3 Discussions

 It has 4 discussions. I need 200 words response on each discussion and i will send two replies of each discussion later.  Due in 24 hours. No Plagiarism.  

Discussion 1

How did the Mexican painters use their art as a political tool? Did their messages

compromise or influence their aesthetic choices?

How did the Mexican painters use their art as a political tool? Did their messages compromise or influence their aesthetic choices?

 These postings should be at least two paragraphs and contain significant analysis and examples from the readings and videos to receive credit.  You can also respond to tother people’s posts.

Discussion 2

How did the depiction of women change in Mexican art in the 1920’s and 1930’s?

How did the depiction of women change in Mexican art in the 1920’s and 1930’s?

Discussion 3

How does this painting describe the way RIvera and Kahlo’s art is being exploited today?

Discussion 4

What were some of the differences between the styles of Los Tres Grandes?

Jonathan Luna

WednesdayAug 5 at 10:42am

Manage Discussion Entry

This art piece is very telling about many things. For starters, Friday Kahlo and Diego Rivera are displayed prominently. This is important considering they are the two artists that are always reflected the most upon from Mexico. In history books, in films, in novels, they are the most popular. From the very beginning, both of them were exploited to the masses, creating beautiful murals and generation-defining art pieces. In this art piece, this is reflected as well. They are exploited worldwide. In this piece, Diego Rivera becomes a bag of Doritos, while Frida Kahlo becomes a bag of Fritos. Both of which are chips that are sold daily in the thousands and are existing worldwide. They are sold, distributed, passed around, and enjoyed with such jubilance. Their art has become manufacturers of chips. It is consumed daily. When a kid opens up their laptop and searches Mexican art, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo pop up. In their history books at school, documentaries, even with the Google logo than on their birthday has an image of them celebrating them. They are ingrained into the history of the world. Their art is a thing of beauty. It is their identity being passed around and seen around the world with such craving and delicious enjoyment. Their bag of murals has been passed around and each person takes a chip of enjoyment.

However, this art piece also reflects something much more demeaning. It shows the marketable expansion between Diego and Frida. It shows the misogyny and sexism that exists in art. Although both are exploited and enjoyed worldwide for their art pieces, there still exists discrimination. For Frida, there is a woman hand digging from her bag of art pieces. Yet for Diego, there is a man’s and the hand of Mickey Mouse. Not only does this show the world-wide expansion. This shows that regardless of both being prominent, the hand always chooses the male, and the unfortunate telling of this shows the depiction of women that have existed since humankind can remember. Even though this is portrayed, it doesn’t take away from the influence Frida has had and will continue to have. Her art is just as important as Diego’s, as this art piece reflects. Their murals are immortal and will continue to be passed down through generations as the normal human consumption.

Fatima Salgado- Ortiz

Fatima Salgado- Ortiz

WednesdayAug 5 at 8:55pm

Manage Discussion Entry

This painting describes the way Rivera and Kahlo’s art is being exploited today because it depicts an image of Diego Rivera as Doritos and Frida Kahlo as Fritos. In this painting, the artists are being reduced to popular snacks today. I think it’s an accurate representation of how the media often perceives them today because they are seen as very popular and likable artists, however they aren’t given the appropriate respect. The painting also shows the hands of different people all enjoying the chips, which would represent people’s greed to consume the artists works and anything associated with their name.

This exploits the artists because it uses their name to reach an audience, without accrediting them for anything or illustrating them as something more honorable than just a bag of chips.  Today, many artists will create work with their faces or their names as a means of profit. This is clearly something the artists themselves aren’t able to consent for. It is also sad to see that in the case of Frida Kahlo, her art was very controversial and highly critiqued during her time. Now, that she has passed, her art has become highly influential and widely accepted but through the act of exploitation. 

Jodi Lo

SundayAug 2 at 8:56pm

Manage Discussion Entry

                Diego Rivera was born in 1886, and was one of the leaders of the Mexican mural movement in the 1920s. The national style and spirit of Mexican murals he pioneered had an significant influence on many artists and literary workers during that time. He is an active political fanatic and Communist Party member, and his life experience including artistic activities are consistent with his political attitudes and ideas. Therefore, Rivera’s artistic creation were all part of his political activities, echoing his political attitude. From 1920 to 1922, Rivera devoted himself to studying and researching Renaissance frescoes in Italy, which laid the direction and tone of the fresco movement (“Diego Rivera Biography”). He became involved with a government mural program in 1921 with the new Secretary of Public Education José Vasconcelos “….. became one of its key inspirational figures. As the secretary of state for public education in mexico from 1921 to 1924…(Mexican Muralists Chapter 1)” Rivera announced that he would abandon extremely rational painting, instead create an art that can fully emphases national accumulation (“Diego Rivera Biography”). The most important is to be acceptable and understood by the general public. Rivera turned to a painting style which showed the national history,  “ ….he declared that the role of art was to reflect life and act as a determine force in society (Mexican Muralists Chapter 1 ).”

                 A good example is the fresco “Man at the Crossroads ” (1934) constructed by Diego Rivera, which is still on display today (Xenne). This mural fully demonstrates the great influence of the Communist Manifesto on Mexican art, which encourages to hope for a new and better future. Rivera created a grand “epic” theme atmosphere through the use of a large number of images that are rich in symbolic meaning, along with the combination of events in different time and space. The works ended up to contain a quality of  “great realism”, which greatly strengthens the spiritual infection of the audience. Rivera once said,  “only a social revolution can clear the way for a new culture (Rivera).”  This is precisely the connotation of Rivera’s art revolution. He uses his own art revolution to practice his political concept, and at the same time, political concept serves as the guide of the art movement. The practice of art is exactly the politics that needs to be compatible

Ava Koblik

TuesdayAug 4 at 1:12pm

Manage Discussion Entry

In the 1920’s, following the Mexican Revolution, the new government enacted social reforms that empowered workers and farmers, but there was no shared culture or sense of a Mexican national identity. The nation turned to muralism to create and promote a national self-image that emphasizes both the country’s roots in indigeonous culture and heroic triumphs of it’s recent revolutionary conflicts. This new artistic direction was dominated by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – Los Tres Grandes. The murals created by Diego Rivera at the Ministry of Education in the National Agricultural School at Chapingo in 1923 and 1928 represent an important stage in the development of the Mexican mural movement as a revolutionary vehicle for a national aesthetic. 

Located in the second courtyard of the Ministry of Education, ‘The Corridor of the Fiestas’ connects traditional local culture and the recent Mexican revolution with modern socialism. Rivera designed three distinct sections that represent the peasantry, the working class and the wealthy elites. Titled the corrido panels, social evil, created by colonialism and the violence that followed, are overcome as socialism unites different ethnic groups and classes and inspires proletarian revolution. In Capitalist Dinner, Rivera comments on Capitalist’s obsession with money by illustrating them sitting around a dinner table, their eyes fixated on plates full of coins. Wall Street Banquet depicts America’s well known Capitalists seated around a dinner table studying the golden wall street ticker tape. The entire group is being watched over by a menacing machine-like figure who’s body is a bank vault symbolizing the consuming nature of capitalism and profit at any cost. In contrast, Our Bread is a panel depicting the harmony of the socialist revolution. Here, the entire image is orderly and content. In the center of the image, the socialist revolutionary hero presides over the scene, much like Jesus had in countless Christian works before. In contrast to the machine in Wall Street Banquet, the dinner is flanked by the heroic and unified image of the Mexican people.  For Rivera, his politics were the inspiration for his art, but his aesthetic was influenced by traditional Mexican culture. These murals, like many other of Rivera’s politically charged works, were instrumental in establishing a new national Mexican identity.  

Collapse Subdiscussion

Jodi Lo

Jodi Lo

MondayAug 3 at 7:40am

Manage Discussion Entry

 

         During the 1920 in Mexico,Women have been discriminated in several aspects. Many art work created by women are rarely cited in texts such as names and titles. The article “The First Mexican woman muralist” mentioned, “ Despite the recent interest in female easel painters who worked in Mexico during the early-20th century, the country’s female muralists have been virtually ignored (Reyes).” Women have always being assumed as lack of physical strength and power to create art piece, therefore, women have only little interest in public art during the early years of the 20th century. It is hard to deny the fact that Mexican mural have a dominant  of men.

            In the 1930, women have gained more rights compared to the 1920. Women have participated and involved more political activities and call for woman’s education to construct a new society. However, the article “The First Mexican woman muralist” mentioned, “ women proved themselves capable at tasks previously assigned only to men, including fighting at the front. Still, most of the secular martyrs depicted in the murals during the 1920s and 1930s were male (Reyes).”  Although woman’s situation had improved due to sexual equity, but tradition ideas still existed

Samuel Boucher

TuesdayAug 4 at 4pm

Manage Discussion Entry

The depiction of women changed in Mexican muralism in the 1920s and 1930s via the new subjects of post-revolutionary art and through the expression of a new wave of talented female artists.  Antecedently, art was ‘closely associated with masculinity in Mexico’ but artists such as Frida and Aurora Reyes amongst others challenged this view. These women expressed and negotiated their female identity through their work. For Frida Kahlo, self-portraiture was an essential means to investigate and cement her identity. Janet Landay, curator of exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston states: “Kahlo made personal women’s experiences serious subjects for art, but because of their intense emotional content, her paintings transcend gender boundaries. Intimate and powerful, they demand that viewers—men and women—be moved by them.”  By showing her pain on her canvas (both physical and emotional) Frida demanded to be seen as a subject of seriously consideration and thought, and, through her expression as a woman, demanded that all women be seen as such.

 

Previously, women were represented in art as mothers or through glorified motherhood. Even after the Mexican Revolution, the subjects were primarily male revolutionary ‘matyrs’ and the female subjects were still confined to the paradigm of allegorical images of the “abstract concepts of earth, motherland, democracy, and occasionally, evil. When depicted as real women, they usually appeared faithfully following and providing for the men, but never actively participating in the struggle; as grieving mothers and wives; or as idealized teachers, the only profession considered acceptable for women” (Comisarenco Mirkin 6). This greatly shifted with the works of the first female Mexican muralist: Aurora Reyes. In a famous 1939 lecture at the Congreso Nacional Femenil in Havana, Reyes gave her perspective on the hegemony of male artists in the Mexican School and denounced the oppression and violence committed against Mexican women throughout the 1930s and the preceding decades. For Reyes, “the inequities in Mexican society have more to do with gender oppression than class.” Reyes especially broke a taboo by portraying violence against women in her famous, Attack on the Rural Teacher, the first mural created by a Mexican female artist. In this mural, Reyes shows “that sexual inequality, hierarchy, and oppression are not natural, absolute conditions but products of a culture, a combination of social and psychological practices.” And the best way to re-construct the feminine identity was via socialist educational programs—including that of the murals. Additionally, Reyes’ re-orientation of the subject of docile mother as subject to strong active worker showed a genuine reality of the Mexican Revolution: the female revolutionary soldiers. In both Zapata’s army as well as in the army of Pancho Villa, women played a key role in the organization of the camps in addition to the actual fighting (as seen in last week’s documentary on Pancho Villa). In yet another one of Aurora Reyes Flores pieces, Mujer de la guerra, she explores this duality of the female as both mother and revolutionary. Her subject holds her child and a gun in each arm. Both of these female Mexican artists among others greatly influenced the art scene in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s and changed the view of the female subject forever.

Jodi Lo

TuesdayAug 4 at 1:24am

Manage Discussion Entry

           The three most influential muralists from the 20th century are Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros, often referred to as Los Tres Grandes. Between the 1920s and 1950s, they worked together as a team during the Mexico Revolution from 1920 to 1950. Los Tres Grandes crafted epic murals on the walls of highly visible, public buildings using techniques like fresco, and sculpture-painting.

          First of all, start with Diego Rivera. Diego Rivera was the most traditional in terms of painting styles, and he incorporated European Modernism into his work combined with Mexico’s bright colors to depict his people, and particularly the working class. He originally painted this in bright colors in the European style, however, he turned to a painting style which showed the national history,  “ ….he declared that the role of art was to reflect life and act as a determine force in society (Mexican Muralists Chapter 1 ).” customs and realistic themes that the public is familiar with.

             Second, belongs José Clemente Orozco. Orozco, he also began with a European style of expression like Diego Riverra. However, he had participated and physically fought  in the revolution, which caused his work of tone dramatically changed. His art started to developed a tone of angry and oppression especially to the ruling class.In order to portray the suffering of mankind and the horrors of war, his work was somber and dire.

              Lastly, will be David Siqueiros. Siqueiros was the youngest and most radical compared to the three. He experienced the Revolution from the front lines just like José Clemente Orozco. His work often related to technology, and characterized with rapid, sweeping, and bold lines. Due to his political beliefs, it occurred him to create much of his work in South America.

             The differences among the three artists related to their experiences of Mexican Revolution. Which conclude that Rivera’s works were utopian and idealist, Orozco’s were critical and pessimistic, and Siqueiros considered the most radical,  which focused heavily on a scientific future. Although they all have different political beliefs and ideals, they considered art as the highest form of expression.