La Jornada: Italy: the Capitoline Museums invite you to “a journey through the colors of Mexico”

Rome. “A journey through the colors of Mexico” is the invitation with which the Capitoline Museums present the exhibition Diego Rivera and the construction of modern art in Mexico in the 20th century, which can be visited from tomorrow until December 13 at Villa Caffarelli, a modern exhibition space in the oldest public complex in the world.

It is not a retrospective of Rivera, but an exploration of Mexican artistic modernity through his work and that of other essential protagonists of national art.

Organized by the administration of Rome and the Capitoline Superintendence of Cultural Assets, in collaboration with MetaMorfosi and the Kaluz Museum in Mexico City, the exhibition is curated by Miguel Fernández Félix, general director of the Kaluz Museum, and Alberto González Torres, from the Robert Brady Museum in Cuernavaca.

The promotional formula chosen is symptomatic of a trend that has marked the Italian reception of Mexican art for decades, often more interested in underlining its exoticism and color than in promoting a true cultural dialogue.

According to Mario Sartor, art historian and one of the main Italian references in the study of Latin American art, the reception of Mexican plastic art was marked for much of the 20th century by a predominantly Italocentric view that reduced the complexity of the continent to a few reference figures, and often to superficial readings conditioned by ideological prejudices.

For this specialist, Rivera occupied a unique position in Italy for decades: he was practically the only Latin American artist present in the imagination of critics and the public, although often in a superficial and distorted way.

Become an emblem of an entire continent and a character rather than an artist, critics preferred to insist on the picturesque image of the revolutionary who “painted with the palette in one hand and the gun in the other,” rather than analyze the aesthetic, historical and political scope of a fundamental work for understanding Mexican modernity.

Although the 25th Venice Biennale in 1950 is often considered the decisive moment in the discovery of Mexican art in Italy, recent research by Isabella Proia has shown that interest in Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros had already manifested itself in the first post-war years.

Documents from 1946 found in the Diplomatic Historical Archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reveal the existence of a project for the three muralists to carry out a joint work in the Foro Italico, the former Mussolini Forum, a vast sports and monumental complex located on the banks of the Tiber and conceived as one of the main showcases of fascist ideology.

Conceived by Rivera as a “lyric of the Latin fraternity” and financed by the Mexican government, the initiative foundered amid economic and organizational difficulties, aggravated by the Allied occupation of the site and by the reservations aroused by Siqueiros’s communist activism.

Venturi and De Micheli, popularizers

The true recognition of Mexican muralism in Italy came in the postwar period, when intellectuals such as Lionello Venturi and, above all, Mario de Micheli began to place Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros among the protagonists of international modernity.

For De Micheli, muralism represented “the highest example of contemporary epic realism”: a form of modern, public and deeply human art, capable of reconciling formal innovation, social commitment and a close relationship with history and the collective aspirations of its time.

Chiara Stella Alberti’s research, based on the Ada and Mario de Micheli Fund in Milan – an extraordinary archive that brings together more than 22 thousand volumes, specialized magazines, correspondence, manuscripts, photographs and exhibition catalogs – allows us to reconstruct the reception of Mexican muralism in Italy from the post-war period to the 1980s.

His study reveals the way in which De Micheli found in the art that emerged from the Mexican Revolution a model capable of reconciling formal innovation, social commitment and public vocation.

With the purpose of learning first-hand about that artistic experience, De Micheli traveled to Mexico in 1966. During his stay he lived with Siqueiros in Cuernavaca for a week, visited his workshops and toured some of his mural projects. From that meeting came the monograph Siqueiros, published in 1968 and later republished in the United States and Mexico.

His dissemination work continued with the great retrospective dedicated to the artist in Florence in 1976, where some of his murals were reproduced on a full scale, and with the exhibition on José Clemente Orozco organized in Siena in 1981. Thanks to these initiatives, De Micheli became a decisive figure for the critical reception of Mexican muralism in Italy.

Despite this solid background, interest was never fully consolidated, and Rivera’s figure ended up displaced by stories more easily assimilated by the art system.

The most eloquent case was the media construction of Frida Kahlo as a global icon, a popularity that over time ended up eclipsing the notoriety that the muralist had sustained for decades.

Seen from this perspective, the Roman exhibition constitutes much more than a historical review: it is a new opportunity to bring the Italian public closer to an artistic tradition that for decades had a limited and fragmentary reception.

It is still significant that it today occupies one of the most prestigious and visible exhibition spaces in the Italian capital – an institutional centrality rarely granted to Latin American art.

But beyond Rivera and the muralists, the exhibition brings together fundamental figures of Mexican modernity such as Rufino Tamayo, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Carlos Mérida, Roberto Montenegro, Juan O’Gorman, María Izquierdo, Leonora Carrington and Rosa Rolanda, to name a few, revealing an artistic panorama of extraordinary richness and diversity. Far from those old stereotypes, the exhibition proposes a journey through some of the most sophisticated and original expressions of artistic modernity of the 20th century.