How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture

A public art movement initiated by the postrevolutionary state, Mexican muralism has long been admired for its depictions of popular struggle and social justice. Mary K. Coffey revises traditional accounts of Mexican muralism by describing how a radical art movement was transformed into official culture, ultimately becoming a tool of state propaganda. Analyzing the incorporation of mural art into Mexico's most important public museums—the Palace of Fine Arts, the National History Museum, and the National Anthropology Museum—Coffey illuminates the institutionalization of muralism and the political and aesthetic issues it raised. She focuses on the period between 1934, when José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera were commissioned to create murals in the Palace of Fine Arts, through the crisis of state authority in the 1960s. Coffey highlights a reciprocal relationship between Mexico's mural art and its museums. Muralism shaped exhibition practices, which affected the politics, aesthetics, and reception of mural art. Interpreting the iconography of Mexico's murals, she focuses on representations of mestizo identity, the preeminent symbol of postrevolutionary Mexico. Coffey argues that those gendered representations reveal a national culture project more invested in race and gender inequality than in race and class equality.

"How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture is art history and sociocultural analysis at its best. We now have, for the first time in English, a detailed discussion of how murals were integrated into museum practice in the one country in the Americas where muralism underpinned the development of state ideologies and popular culture."—Barry Carr, author of Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, "Mary K. Coffey has written a splendid analysis of muralism as an indispensable element in the museography of citizenship-making, nation-building, and international cultural politics in modern Mexico. At the same time, she elegantly engages Octavio Paz's essays to produce an illuminating argument about art, gender, national identity, and the Mexican cultural state. Particularly welcome is her treatment of the critical, contestatory exhibit as part of state politics after 1968."—Mary Kay Vaughan, Emerita Professor, University of Maryland, "This is a major work of scholarship, a sorely needed and comprehensive treatment of the relationships between muralism and nationalist political culture, and between mural production and museum practice, in mid-twentieth-century Mexico."—Leonard Folgarait, author of Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940: Art of the New Order, “Readers from all disciplines will find here a sophisticated analysis of how, when, and where Mexico’s early twentieth-century artistic and political revolutions intersected and how, in becoming orthodoxy, they informed and were informed by museum spaces and practices.”, “[T]his book… addresses a fascinating topic and the reader is left in no doubt about the writer’s expertise in the matter of Mexican mural art…. This is a very valid and serious object of study, and Coffey provides a rich, nuanced understanding of the works that she examines – from the social realism and drama of José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera to the Bahaus abstraction of Mathias Goeritz.”

Mary K. Coffey is Associate Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College.