Don’t be fooled by “Dance in Tehuantepec” (1928), Diego Rivera’s colorful, seductive painting of a folk custom that opens “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It beckons visitors into a gallery of artworks that, following the end of the bloody Mexican revolution in 1920, romanticized the country’s indigenous peoples and their culture. Americans like Paul Strand and Edward Weston, whose visits to Mexico are well documented, followed their lead, and their works here seem familiar. Other pieces, by less-known artists from north of the Rio Grande, such as “Women With Cactus” (1928) by Everett Gee Jackson and “Women of Oaxaca” (1927) by Henrietta Shore, are vibrant and charming, but seem only to imitate Mexican artists.
The real thesis of “Vida Americana” is more interesting, more enlightening and more haunting. By 1922, Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, among other Mexicans, were turning away from such uplifting “aristocratic” art toward public, monumental art intended to address social injustices and rally the masses. Mexican muralism was born—and “los tres grandes” began creating politically potent vistas like those that decorate the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.