial working class.
Knight connects his and Hart’s work to earlier scholarship by John Womack and Frank Tannenbaum.

Critical stance towards claims that the Revolution was progressive or egalitarian.
Assertion that political elites were the true makers of the Revolution.
Emphasis on the corrupt and self-serving nature of the Revolution.
Stress on the Revolution as a political rather than social transformation.
Denial of any socialist component in the Revolution.
Stress on historical continuity over historical rupture.
Rehabilitation of the pre-revolutionary Porfirian period.
Reassessment of Adolfo de la Huerta’s regime of 1913–1914.

There were three revolutions: agrarian-based insurrection (Zapata, Villa), proletarian revolution (urban workers), and bourgeois revolution (middle class).
The agrarian revolution advocated land redistribution.
The proletarian revolution was channelled through national unions.
The bourgeois revolution championed constitutional reform.

Folgarait collapses state and capital, precluding distinctions between post-revolutionary governments.
He diminishes artistic agency, reading state ideology into murals.
Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros become unreflexive agents of counter-revolution.
Political differences between artists and governments are deemed insignificant.
Folgarait’s theoretical model accounts for political transformations as requirements of capital accumulation. Politicians become functionaries, and artists propagandists.

Folgarait's analysis sidelines the struggles of Mexican peasants and workers.
It neglects how audiences negotiated meanings in the murals.
He rarely examines how the murals were looked at, talked about, attacked, defended, or engaged with.

Press reaction to Orozco’s mural cycle in the National Preparatory School was strong.
Rivera's work in the Secretariat of Public Education remains a powerful visual statement against the humiliation of the Mexican working class.

Vaughan's analysis of the state-sponsored educational programme provides a useful counterpoint.
The schools became arenas for negotiations over power, culture, knowledge, and rights.
The state ideology taught was contested by communities.

The post-revolutionary history was a sustained struggle for the Revolutionary inheritance.
The government could not necessarily control the outcome.
Subaltern groups influenced the Mexican muralists.
Artists may have used government patronage to appeal to such audiences.
Groups may have appropriated the murals for their own ideological ends.

Schapiro questioned the revolutionary character of art created under the patronage of the regime.
He asks whether criteria are in the artist's intentions or the interests of the group paying for the work.
Schapiro suggests that meaning is determined by the intended audience and changing circumstances.
A materialist account would discard the certainties of Poulantzas and Foucault for a history of active struggle.

Craven argues that the meaning of artwork is a site of contestation.
Informal public response and the artist’s political position are important.
Rivera 'ideologically coupled' representations of the agrarian revolution and proletarian revolution.
Rivera painted scenes of conflict, including foreign capital, corrupt journalists, and reactionary forces.

Rivera painted the causes of conflict, including foreign capital and reactionary forces.
He depicted workers being repressed and then rising up in armed revolt.
The production of Rivera’s murals was situated within actual moments of political struggle.

Knight links the revisionist historiography to the political repression of 1968.
The standard interpretation of the Revolution made historical explanation of the repression impossible.

Theoretical anti-humanism is traced to 1968 and the May events in France.
Poststructuralism emphasized the discursive over the ideological and was anti-humanist.
Revisionist accounts led to more sophisticated analyses of the Revolution.

An attempt at rehabilitating the revolutionary claims for the art of los tres grandes will have to come to terms with Folgarait’s account.
Despite the theoretical and historiographical problems, it remains the most sophisticated interpretation of Mexican Muralism.