Gallery Chronicle (January 2017)

THE NEW CRITERION, January 2017

Gallery Chronicle

On art in the age of Trump.

America’s cultural fault lines should have become apparent even before the seismic shock of the latest presidential election. Now we might ask what role art could play in bridging that divide. Our stratification has become increasingly unstable. Regardless of one’s political views, the solution should not be greater segregation but new efforts at cultural integration.

The country’s cultural division was the subject, of course, of Charles Murray’s penetrating 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010. Here Murray observed how a “high-IQ, highly educated new upper class has formed over the last half century. It has a culture of its own that is largely disconnected from the culture of mainstream America.” To prove the point to his readership, which he assumed would largely be of this new class, Murray posed a series of questions called “How Thick is Your Bubble?” The quiz has now been widely distributed through an online version published by pbs’s NewsHour. It asks questions such as whether you have ever walked a factory floor, known low academic achievers, or regularly eat at chain restaurants—experiences that might show shared experiences with working- and middle-class Americans.The quiz should be compulsory testing for any latter-day Pauline Kael who cannot understand a political outcome so out of step with elite expectation—which was the true shock of this election.

It was Kael’s fate for her life’s work as a film critic to become overshadowed by a single political quip: that she couldn’t understand how Nixon won, because no one she knows voted for him. That aphorism, it should be noted, turns out to be somewhat off from what Kael actually said. At a 1972 talk before the Modern Language Association, Kael remarked that “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” So Kael was acknowledging her own provincialism while also, perhaps, demonstrating relief at the segregation that created it—even as she could occasionally “feel” the presence of a Nixon voter in the demotic assembly hall of the American movie house.

The takeaway of Murray’s study might be that we are all Pauline Kaels now, increasingly divided not by a wall but by the cultural fortifications that surround the city-states from flyover country. I say this as a critic, not unlike Kael, writing from inside the battlements. When I took Murray’s latest quiz, in which lower numbers indicate greater degrees of insularity, I scored a mere eight out of a hundred—a number so impenetrably low that it falls below even the average median of 12.5 for my boyhood neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which Murray reveals to be the “bubbliest zip code” in the United States. And I must say even as I have moved on and up (two zip codes north), most people I know still live in this “rather special world” of separatist identity that run deeper than presidential preference. It is a cultural deficiency I acknowledge, and one that I have tried to confront in this column by looking to the tributaries and backwaters of the artistic mainstream.

After all, such separation does not make good culture. It is certainly not a healthy culture, but rather one made of equal parts disdain and resentment. It is also not a rich culture, with the dynamics of America at full throttle. Just what could be done about these divisions is a question that should now be posed by our cultural institutions, our artists—and by government itself. What follows are a few possible answers.

In the museum world, one of the most successful recent examples of bridging our cultural divide has been the creation of the (appropriately named) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened in Bentonville, Arkansas in 2011. Tucked deep in Ozark hill country, with a complex designed by Moshe Safdie that spans a bubbling body of water called the Crystal Spring, the museum is a literal bridge of American art in a culturally underserved area of the country. If you haven’t been there, I encourage a visit, with fifty flights a day landing in nearby Fayetteville and a boutique “museum hotel” that connects by sylvan bike paths to the institution, which should increase the comfort level of even the bluest of blue-staters.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Founded by Alice Walton, the heiress of the Wal-Mart fortune, and constructed with funds north of one billion dollars by the Walton Family Foundation, Crystal Bridges bucks all conventional wisdom on who, where, when, why, and what a major museum should be. “Swim upstream,” wrote Sam Walton, Alice’s father, in his 1992 autobiography, published the year he died. “Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.” By choosing to locate a new world-class museum far beyond our wealthy urban centers, Alice Walton has been an iconoclast in culture just as her father was in business, all while giving back to the hometown that still maintains the original “Walton’s 5&10” (which is now also the company’s museum).

Crystal Bridges’s truly counter-cultural formation has also been reflected in its maverick programming—so unlike many other inland museums that operate more like colonial outposts of coastal elitism camouflaged in pandering condescension. Two years ago I visited Crystal Bridges for a survey of contemporary art called “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now,” an exhibition I covered in these pages in October 2014. In search of artists whose “engagement, virtuosity, and appeal” have gone underappreciated, the museum’s director and curator hit the road on a 100,000-mile coast-to-coast visit of 1,000 artist studios. They logged 218 flights and 2,396 hours in rental cars, recording 1,247 hours of audio conversation and extensive video as they narrowed their selection down to the 102 artists to include in their 19,000-square-foot exhibition. “The vision on which Crystal Bridges was founded, and its mission today, is to share the story and the history of America through its outstanding works of art,” Alice Walton told me at the time. “That’s exactly what ‘State of the Art’ is about—sharing works that are being created in artist studios all across the country, in our own time.” “The mainstream is very narrow,” added Don Bacigalupi, the museum president who spearheaded the initiative with Walton. “Our exhibition is outside the mainstream structure of the art world.” Granted, such a wide net will necessarily bring in a haul of various quality, but at least this diverse selection of contemporary American art, created in just about every corner of the country, was a refreshing departure from our art fairs and biennials. It was also an indication that we all need to hit the road.

A decade ago an artist named Scott LoBaido did just that—he went on the road to paint the American flag across fifty rooftops in fifty states. He crossed back and forth over the country nearly two times. In the process, he went broke. He was attacked by wild animals. He dodged twisters. He took a container ship to Hawaii. He slept outside on a twenty-two-hour ferry ride to Alaska. He relied on strangers for food and shelter. And as curators look to the state of political art post-election, they might consider giving equal time to the conceptual and painted work of this self-styled “creative patriot.”

Scott LoBaido

A self-taught artist living just a ferry ride from the heart of the art world, LoBaido hails from that other New York City—the middle class, flag-waving, Republican-voting borough of Staten Island. I first met LoBaido in September 2004, at a show of his paintings at a gallery in lower Manhattan, off Broadway, timed to the Republican National Convention (“Gallery Chronicle,” October 2004).

A year after I met him, I got word that he was in Mississippi working in the relief effort after Hurricane Katrina. He had driven a truck of supplies down from Staten Island, offering his skills in wood and paint. It was in Mississippi that LoBaido made a connection between Katrina and the other great tragedy of his life: the terror attacks of 9/11. In Mississippi, he saw a spirit of hope, renewal, and patriotism that he believed could unite people from very different worlds. He was then inspired to paint an American flag on one of the Gulfport rooftops. He donated his truck to the relief effort, and on his twenty hour bus-ride home, the idea for “Flags Across America” was born: a visible display from the ground and from the air. He said he wanted to send an artistic message to the troops flying home from war. Back home at bar on Staten Island called The Cargo Café, where he was artist-in-residence, LoBaido loaded up a 1989 Chevrolet Suburban named Betsy, a replacement gift from a friend painted in the colors of the American flag: this was the beginning of “Flags Across America.”

LoBaido’s efforts earned him a profile as “Man of the Week” on abcNews. Yet when I told his story at a conference of the College Art Association and made the case for him as a legitimate political artist, the audience, needless to say, wanted none of it. Most recently, LoBaido has made a name for himself again: this time for painting a red-white-and-blue “T”-shaped billboard in Staten Island. This sign, and his flag murals, have been the repeated targets of vandalism and arson. LoBaido’s dissent from cultural orthodoxy is not mere novelty; it is heretical, which should say much about the diversity promises of the cultural establishment. Until this changes, much of America will never see themselves reflected in those mandarin surveys of contemporary American art such as the Whitney Biennial, despite their overtures to inclusion.

Even beyond the National Endowments, there are now dozens of presidential appointments and thousands of Federal employees dedicated to American arts and culture. The new administration could do worse than seek out the cultural analogues of those “forgotten men and women” who have become estranged from the political establishment. Moreover, the power of celebrity can bring comfort, rather than just disdain, to the culturally forsaken, such as Gary Sinise’s outreach with soldiers and veterans through his Lt. Dan Band or Dolly Parton’s efforts for childhood literacy. I have also been moved by efforts such as the Joe Bonham Project connecting illustrators with Wounded Warriors as they undergo rehabilitation, shining a light on the hidden faces of war.

Concept for Wheels of Humanity, a sculpture by Sabin Howard to be displayed
at the National World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C

A final mention should go not only to our culture’s geographic outliers, but also to those who have been aesthetically pushed aside. What I mean are to those many artists, undoubtedly a majority of the country’s artists, whose creative urge has driven them beyond the pale of narrow, establishment style. You might have your pick of this category, but it would include every artist who does not fit within the Happy Meal of Contemporary Art now served up the same way across the country (Gerhard Richter burger; Kehinde Wiley fries; Jeff Koons toy). So consider the religious artists, the plein-air painters, the formalists, the classical realists, and the many, many others now on the outside looking in.

All this will be a bitter pill for the art world to swallow. “Trump lost the art vote by a wide margin,” writes Ben Davis. A critic on the Left, Davis it should be said contributed the most comprehensive coverage of artists across the political spectrum this election season, including the activism of Scott LoBaido. “The entire cultural establishment . . . threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton (or at least against Donald Trump) in the final stretch of this campaign.” Still, Davis concedes, “mainstream culture failed to be the decisive factor where it was needed. It is even likely that this anti-Trump unanimity may have helped give a false sense of his weakness.”

Davis is right when he suggests that the “dynamic of this election should raise some critical questions on the limits of cultural activism.” It is a conclusion with which the world of culture must reckon as it considers art in the age of Trump and the best application of its creative and institutional energies in a divided landscape.

Magic Mozart

In his 1952 talk “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” C.S. Lewis noted how the best stories for children arise out of “where the children’s story is simply the right form for what the author has to say.” Rather than looking to “regale the child with things calculated to please it but regarded by yourself with indifference or contempt,” Lewis continued, “everything in the story should arise from the whole cast of the author’s mind. We must write for children out of those elements in our own imagination which we share with children.”

Die Zauberflöte shares such an affinity across ages like no other work of art for this reason. Weaving together Mozart's music (and his final opera) with Emanuel Schikaneder's libretto, the celestial 1791 work—with its mystical-comedic story of the prince Tamino, the princess Pamina, the Queen of the Night, the high priest Sarastro, and a bird-catcher Papageno—is perhaps even more attuned to the free-floating associations of children than the earth-bound expectations of adults.

Robert Brubaker as Monostatos and Janai Brugger as Pamina in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.” Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera's magical English-language adaptation of The Magic Flute, which returns as this year's family-friendly Met holiday run through January 5, and is so titled to distinguish it from the Met's same production in German, stays faithful to the original by following Lewis's canon to create for all ages “out of those elements in our own imagination which we share with children." Here young singers Janai Brugger and Ben Bliss are the princess and prince, Christopher Maltman returns as the bird-catcher Papageno, with Anthony Walker in the pit. This year, the Met Opera has also released An Illustrated Synopsis of the opera that will help adults as much as children understand the shifting loyalties of this fanciful story. 

Much was made of Julie Taymor's puppetry when this production premiered in 2004, and the attention was justified. Her neoprimitive, cargo-cult-like costumes and props are so affecting because they give us imaginary access to how these transporting creations are crafted and operated. In a similar way do the live singers and orchestra create the underlying magic of opera through their own analogue technologies—in particular the astonishing range of the human voice, which we experience pushed to the highest limits in the coloratura of the Queen's aria of “Here in My Heart" (Der Hölle Rache) and the lowest depths in Sarastro's “Within Our Sacred Temple” (In diesen heil'gen Hallen).

Christopher Maltman as Papageno in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”
Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Beyond Taymor's staging, more should be made of the poet J.D. McClatchy's English translation, which stays true to the spirit of the German original while adapting to modern ears. “The word magic is not in its title by accident," he wrote in his translator's note. Last year McClatchy gave us a new translation for the Met's family Barber, and here we find similar tuneful delight in his phrasing:

You know the secret of its power.
My father in a moonless hour
Once fashioned it from ancient oak
By lightning flash and thunderstroke.
Now take the magic flute and play
To guard us on our dangerous way.  

An off-note of the production continues to be George Tsypin's aluminum and plastic sets. Their machine-like look may have been intended to contrast with Taymor's handmade costumes. Instead they come off as incongruous banquet-hall kitsch.

A scene from Mozart's The Magic Flute. Photo by Ken Howard.

A even greater flaw is in the extreme cutting of the production. With a length that can extend beyond three hours, Die Zauberflöte can undoubtedly benefit from some judicious editing to achieve a more family-friendly length. Yet here the foreshortening conflates too much of the opera's feeling of dreamy somnambulance in order to keep the production under two hours. Gone also is the necessary pause between Acts I and II. It might be assumed that the expeditiousness appeals to the family demographic, but such assumptions cut against Lewis's edict to let the work, and not the market, speak to the audience on its own terms.

Plus, without an intermission, what opportunity is there to purchase that promised bar of Toblerone?

Modernism & Mexico

HUMANITIES, Fall 2016

Modernism and Mexico: When artists painted more than one revolution

The Mexican Revolution of 1910, which ended the 35-year presidency of Porfirio Díaz, is best understood as the first battle of a decade-long civil war that divided the country along economic and geographical lines. The moderate landowner Francisco I. Madero replaced Díaz in Mexico City in 1911—only to be ousted, imprisoned, and murdered two years later in a short-lived military coup by Díaz loyalists. Meanwhile, followers of Francisco “Pancho” Villa from the rural north and of Emiliano Zapata from the populist south pressed their own campaigns against the chaos, leading to a period of continued turmoil and bloodshed in which as many as 1.5 million people perished.

In a similar way, the modern art of Mexico, with a history that is often associated with the country’s Revolutionary period, was not so much a scene of swift united insurrection but, rather, an era of protracted conflict—a period, like the art that emerged from it, that remains little understood north of the border. Informed by this perspective, “Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950,” an expansive exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, delves deeply into los tres grandes, “the three greats,” of Mexican mural painting—José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949), Diego Rivera (1886–1957), and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974)—but also unearths the many counterforces and divergent influences that ultimately enriched the country’s modernist legacy.

“In this environment where everything was moving and changing,” writes the Mexican scholar Renato González Mello in one of the fourteen essays for the exhibition’s expansive catalog, “the role of the artist was not so much to engage in laboratory experimentation, but rather to collect the scraps from this ever-changing social, political, and industrial world in order to build something that made sense.”

Mexican modernism was also about more than murals, which are often its only recognized manifestation abroad. “The dominance of muralism has obscured from the art-historical record practices such as ‘Estridentismo’ [also known as ‘Stridentism] that made cultural circles hum with competing visions,” the art historian Lynda Klich notes of one of the country’s modernist countermovements. Here was an international, vanguard style represented by the poet Manuel Maples Arce (1900–1981) and the painter Ramón Alva de la Canal (1892–1985) that was often at odds with the localism of the muralists and the folk art traditions advocated by artists and teachers such as Dr. Atl (1875–1964), Roberto Montenegro (1885–1968), and Adolfo Best Maugard (1891–1964). “The postrevolutionary environment fostered many artistic dialogs, including the Estridentistas’ own interrogation of what it meant to be both modern and Mexican at this time,” says Klich.

“For many years,” says Matthew Affron, the exhibition’s curator at the Philadelphia Museum, “the received story of modern Mexican art was dominated by los tres grandes . . . Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, though standard accounts also had room for [Rufino] Tamayo [(1899–1991)], who positioned himself as the muralists’ competitor. The popular ascent of Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) came in the 1980s. Only in more recent times have the diverse achievements of the broader modernist artistic community been examined in greater depth.”

With more than three hundred objects—including paintings, drawings, photographs, woodcuts, and publications—“Paint the Revolution” goes far beyond the political “painted revolution” many of us associate with the famous muralists.

One point of tension was just what should be “modern” and “progressive” about Mexican art. “This exhibition alters our idea of what modern is,” Affron tells me as he opened his show. The Mexicans “might also change our understanding of what is progressive art and what is regressive art,” he adds. For one, they “complicate our ideas of realism. There are elements of murals that speak to masses, but there are also elements that are much more coded. There is an interesting dialog between an art which wants to speak to many publics at once, a wide public, and an insider public.” Drawing directly on the esoteric influence of symbolism in late nineteenth-century Mexico City, there known as “Modernista,” for example, even in its most realistic and didactic forms the art of the Mexican modernists “dislocates what is looking forward and what is looking back. This quite elite streak in modernism, that doesn’t end.”

This more cosmopolitan, “decadent” influence of Mexican art was picked up by a movement known as Contemporáneos, with artists such as Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, who cultivated a connection to Oscar Wilde and André Gide “as a strategy for publicly representing their own homosexuality,” writes the Philadelphia Museum’s Mark A. Castro, “creating a counterpoint to the hypermasculinized images of celebrated revolutionary leaders such as Francisco (Pancho) Villa and Emiliano Zapata.” Connecting in the 1930s with the Surrealist exiles from Europe, the Contemporáneos sought a pure, art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic, free of political compromise and dedicated to personal visual language.

After the Contemporáneos criticized the murals of Rivera for turning art into a “political-social instrument” for the state’s agenda, Rivera lashed out at them in 1934 as “pimps of the bourgeoisie” in an article he called "Arte puro: Puros maricones" (Pure Art: Pure Faggots), while caricaturing two of their artists in his mural panels. Orozco also derided them as los rorros Fachistas (Fascist Gay Boys) in a drawing for the publication El machete. “For the muralists,” writes the art historian Mireida Velázquez, “the revolution had signified the possibility of renewing Mexican culture; for the Contemporáneos, it represented a period of barbarity that had broken the balance established under Porfirio Díaz.”

Another point of tension was between the Marxism of muralists such as Rivera and the capitalism of their American patrons, who repeatedly lavished them with major projects. After Edsel Ford brought Rivera to the Detroit Institute of Arts to paint his most famous and brilliant stateside mural over eleven months from 1932 to 1933, Nelson Rockefeller commissioned him later that year to paint a mural of similar scope in the lobby of the new RCA Building at Rockefeller Center—even after Rivera had included a not-so-flattering portrait of Rockefeller’s grandfather in the Ministry of Public Education (SEP) murals in Mexico City. Their diverging views came to a histrionic head as Rivera departed from his original proposal and included a portrait of Lenin in his RCA lineup. Rockefeller objected, and the New York mural was destroyed—only to be reproduced back in Mexico City.

“None of them was a dupe,” says Affron. “They all knew what was going on. It cannot be an accident that during the Great Depression this American art with ancient sources, not European, a moral art, came to the attention of such a varied public. Rockefeller and the Fords understood that as patrons during the Depression they had a certain responsibility. Rivera fit the bill, but it wasn’t an easy relationship.”

Despite the mural controversy, Affron says, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller purchased Rivera’s May Day drawings and gave them to the Museum of Modern Art. “This is not a simple story. They were all living in a situation of shifting political sands.”

With repeated overtures and allusions to art history, from the Old Masters to indigenous abstraction, the Mexican modernists drew on a diverse inventory of sources that looked both forward and backward, local and international. “One of the ideas we try to hit people over the head with,” says Affron, is that “no matter how nationalist this Mexican art was, it was just as internationalist, and this is the great surprise to many people.” After training in Mexico City’s National School of Fine Arts, for example, a government scholarship brought Rivera to Montparnasse in Paris, where he lived at its moment of greatest modernist ferment from 1911 to 1921, in fact missing the direct experience of the Mexican Revolution. Instead, he became immersed in the circle of modernists around the studio building of La Ruche, a group that included the painters Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani and the poet Max Jacob. According to Mexican scholar Dafne Cruz Porchini, Rivera was also steeped in mystical beliefs as a member of a Rosicrucian order—a reason why hidden, subterranean forces can often complicate the political messages of his murals.   

Portrait of Martín Luis Guzmán, 1915, by Diego Rivera (Fundación Televisa Collection) © Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

This all helps explain why one of Rivera’s earliest paintings now on display in “Paint the Revolution,” Portrait of Martín Luis Guzmán (1915), mixes Analytical Cubism with the Hispanism of a matador’s hat and the Mexicanidad, or “Mexicanized,” pattern of a native blanket for this depiction of a writer Rivera portrayed sitting in his Paris studio. For an artist today identified as one of Mexico’s big three muralists through a native, political, “revolutionary” style, Rivera was most influenced by this period of European high-modernist expatriation. As compared with Rivera’s revolutionary theories developed abroad, the muralist Orozco experienced the bloody revolution of Mexico first hand—one reason his work tended to focus on the disasters, rather than the aims, of war.

Beyond his contemporary influences, Rivera increasingly looked back—to Cézanne, to El Greco (whom he studied in Toledo), and finally to Italy, where Renaissance fresco initially sparked his interest in muralism. Rivera’s European influences, in fact, put his work at odds with the muralism of Siqueiros, who attempted to radicalize not only his content but his medium.

“Rivera’s mural art is a modern adaptation of an historical medium—the Mexican government financed his trip in 1921 to Italy,” says Affron. “But by the 1930s Siqueiros was loudly denying that fresco was a good way to go. He thought it was an historical anachronism, an elitist medium.” So as Rivera looked to historicized techniques in designing his murals for classical buildings from Mexico City to Detroit—trompe l’oeil frames, grisaille, illusionistic banners, and other traditional academic techniques—Siqueiros began experimenting with spray paint, synthetic pigments, and unorthodox spatial perspectives. These innovations came together in Siqueiros’s dizzying Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939–1940), which he painted in the stairwell of the new modernist headquarters of the Mexican electricians’ labor union and is reproduced in a special installation in “Paint the Revolution.” 

This brings up a question for any exhibition on Mexican modernism: how to treat its most well-known component. “When I would speak about the exhibition, I’d say, I know what you are thinking: What about the murals?” says Affron. “The stumbling block of any exhibition of this kind is that the most famous artistic examples are bound into the walls in which they are painted.” For two major murals, Affron and his colleagues at both the Philadelphia Museum and in Mexico found a solution in high-definition video technology deployed on site. These films are used to reproduce the work as scanning projections for Rivera’s Ballad of the Agricultural Revolution (1926–27) and Ballad of the Proletarian Revolution (1928–29) from the SEP in Mexico City, and Orozco’s The Epic of American Civilization (1932–34) from Baker Library at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

“It was important to us that all of the digital simulations find a way to really show they exist in architectural spaces and can only be seen in time and space,” Affron tells me. “I cared a lot about that. You must give people an equivalent version of the experience. We have a whole team here working in information technology and interpretation, and they worked with the curatorial department. Then we had to hire a very specialized team in Mexico City. You get a level of clarity and quality, and the solution was totally innovative. No one has seen it done this way. It really required everybody’s brain to add something that couldn’t be added by other means.”

Without any murals of its own—unlike its partner institution, the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, which features murals by all three greats, including Rivera’s recast Rockefeller Center work—the Philadelphia Museum might not appear to be the first institution to choose to take on such a large-scale Mexican exhibition. But, in fact, the institution’s commitment to Mexican modernism runs as deep as any American museum’s.

Trained as an engineer in Austria, René d’Harnoncourt moved from Paris to Mexico in 1926 to try to live as a painter, but he soon established himself as a dealer and curator, first in Mexican antiquities and then for the modernists. In 1930 he organized the first exhibition of Mexican art in the United States at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

With its grand building’s opening in 1928, the Philadelphia Museum also first looked to the Mexicans, and d’Harnoncourt, to fill out its modern collection, decades before such great modernist bequests as that of Walter and Louise Arensberg, which included Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), enriched its collection in the 1950s.

Then, in 1943, the Philadelphia Museum organized “Mexican Art Today,” arguably the most significant exhibition of Mexican art in the United States in the twentieth century and a model for the current show. It also happens that d’Harnoncourt’s only child, Anne Julie d’Harnoncourt, served as the longtime director and later CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, from 1982 until her death in 2008. “And to think that Rivera came here in 1922,” says Affron. "And René’s daughter became the director here. These are all examples of why we are the right institution to do this show.”

Today Philadelphia has one of the richest contemporary mural projects of any city. What began as an anti-graffiti initiative in the 1980s, the city’s Mural Arts Program now employs hundreds of artists a year and has become a defining characteristic of the cityscape. Is there a direct connection between this exhibition and what we now see lining the city streets? “I don’t think you can connect them as a cause and effect, but there’s a consonance of ideas,” says Affron of the Mexican muralists and Philadelphia’s contemporary examples. 

“Paint the Revolution” proves yet again how the true revolution of art was modernism itself, which flowered simultaneously across continents in multiple centers of influence. “This story was both local and international from the start,” Affron concludes. “Mexican artists created a modern art that was deeply embedded in international politics and aesthetic currents, but was also rooted in Mexico’s particular experiences, history, traditions, iconography, and institutions. Looking back a century later, at a moment when a global account of modernism is emerging, Mexico between 1910 and 1950 clearly belongs at the center of the story”—with a revolution in style that remains revelatory.