Uneasy Bedfellows: The Colonial in the Modern Mural

The deployment of religious iconography in murals by politically radical artists within the strong anti-clericalist current of the early postrevolutionary years resulted in some of the most perplexing imagery of Mexican modernism. Diego Rivera’s recasting of the campesino as a modern-day martyred Christ at the Secretaría de Educación Pública can easily be championed as a popularizing gesture, reaching out to the illiterate, pious, peasantry in a pictorial language familiar from quotidian religious practice. At the same time, such religious references spoke to the conservativism of an old guard (the real audience for the murals) bent on preserving its social status by rendering the oppressed, underrepresented classes in an elevated fashion and making the Revolution symbolically palatable. I examine what José Clemente Orozco called the “surprising persistency” of Christian iconography among the increasingly Marxist artists. Viewing mural cycles at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria—including Orozco’s mostly no longer extant first murals and subsequent Franciscan series and especially David Alfaro Siqueiros’s Colegio Chico—through these lenses allows for new iconographical and contextual interpretations of key, but little understood, early murals. Probing artists’ deliberate use of colonial models also underscores their developing understanding of muralism as Revolutionary messianic mission (akin to the catechizing project of sixteenth-century Catholic friars) in line with their own radical politics. In positing sixteenth-century missionary complexes as exemplars for the artists—whose own murals adorned colonial and neocolonial buildings—I argue for the colonial period as a deliberate, and loaded, model on the level of both form and content.