Mexican Culture, Art & Literary Artists

The Mexican Revolution with its violence extending from 1910 to the early '30s, there has been an outburst of creativity that has extended past the boundaries of American and Hispanic culture to reach a worldwide audience - particularly in the graphic arts.

This statement may seem overblown because the names of Mexican graphic artists are not as celebrity-iconographic as, say, Picasso or Warhol, nor as written-about as the country's literary figures, such as Carlos Fuentes and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. If anything, however, it is an understatement. Mexican art in the 20th Century, particularly in the work of muralists such as Diego Rivera, JosT Orozco and David Siqueiros, has provided the catalytic inspiration for schools of international art ostensibly unrelated to the Mexican experience per se - yet inextricably linked to the humanity underlying their works (Stefoff 116-117; Strickland & Boswell 157). Spaniard Pablo Picasso is rightly honored for his 1937 mural "Guernica"; its connections with Mexican works such as Orozco's 1932 "Epic of American Civilization" is impossible to deny (De La Croix, Taney & Kirkpatrick 1025-1026). In the 1960s Polish-American Andy Warhol rode high on a "Pop Art" style that made icons of the everyday and the everyday into a background of "art" for everyone (Strickland & Boswell 174-176); in the 1920s the Mexican Secretary of Public Education, JosT Vasconcelos, had already put muralists to making almost every public wall a background of da

Related Essays

American and Architecture 1. Seventeenth-cen .... be taken off his style by exposure to European culture. .... and Arshile Gorky) and some of its ...., such as .... was encouraged by the leftist Mexican muralists Diego .... (8919 36 )

Female Literary Accomplishments .... no opportunity to create a tradition of ..... .... also parallels a similar distance in culture between North .... As the old Mexican singer, Thea's erstwhile friend in .... (9068 36 )

Literature & the Female Perspective Written by a Woman .... especially no opportunity to create a tradition of ..... .... fairly well settled in mainstream culture, with a .... As the old Mexican singer, Thea's erstwhile friend in .... (9458 38 )

Willa Cather & the Feminist Perspective Written by a Woman .... especially no opportunity to create a tradition of ..... .... fairly well settled in mainstream culture, with a .... As the old Mexican singer, Thea's erstwhile friend in .... (9458 38 )

The Frontier The frontier held an important pla .... the more comic and over-the-top films of .... Mix or .... times come to the aid of a small Mexican village .... of their land and the destruction of their culture by white .... (4382 18 )

uses of the Indian population. A strong, land-owning hidalgo (noble) could override a single priest. A governor intent upon filling his coffers with silver (to which the Crown would be entitled to a sizeable share) rarely listened to a bishop's objections when it came to demanding that the "free" Indians contribute several months' labor a year to the mines. And so forth (Fehrenbach 204-209, 223-226). Simultaneous to these defeats, the missionaries were much more aggressive about ensuring the baptism of every single Amerindian under their "care." In this they had the egregious support of the conquerors: as the Indians had bowed to the politico-religious hierarchy of the Aztec, so, too, would they willingly accept their new Spanish overlords if whitewashed with a patina of religious significance (Chavez 19-20). Among the indigenous peoples, then, arts and rituals were devoted to the Church - or they were not tolerated at all, for fear of reviving "pagan" practices (or rebellion). This is a condensation of a century's development. Many of the early-arriving missionaries were devoted to preserving records of Amerindian art, ritual and language; schools and universities were established - with Indian participation expected. T

Category: Literature - M