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“Under Rivera’s Guidance,” 1929–1931

Robert W. Cherny

in Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art

When Arnautoff’’s student visa was expiring, Stackpole arranged an introduction to Diego Rivera, and Victor, Lydia, and their two sons spent 1929-1931 in Mexico. There Arnatuoff assisted Rivera at ... More

When Arnautoff’’s student visa was expiring, Stackpole arranged an introduction to Diego Rivera, and Victor, Lydia, and their two sons spent 1929-1931 in Mexico. There Arnatuoff assisted Rivera at the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca and the National Palace in Mexico City and encountered both the PCM (Mexican Communist Party) and Rivera’s idiosyncratic version of communism. In 1930, Rivera went to San Francisco to paint murals there, leaving Arnautoff in charge at the National Palace. Ione Robinson’s letters provide information both about life in Mexico City and about Arnautoff. In 1931, the family returned to the US as permanent residents eligible for citizenship.Less

Painting Mestizaje in a New Light: Racial, Technological, and Cultural Hybridity in the Murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco

David S. Dalton

in Mestizo Modernity: Race, Technology, and the Body in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

This chapter analyzes the state-funded murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, two artists who served as de facto mouthpieces for the state as they trumpeted the postrevolutionary tenets of ... More

This chapter analyzes the state-funded murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, two artists who served as de facto mouthpieces for the state as they trumpeted the postrevolutionary tenets of official mestizaje through their work. Despite sharing the state’s seal of approval, the two men communicated contradictory racial discourses as they disagreed about the proper place of the nation’s European and indigenous heritage within the official ideology. That said, both men’s work was pro-mestizo despite the fact that they conceived mixed-race identity in very different ways. Orozco’s understanding of racial and technological hybridity tended toward hispanismo as he constantly validated the result—if not the means—of the Spanish conquest. Unlike Orozco, Rivera carefully separated European science—which he celebrated—from the cosmology that had permitted the destruction of thousands of indigenous lives. Instead, he posited an essentialistic indigenous spirit that would redeem mestizo Mexico from the conquering nature it had inherited from its European progenitors. This paternalistic understanding of indigeneity led to an indigenista discourse that became the favored paradigm of official mestizaje throughout the mid-twentieth century.Less

May the Artist Live?

Sharon Ann Musher

in Democratic Art: The New Deal's Influence on American Culture

This chapter examines the forces encouraging the New Deal’s cultural turn. In addition to economic considerations, cultural theories also played a key role in the New Deal’s art projects. Efforts to ... More

This chapter examines the forces encouraging the New Deal’s cultural turn. In addition to economic considerations, cultural theories also played a key role in the New Deal’s art projects. Efforts to democratize and nationalize American art combined with attempts to foster a usable past and preserve culture, to address the supposed problems caused by too much leisure time, and to highlight the comparative international weakness of US investment in the arts. Key events, such as the destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center (1933) and the formation of the Popular Front (1935), further encouraged an array of leaders–within the President’s administration, the established art world, and rank-and-file artists and intellectuals—to demand and create government support for artists. Many of those art advocates idealistically, but unrealistically, hoped that such public funding would come without political strings.Less

The Good Neighbor Onstage: Carlos Chávez’s H.P. and Dialectical Indigenism

Carol A. Hess

in Representing the Good Neighbor: Music, Difference, and the Pan American Dream

This chapter explores the explicitly Pan Americanist ballet H.P. (Horsepower), with a score by Chávez and sets and costumes by Diego Rivera. In depicting the technologically advanced North with ... More

This chapter explores the explicitly Pan Americanist ballet H.P. (Horsepower), with a score by Chávez and sets and costumes by Diego Rivera. In depicting the technologically advanced North with modernist machine music and the fertile South with salon-type, body-conscious Latin American dances, Chávez, at first blush, would seem to be enshrining north-south difference. Yet musical and visual elements of H.P. embrace sameness through a phenomenon the cultural historian Jeffrey Belnap calls “dialectical indigenism,” which proclaims the continued presence of indigenous culture in modern technology. Likewise the Chávez enthusiast Paul Rosenfeld masculinized the habitually feminized South in H.P. with his customary panegyrics. Ultimately, however, Chávez returned almost immediately to ur-classicism, resulting in the Sinfonía India, his best-known work. Considered “exotic-primitivistic” in the 1970s, the Sinfonía India inspired a series of sameness-embracing paeans from critics the stature of Colin McPhee and John Cage, all of whom found little to exoticize.Less

Mexicanism Russian Style: Roberto Montenegro, Diego Rivera, and the Ballets Russes

K. Mitchell Snow

in A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico

The influence of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes saturated the artistic environment inhabited by Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro in Paris before World War I. In predecessors to the debates ... More

The influence of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes saturated the artistic environment inhabited by Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro in Paris before World War I. In predecessors to the debates surrounding nationalism in Mexico, Diaghilev explored its intersections with folk art in the pages of his magazine Mir iskusstva. Montenegro studied with Diaghilev ally Hermen Anglada who urged his disciples to use elements from their nation’s folklore to escape the hegemony of Parisian modernism. Although Rivera disparaged the Ballet Russes’s influence on Mexican art, he painted his “Mexican trophy,” a cubist Zapatista landscape with a prominent serape, in response to an exhibit of Russian folk art that had been inspired by the success of Diaghilev’s dance company. Montenegro also cited this exhibition as one of the major influences in his decision to pursue Mexican folk art as a source of inspiration.Less

Ford’s Potemkin Villages

Thomas F. Gieryn

in Truth-Spots: How Places Make People Believe

Tourists flock to Greenfield Village, Henry Ford's outdoor historical museum located just outside Detroit, and not far from the River Rouge assembly plant that ushered in the era of industrial mass ... More

Tourists flock to Greenfield Village, Henry Ford's outdoor historical museum located just outside Detroit, and not far from the River Rouge assembly plant that ushered in the era of industrial mass production. Just before the Great Depression, Ford moved or built the homes and workplaces of America's great inventors and entrepreneurs around a replica New England village green. However artificial it was to locate Ford's first factory adjacent to the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop from Dayton, Greenfield Village serves up a compelling representation of the roots of industrial capitalism in the small town life that Ford's assembly lines ironically did so much to erase. Coincidentally, Mexican socialist Diego Rivera painted "Detroit Industry," his masterful murals in the Garden Court at the Detroit Institute of Art. Tourists also flock to this very different truth-spot that depicts the prowess of machines and their capacity to ease the physical burdens of human labor, while only hinting at the possibility of a class struggle that would move society from capitalism to communism. Ford's Village and Rivera's murals rely on both authenticity and artifice to make visitors believe in very different understandings of the past and future of American industrial capitalism.Less

Red Robins, Bob Whites, and Bluebirds

John Franceschina

in Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire

After Hermes Pan completed work on Betty Grable’s Sweet Rosie O’Grady he was invited by Cole Porter to choreograph Mexican Hayride on Broadway but refused, preferring to continue his career on the ... More

After Hermes Pan completed work on Betty Grable’s Sweet Rosie O’Grady he was invited by Cole Porter to choreograph Mexican Hayride on Broadway but refused, preferring to continue his career on the West Coast. Following the production of Pin Up Girl, however, Pan grew dissatisfied with Hollywood and entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani with the view of becoming a monk. Realizing that monastic life was not to his taste, he returned to the West Coast only to be introduced to muralist Diego Rivera who invited Pan to Mexico and painted his portrait. Back at Fox Pan continues turning out musical films including Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair before he is lent out to Paramount to choreograph Irving Berlin’s Blue Skies starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby and featuring “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” After the completion of That Lady in Ermine, Fox drops Pan’s option.Less

“Sandunga”

in In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein's Mexico

This chapter explores links between the representation of women and the primitive (or the indigenous) in the “Sandunga” episode of Sergei Eisenstein's film ¡Que Viva Mexico!. It explains that this ... More

This chapter explores links between the representation of women and the primitive (or the indigenous) in the “Sandunga” episode of Sergei Eisenstein's film ¡Que Viva Mexico!. It explains that this episode reflects the dual function of woman as the figure for the essential and natural, but at the same time a force that is subversive to the masculine symbolic economy. The chapter also traces particular images of women in “Sandunga” to their representations in other artists' work, such as Tina Modotti's photography and Diego Rivera's murals.Less

Dancing a Sandunga in English: Carlos Chávez and Diego Rivera in the United States

K. Mitchell Snow

in A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico

Carlos Chávez was determined to make a name for himself through his dance compositions, trading on the Indian conception of Mexico that permeated potential audiences beyond its borders. He parlayed ... More

Carlos Chávez was determined to make a name for himself through his dance compositions, trading on the Indian conception of Mexico that permeated potential audiences beyond its borders. He parlayed the international attention his music received into a series of highly influential posts within Mexico’s cultural bureaucracy which gave him, at first, indirect influence and, eventually, full creative control over its state-sponsored theatrical dance. Failing in his efforts to see his ballets produced in his homeland or by the Ballets Russes, he traveled to the U.S., where he finally saw his third ballet, H.P., staged with designs by Diego Rivera. One Mexican critic who had traveled to the U.S for the ballet’s only performance complained about the anglicization of the work’s Mexican dance sources. Nonetheless, it demonstrated that the idea of a Mexican ballet was a viable one.Less

“If you don’t have money, you can’t dance.”: Angelo Pinto

Sharon Skeel

in Catherine Littlefield: A Life in Dance

Catherine is hired by William Goldman to stage dances for the Stanley Theatre in Philadelphia. Goldman becomes her boyfriend. At the Mastbaum Theatre, she is appointed assistant to dance director ... More

Catherine is hired by William Goldman to stage dances for the Stanley Theatre in Philadelphia. Goldman becomes her boyfriend. At the Mastbaum Theatre, she is appointed assistant to dance director Robert Alton. The Littlefield School moves to the Fuller Building. William Dollar, Douglas Coudy, and Thomas Cannon, students of Mikhail Mordkin and Ethel Phillips in Philadelphia, join Catherine’s ensemble. Mommie takes Catherine, Dorothie, and other dancers to Paris to train with Russians Lubov Egorova and Alexandre Volinine. In Paris, the sisters become friendly with choreographer George Balanchine. The Littlefields move to an elegant home in the Wynnefield neighborhood. Catherine hires Alexis Dolinoff to dance in H.P. (Horsepower), a ballet-symphony by Mexican composer Carlos Chávez in collaboration with Diego Rivera, Frances Flynn Paine, and Lincoln Kirstein. Conducted by Leopold Stokowski in March 1932, H.P. is the first piece of choreography attributed solely to Catherine.Less

Aphrodite, Atlas, and the California Body

Peter J. Hollida

in American Arcadia: California and the Classical Tradition

America’s Pacific coast promised self-fulfillment not only through moral and spiritual regeneration but exuberant physical health as well. This chapter considers how the Southland’s sunny climate, ... More

America’s Pacific coast promised self-fulfillment not only through moral and spiritual regeneration but exuberant physical health as well. This chapter considers how the Southland’s sunny climate, first promoted by the region’s boosters, actually encouraged settlers to lead their lives differently. The body became the focus of an often literal self-fashioning, through fitness masters like Jack LaLanne or cosmetics pioneer Max Factor. Self-consciously emulating ancient Greeks and Romans, Southern Californians initiated trends that would change the way Americans eat, dress, and spend their leisure time. Californians even fashioned their bodies according to classical ideals. Visual artists—Diego Rivera, David Hockney, Cronk, David Ligare, Herb Ritts, Robert Graham—were sensitive to this new conception of beauty, and represented it in various media throughout the twentieth century.Less

Minerva’s Owl and Apollo’s Lyre

Ilana Löwy

in Tangled Diagnoses: Prenatal Testing, Women, and Risk

This short chapter argues that a ‘positive’ prenatal diagnosis - that is, the diagnosis of a serious anomaly of the fetus - is always the announcement of a forthcoming loss: loss of a pregnancy or ... More

This short chapter argues that a ‘positive’ prenatal diagnosis - that is, the diagnosis of a serious anomaly of the fetus - is always the announcement of a forthcoming loss: loss of a pregnancy or loss of the hope of birth of a healthy child. Academic research has a limited capacity for dealing with emotionally charged issues. Art provides very different means to reflect on such issues. The coda juxtaposes two art works which deal with pregnancy loss, reproductive ambivalence and the liminal status of the fetus: a 2010 collection of short stories Obsoletki by a Polish poet, Justyna Bragielska, and the 1932 painting, 'Henry Ford Hospital', by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Very dissimilar in intention and execution, both art works combine raw sentiment, empathy and irony, and both firmly place failed pregnancies within the fragile, glorious, messy, tragic, banal, ambivalent, risky, and hopeful stream of life.Less

A Revolutionary Proposal

Toba Singer

in Fernando Alonso: The Father of Cuban Ballet

Touring takes company to Miami and Puerto Rico. Government withholds funding, another Hurok offer rejected. Alberto is choreographing new works, Fernando authors proposal for Latin American ballet ... More

Touring takes company to Miami and Puerto Rico. Government withholds funding, another Hurok offer rejected. Alberto is choreographing new works, Fernando authors proposal for Latin American ballet company to 1953 Continental Culture Congress in Chile which is presented by Nicolás Guillén. U.S. embassy withdraws Fernando’s work visa.Less