Frida Diego WPA

WPA art: a celebration of workers

POSTED SEPTEMBER 6, 2021

The Great Depression of the 1930's saw US unemployment rates soar to 25%. To make matters worse, a period of extended drought and a series of severe dust storms devastated America's farms. Hunger and poverty gripped the entire nation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" tackled these issues in the greatest effort America had ever seen to build a social safety net for its people. The year 1935 was particularly momentous with the passage of the Social Security Act and creation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA employed millions of job-seekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, including the construction of public buildings and roads.

One of the more surprising elements of the WPA was the "project to employ competent, unemployed artists in decorating Federal buildings where there was no money available for this decoration under the building fund." In deciding to move forward with the project, President Roosevelt was significantly influenced by the work of Diego Rivera. Roosevelt was drawn to Rivera’s murals, such as “Detroit Industry”, which featured images from American life on the walls of public buildings. [video below] These images also inspired many artists who produced works for the New Deal programs, and many of them continued to deal with the political issues raised by Rivera. [1]

Among the 10,000 "competent, unemployed artists" commissioned to work for the Federal Arts Project were Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the photographer Dorothea Lange. The Federal Arts Project also established more than 100 community art centers across the country. Although the FAP put no restrictions on the artists as to content or style, it encouraged the artists to paint with the public in mind. The artists produced graphic posters, documentary photographs, large-scale sculptures, modernist murals, and other works of art - mainly for municipal and public buildings, but also for theaters, museums, and other arts organizations. [2]

Their work documented everyday life during the Depression, put a face on the people's struggle and, appropriately for this Labor Day 2021, celebrated workers. Below are a few of the works from the Federal Arts Project.

Winold Reiss and the Cincinnati Union Terminal

The mural of construction workers on steelwork high above the river port of Cincinnati is one of more than a dozen created for the Cincinnati Union Rail Terminal by Winold Reiss. Commissioned by the Federal Arts Project to portray the history of Cincinnati, the German-born Winold Reiss did so by blending Art Deco with portraiture and captured the history of Cincinnati through its people.

The Cincinnati Union Terminal murals are considered his most outstanding works, but Reiss is also known for his portraitures. He painted a broad cross section of peoples in the United States - including 250 portraitures of Native Americans, particularly the Blackfeet of Montana, and illustrations for Alain Locke's The New Negro, an important book about African American culture at the time of the Harlem Renaissance. When Reiss died in 1953, the Blackfeet spread his ashes along the eastern edge of Glacier National Park.

Muses of Music, Dance, Drama by George Stanley

The Art Deco style monument serves as the gateway to the Hollywood Bowl. Constructed between 1938 and 1940, it is the largest of hundreds of WPA sculpture projects created in southern California. The monument is composed of a large fountain and multi-tiered sculptural base. The crowning feature of the fountain is the Muse of Music, a 15 foot tall kneeling statue playing a harp. [shown left] On either side of the fountain are two smaller 10 foot tall statues set back in ziggurat-shaped niches; these figures represent the muses of dance and drama. [4]

Besides sculpting the Muses, George Maitland Stanley also designed the Academy Award of Merit statue, better known as the "Oscar."

Arthur Getz, Untitled

North America's breadbasket, the prairies of the United States and Canada, was devastated by drought and dust storms in the 1930's. Recovery and development of rural areas were a large part of the New Deal. Before the advent of Big Agriculture, small farms produced the food for our nation. Arthur Getz, who later became the cover illustrator for The New Yorker, captures the labors of a farm family struggling to renew the land. Dark clouds are on the horizon and the utility poles in the distance are leaning precariously, but I'm pretty sure the hard-working subjects of Getz's painting will succeed.

Daniel Celentano, Festival

Even during a Depression, life goes on and close-knit communities find a way to survive, often joyously.

Daniel Celentano, an Italian American from an uptown New York City neighborhood called Italian Harlem, saw many processions like the one shown here. Such street festivals, or festa, were vital social events that helped the Italian American Catholic communities of New York survive the stresses of the Depression as they had endured previous decades of poverty and oppression. A market includes a fish seller, a pizza vendor, and a butcher hawking their wares in front of a spaghetti house. In the background are the natural-gas tanks that once blighted Manhattan's immigrant slums. [5]

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother

Finally, lest we lose sight of the reason for the creation of the WPA, we conclude with the iconic photograph by Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother.

A photographer for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930's, Lange had been commissioned to document the impact of federal programs intended to improve rural communities. In her travels across the country, she also worked on a personal project: photographing the real-life effects of the Depression. During a visit to a campsite of out-of-work pea pickers, Lange spotted a particularly downtrodden woman and immediately felt compelled to photograph her. With the woman's permission, she snapped six photographs, one of which is Migrant Mother. [3]

“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

References: [1] PBS [2] My Modern Met-1 [3] My Modern Met - 2 [4] LA County Arts [5] Smithsonian American Art Museum

Frida Kahlo, Feminist and Chicana Icon

POSTED SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

In the decades since her death in 1954 at age 47, Frida Kahlo has become one of the most famous Latin American painters. The Tate Modern considers Kahlo "one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century", while according to art historian Elizabeth Bakewell, she is "one of Mexico's most important twentieth-century figures".

Her vividly colored paintings exploring suffering, loss, and female identity made her an international icon of the feminist movement, while her celebration of traditional Mexican culture and her political beliefs made her a hero to the Chicano movement. [sidebar]

In 2010, the 100th anniversary of the Mexican Revolution and the 200th anniversary of Mexican Independence, Mexico honored her and her equally famous husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, by putting them on the 500 MXN banknote. [sidebar]

About one-third of her 150 surviving works are self-portraits, and the best place to start understanding Frida Kahlo's paintings is the story of her personal life.

Frida Kahlo: Feminist and Chicana icon

Frida Kahlo was born in 1907 in the Coyoacán section of Mexico City. The daughter of a German father and a Mestiza mother, her childhood and early adolescence were spent with the Mexican Revolution raging in the background. If her paintings often seem to come from a place of pain, they do so for good reason. When Kahlo was six years old, she contracted polio, which made her right leg shorter and thinner than the left. In 1925, at age 18, a serious bus accident left her with crippling injuries including a fractured spine, that led to a lifetime of pain and unsuccessful operations, and a pierced uterus and abdomen, that made her unable to bear children. Confined to bed for three months following the accident, Frida Kahlo began to paint.

Her early paintings were of her friends, her family and herself. Self-portraiture, self-reflection if you will, was a theme throughout her entire artistic career. About her self-portraits, she writes, "I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best. I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to and I paint whatever passes through my head without any consideration." Painted a year after her accident, Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress is one of her earliest self-portraits.

Towards the end of the 1920s, Frida Kahlo began to develop her own personal style, which combined realism, surrealism, and fantasy with icons from her Mexican culture to create art that some have described as "magical realism".*

Her interests in politics and art led her to join the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, through which she met fellow Mexican artist Diego Rivera. The couple married in 1929, and spent the late 1920s and early 1930s travelling in Mexico and the United States together. The Bus (1929) is an early, subtle** example of the influence of her (and Rivera's) political beliefs. It shows a few people sitting side by side on a wooden bench of a rickety bus, perhaps similar to the one where she suffered her crippling accident. The passengers are representatives of different classes of Mexican society - a housewife holding her shopping basket, a blue-collar worker in his overall, a barefoot Indian mother feeding her baby, a little boy looking around, a businessman holding his money bag, and a young girl who might be Frida herself. In painting the Indian mother as Madonna-like, Kahlo shows her sympathy for the dispossessed using classic Catholic iconography.

Whilst Diego Rivera is known for his massive murals, Frida Kahlo's works are small in size. Many are about the size of the "Ex-Voto" paintings that became popular in Mexican religious culture in the 19th century. Ex-Votos are images offered to a saint or the Madonna as a thank you for an answered prayer. They depict scenes illustrating a tragedy or someone with a grave illness or injury and a Saint or martyr that intervened to save the person. Kahlo painted the surrealistic and disturbing Henry Ford Hospital after a miscarriage in 1932. Like ex-voto's, it was painted on a metal sheet. A tearful Kahlo is lying in bed connected to a half dozen images by umbilical cords - among them the wished for son and an orchid given to her by her husband.

While many of Kahlo's paintings convey her personal life, emotional state and feminist beliefs, she also created works influenced by the Mexicanidad movement, which began in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution. The movement was a resistance of the “mindset of cultural inferiority” that had resulted from colonialism, and aimed to promote the history and culture of the indigenous Mexican people. After joining an activist group called the Cachuchas, Kahlo began dressing in the Tehuana style, the colorful Mexican dresses and shawls that appear in her pieces, such as Self-Portrait on the Border (1932) and My Dress Hangs There (1933) painted while she and Rivera were traveling in the United States and Mexico. The paintings can also be seen as a critiques of the United States: the United States is depicted as a place that is soulless with skyscrapers and machinery, while Mexico is portrayed as a naturalistic, lush, fertile ground.

Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera divorced in 1939, only to remarry a year later. Each was the great love of the other's life, although Kahlo once remarked, "There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst." One of her most famous self-portraits, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, comes from the period of their separation. Reflecting Kahlo's emotional state after the divorce, this painting is rife with symbolism.

Frida stares stoically ahead as blood trickles from wounds caused by the thorn necklace, an obvious reference to Jesus's crown of thorns.
Birds symbolize life and freedom. In Mexican culture, hummingbirds symbolize love and falling in love. In nature, hummingbirds are colorful, constantly and rapidly beating their wings. In this painting, though, a dark hummingbird is hanging lifelessly as a pendant from the thorn necklace.
Monkeys are Aztec symbols of fertility and connected with dance and the arts. They appear in numerous Kahlo paintings. She and Rivera kept several monkeys as pets, perhaps as surrogates for the children they could not have.
The black cat, a traditional symbol of bad luck, stares directly at the viewer while the background foliage creates a claustrophobic atmosphere.

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird is a visual rephrasing of Kahlo's famous statement: “At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” But the painting is not only about enduring misfortune and pain. In the butterflies, symbols of resurrection, and dragonflies, symbols of happiness, new beginnings and change, there is hope.

Frida Kahlo's paintings resonate with all those who have had to endure emotional and physical pain and with all those who have ever been marginalized. Besides being an icon to feminists and Chicanos, she has also become a hero to the LGBTQ community. As in the Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, Kahlo's paintings as well as her life radiate both resilience and hope. For those of us who may not be marginalized or suffering, her work holds meaning and relevance - like much of the greatest art, Kahlo's paintings put us in touch with the experiences and the emotions of others.

Notes

*The term magical realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh in 1925. Roh pointed out the accurate detail, photographic clarity, and elements of magic in the work. When he coined the term, he intended simply to create an art category that distinguishes the art from Realism and Expressionism. Magical realism became an actual art movement in the 1940's taking hold especially in Latin America. Magical realist authors such as Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez add supernatural characters and events in a matter-of-fact way. At times, the strange seems more normal than the real. Magical realist painters more often intended to shock their viewers but also to have their viewers see the magic in everyday life.

**Among her less subtly titled works are "Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky" and "Marxism Will Bring Health to the Sick"

Sources: Wikipedia, "Frida Kahlo’s Art through the Lens of Magical Realism", FridaKahlo.org, FridaKahloStory.com, Kahlo.org, Singulart

The legendary murals of Diego Rivera

POSTED OCTOBER 12, 2021

Diego Rivera was the most influential Mexican artist of the 20th century. As one of the founders of the Mexican Muralist movement, Rivera played a major role in Mexico's artistic Renaissance. His works have been called an "idiosyncratic fusion of Renaissance, academic, modernist and indigenous Mexican techniques, styles and motifs."

Trained in art from the age of 10, Rivera studied in Mexico City, Madrid and Paris. His admiration for the great masters is reflected in his early work. View 0f Toledo [right] exemplifies Rivera's tendency to unite traditional and more modern approaches in his work.

Reworking the famous 1597 landscape painting by El Greco, he uses the same viewpoint as the Spanish Old Master while the subdued palette, flattened forms, and unconventional use of perspective suggest the artist's admiration of Cézanne.

While Diego Rivera created dozens of "easel" paintings, he achieved international recognition because of his massive murals. He had a larger-than-life persona, was married to fellow Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and inspired US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to formulate the WPA arts projects in the 1930's. The scale of Rivera's murals appropriately reflect the major themes that he tackles in his art - social inequality; the relationship of nature, industry, and technology; and the history and fate of Mexico.

Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in, among other places, Mexico City, Chapingo, and Cuernavaca, Mexico; and San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City, United States. In 1931, a retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; this was before he completed his 27-mural series known as Detroit Industry Murals, perhaps his most admired and influential work. In a previous post, "WPA art: a celebration of workers", there is a video discussing Rivera's “Detroit Industry” series, which features images from American life on the walls of public buildings. Painted between 1932 and 1933, they were considered by Rivera to be his most successful work. In April 2014, the Detroit Industry Murals were designated by the Department of Interior as a National Historic Landmark.

Creation, a 1000 square foot mural was Rivera's first government-commissioned mural. Completed in 1922 and located at San Ildefonso College, Mexico City, it is an allegorical composition in classical Renaissance style.

Among the mythological and religious motifs in the painting, the viewer can see what could be a symbol of the Holy Trinity with blessing hands; Aton, the Egyptian symbol of the creative sun; Adam and Eve; the Greek Muses; the Christian Virtues; and in the sky symbols of Wisdom and Science.

Unlike some of Diego Rivera's later murals, the picture does not carry any political or ideological message. The painting technique is "encaustic", a complicated but ancient technique in which the pigments are applied suspended in molten wax.

Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park (above) is a fifty foot mural that takes the viewer through three key eras of Mexican history: the Conquest, the Porfiriato dictatorship, and the Revolution of 1910. The mural depicts famous people and events in the history of Mexico, passing through the Alameda Central park in Mexico City. In chronological order starting from left to right we meet numerous prominent figures from Mexican history.

The central focus of the mural is the bourgeois complacency and values shortly before the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Elegantly dressed upper-class figures promenade under the figure of the long ruling dictator Porfirio Díaz. An indigenous family is forced back by police batons and to the right flames and violence loom. To the far left, victims of the Inquisition, wearing the penitential sanbenito robes and the conical coroza hat, are consigned to the flames.

In the center of the mural (detail right) is Diego Rivera at the age of ten being led by the hand by the Dame Catrina ("La Calavera Catrina"), a skeleton figure parodying vanity and a symbol of the urban bourgeoisie. Between La Calavera Catrina and the young Diego is Frida Kahlo in a traditional Mexican dress. She holds in her left hand the Yin-Yang symbol of duality taken from Chinese philosophy, which also represents duality in pre-Columbian mythology. Kahlo's other hand rests maternally on the shoulder of the young Diego, who sets out on his walk through life and through the world under her protection.

Not all of Rivera's works were as well accepted by his American audience as was his Detroit Industry series. Case in point: "Man at the Crossroads." This fresco was first commissioned by the Rockefellers for the ground-floor wall of Rockefeller Center in New York City. However it was never completed as Rivera refused to remove a portrait of Lenin which was causing a controversy. It was subsequently destroyed but Rivera had black-and-white photographs of it. Using these, he recreated a nearly identical mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and renamed it Man, Controller of the Universe. (below).

The composition contrasts Capitalism and Socialism and depicts many aspects of contemporary social and scientific culture. In the center, a workman is shown controlling machinery. Before him, a giant fist emerges holding an orb depicting the recombination of atoms and dividing cells in acts of chemical and biological generation.

On the left side of the painting, wealthy society women are seen playing cards and smoking, and baton-wielding police are seen striking workers. At the top left, Rivera depicts the brutality of World War I to underscore how capitalist nations used technology (poison gas, machine guns, and warplanes) as destructive forces.

On the right side of the painting, Lenin is seen holding hands with a multi-racial group of workers.* We also see key figures in the worker’s movement (León Trotsky, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx) standing at the foot of a headless classical sculpture whose robe is decorated with a swastika. With workers sitting on the head of the decapitated statue, Rivera rejects both capitalism and the rising fascism of 1930's Europe as well as what he considers the failing structures that have supported Western civilization.

Throughout the painting, Rivera shows a hopeful vision of a world where people of all races and ethnicities are able to join together, be educated together, and work together towards the future. However, it is not certain that this is the world humanity will choose - hence the original name, "Man at the Crossroads."

As for his artistic legacy, besides his role in the Mexican Renaissance and Mexico's Muralist Movement, Rivera is credited with the reintroduction of fresco painting** into modern art and architecture. He also had a great impact on America’s conception of public art. In depicting scenes of American life on public buildings, Rivera provided the inspiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s WPA arts program. Many of the artists who would find work through the WPA continued to address political concerns that had first been publicly presented by Rivera. His original painting style and the force of his ideas remain major influences on American painting more than 60 years after his death.

Although many painters have imbued their work with a social consciousness, Rivera's murals are among the most direct and outspoken. He once said, “An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can’t feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn’t capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won’t put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn’t a great artist.”

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's "Diego Rivera's America" featuring 175 of the artist's works opens in July 2022. The centerpiece of the exhibit is the magnificent "Pan-American Unity" mural (below). For more on the exhibit and how the 30-ton mural was moved, click on this link.

*Even Rivera's "Detroit Industry" murals received criticism in 1930's USA because they depicted people of different races working together.

**Fresco is a technique of mural painting executed upon freshly laid lime plaster. Water is used as the vehicle for the dry-powder pigment to merge with the plaster, and with the setting of the plaster, the painting becomes an integral part of the wall.

Sources: Art Story, DiegoRivera.org - 1, Wikipedia, Learnodo-Newtonic, Khan Academy, Smart History, DiegoRivera.org - 2, Diego Rivera.org - 3, Diego Rivera.org - 4, PBS

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