Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 | Art & Artists

Feb 17, 2020–Jan 31, 2021

Romantic Nationalism and the Mexican Revolution

A painting of a person holding many flowers in front of three kneeling people.

Romantic Nationalism and the Mexican Revolution

In an effort to unify Mexico after ten years of civil war, the country’s new government sought to construct a shared understanding of Mexican identity and national history. Central to this was the celebration of rural Mexico’s landscape, customs, and people—a sharp repudiation of the veneration of European culture that had existed among Mexico’s ruling class before the revolution. Mexican artists began to portray the country’s Indigenous and largely agrarian population as symbols of national pride and to depict Emiliano Zapata, who led the people’s heroic fight for land reform, as the defining hero of postrevolutionary Mexico. From a contemporary perspective, the idealized portraits of Mexico’s Indigenous peoples created by both Mexican artists and those visiting from abroad may be seen as having reduced their subjects to stereotypes that reinforce their marginalized status within a social system that privileged European heritage. At the time, however, painters, photographers, and filmmakers embraced a romanticized vision of rural Mexico as the embodiment of a simpler, more spiritually authentic way of living in contrast to the alienation and isolation of modern urban and industrial life.