From the 1940s onward, muralists increasingly began to appear as part of the revolutionary establishment, with the role of legitimizing the institutionalized revolution ... Muralism seemed to succumb to the iron law of co-optation of Mexican politics.
Alistair Hennessy, 1991244
In 1940, the Revolution remained the dominant theme of public art, reflecting the state’s willingness to subsidize muralists in an effort to keep alive the image of the Revolution. By 1950, mural art had become an obstacle to Mexican artistic development. As Octavio Paz commented: “Muralism died of an ideological infection. It began as a search and ended as a catechism.”245
Younger artists rebelled against muralism. Rufino Tamayo, a member of the new generation of artists, commented, “Mexican peasants triumphed only in the murals.” In the most publicized criticism of muralism, painter Jose Luis Cuevas charged in a 1956 essay, “The Cactus Curtain,” that the continued ascendancy of the Mexican mural school stifled creative freedom and kept the nation isolated from artistic developments in other countries. Cuevas declared, “What I want in my country’s art are broad highways leading out to the rest of the world, rather than narrow trails connecting one adobe village with another.”246
Eventually Mexican artists did break away from the muralist school. This was formally acknowledged when the works of a new generation of artists were included in a 1966 exposition at the Palace of Fine Arts entitled “Confrontacion ’66.” This exhibit was later sent to Montreal to be exhibited at the 1967 world’s fair. Unlike the mural movement, there was little to unite the post-mural generation. Its members worked in a variety of individual, almost isolated styles.247
Of the artists in this post-mural movement, Frida Kahlo became the most widely recognized in the United States. Her father, Guillermo Kahlo, was a German-Jewish expatriate of Hungarian descent who was commissioned by Porfirio Diaz to photograph major architectural monuments for the 1910 centennial celebration. Her mother was of mixed Spanish and Indian heritage.248
When she was six, Kahlo contracted polio, which left her right leg shorter than her left. Then, at age eighteen, she was involved in a near-fatal bus-trolley accident that crushed her spine and pelvis, leaving her with pain for the rest of her life. She began painting while convalescing.
In 1929, Kahlo married muralist Diego Rivera, who was twenty-one years her senior. Her parents described the marriage between the expansive Rivera and the diminutive Kahlo as a “marriage between an elephant and a dove.” During their marriage, Rivera and Kahlo each took many lovers and she became involved with both men and women, thus providing ample fodder for the press.249
Politically, Frida (as she is almost universally known) was influenced by her celebrity husband, and she joined the Mexican Communist Party, in which Rivera was active. Significantly, though, she did not adopt a single element of Rivera’s artistic style. In her self-portraits, which introduce Catholic symbolism, pre-Columbian imagery, and fantasy, she typically appears wearing the headdress of the indigenous women of Tehuantepec.250
Given her husband’s celebrity status, Kahlo had difficulty emerging as an artist in her own right. She produced her best work in the 1940s. However, during her lifetime Frida had only two one-woman gallery shows, and her work was mainly bought by her friends.251
After her death in 1954, her casket lay in state in the rotunda of the Place of Fine Arts. Many prominent figures attended her funeral, including Lazaro Cardenas. Even in death she could not escape from the shadow of her husband. When Cardenas commented on her death, he referred to her simply as “the wife of my friend, the excellent painter Diego Rivera, whose art has given such glory to Mexico.”252
In contrast to Rivera, whose artistic legacy came to be viewed with less enthusiasm in the late twentieth century, Kahlo became an icon for feminists as well as for art lovers everywhere. A single 1997 review essay considered nine works concerning her that were published in the United
States between 1991 and 1996. At least six films have been made on her life, including the 2002 release Frida, starring Salma Hayek.253
World History
