A mural cannot be rolled up and sold, and for the painters who came out of the Mexican Revolution that was its great virtue. The picture stayed with its building and with everyone who walked into it. Yet several walls here were painted far from Mexico, and more than one was whitewashed, covered over or cut out.
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Why Mexico Handed Its Walls to Painters
Mexican muralism was born in the early 1920s, as ten years of revolution came to an end. The new government needed to explain itself to a population that mostly could not read, and it chose pictures. In 1921 the new minister of public education, the philosopher Vasconcelos, offered painters the bare walls of government buildings, to be covered with lessons in history.
The wall itself was part of the message. A canvas can be bought and carried off to a private house. A painting on the wall of a school or a ministry stays where everyone passes it each day, and several of these painters, who were communists, wanted exactly that.
Most of them went back to fresco, the Italian technique of painting on lime plaster while it is still wet. As the plaster sets, the color becomes part of the wall, and a mistake means chipping out the plaster. Later, some of them traded fresco for cement, spray guns and even colored stone.
Three of these painters soon dominated the movement so completely that Mexicans still speak of los tres grandes, meaning the big three. Around 1930 their walls moved north, to American colleges, a museum and a skyscraper.
Each wall on this list was made for one particular building, and each entry follows what happened between the painting and that place.
12. David Alfaro Siqueiros, Plastic Exercise (1933)
Stretched long by the bend of a curved vault, naked bodies run across the ceiling and carry on down the walls and across the floor. Every one of them was painted from photographs of the same woman, the Uruguayan poet Blanca Luz Brum.
The room is a cellar near Buenos Aires, and the man in charge was David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1933 the president of Argentina had barred him from painting in public, and a private commission came instead. Natalio Botana, a newspaper owner, wanted a room for entertaining in the cellar of his country house.
Siqueiros used a method that owed nothing to fresco. The photographs were projected onto fresh cement, and the painters sprayed color over them with airbrushes. With four South American painters, he worked for six months on more than 120 square meters.
There is no worker in the room, no flag and no slogan, only the body of one woman, repeated. She was Siqueiros's companion, and the couple came apart while the work went on.
A few days after the room was finished, Siqueiros joined a political demonstration and had to leave the country. The painting stayed in the cellar until 1989, when the house was demolished and a restorer cut the painted skin away in five blocks. Since 2010 the blocks have stood together again in the museum of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires.
To me, no room in the movement is stranger. A painter who believed that pictures belonged to crowds made his most daring experiment for a few guests in a private bar, and only cutting it out of the house brought it before the public.
At a Glance
Artist: David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896 to 1974), with Antonio Berni, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Juan Carlos Castagnino and Enrique Lázaro
Painted: 1933, Don Torcuato, near Buenos Aires
Medium: Silicate paint sprayed on fresh cement over walls, floor and ceiling
Size: More than 120 square meters, or about 1,300 sq ft (published as an area, not in cm or in)
Where to see it: Museo Casa Rosada, Buenos Aires
11. Aurora Reyes, Attack on the Rural Teachers (1936)
On a wall of a public school in Mexico City, men beat a teacher with rifle butts and drag her by the hair. Her money is being taken, her books lie trampled, and children watch from behind a column. The scene was not invented. In March 1936, newspapers reported that rural teachers had been murdered in San Felipe Torres Mochas, in the state of Guanajuato, and the woman who painted the wall that same year, Aurora Reyes, was a drawing teacher herself.