La Jornada: An exhibition about the work of Diego Rivera and modern art opens in Rome

Rome. During much of the 20th century, the Mexican State projected the artistic image of the country through large exhibitions of a diplomatic nature: from participation in the universal exhibitions of the Porfiriato to the monumental international exhibitions organized by Fernando Gamboa starting in the 1950s, culminating with Mexico: Splendors of thirty centuries (1990) at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The current exhibition at the Capitoline Museums in Rome reveals, however, a significant change in the way of building the international presence of Mexican art: the protagonism has shifted from public museums to private collections supported by cultural alliances between Mexico and Italy.

The exhibition Diego Rivera and the construction of modern art in Mexico in the 20th century was inaugurated at the Museos Capitalinos-Villa Caffarelli, which brings together 145 works that cover more than a century of Mexican art. The project has been promoted by the Kaluz Museum, in collaboration with the Associazione MetaMorfosi and under the endorsement of the Ministry of Culture of Mexico and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (Inbal). The curatorship is in charge of Miguel Fernández Félix and Alberto González Torres

Among the main lenders are, in addition to Kaluz himself, the collections of Andrés Blaisten, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón and Manuel Reyero, as well as the Robert Brady Foundation and the Veracruz State Art Museum. This public-private cooperation scheme was formally recognized the day after the inauguration, when the Mexican embassy in Italy distinguished organizers and providers for their work in disseminating Mexican artistic heritage.

Among those honored, Armando Colina stood out, a pioneering figure in the promotion of Mexican art both in the country and abroad. Promoter of countless international exhibitions through the Arvil Gallery, he also participated in the Roman exhibition and received this recognition at the age of 91, a few weeks after the tribute that was paid to him in Madrid, in what constitutes a kind of coronation of a career dedicated to the international projection of Mexican art.

As Ambassador Genaro Lozano pointed out, the objective is to strengthen a bridge of dialogue between two countries that conceive culture as a universal language of peace and encounter. In that same spirit, Mexico has recently founded the Tina Modotti Cultural Institute of Mexico in Italy, whose first director is Mónica de la Mora.

More than a total narrative, it offers a panoramic

The exhibition does not have the scale of the large state exhibitions of the last century nor does it attempt to construct a total narrative of Mexico from ancient times to the present day. Your bet is different. It articulates an overview of more than a century of Mexican art based on the figure of Diego Rivera and a set of works that privileges aesthetic quality and, above all, the intimate nature of the discovery. Many of the pieces on display come from private collections and have rarely been seen publicly.

Rivera’s works make up a quarter of the exhibition and focus mainly on his formative period in Europe. Paintings, drawings and lithographs dialogue with the famous photographs of Tina Modotti that document the artist working on emblematic murals such as The creation and those of the Ministry of Public Education. Likewise, an audiovisual record of the mural cycle Corrido of the Revolution (1923-1928) shows the daily life of the building and its users, materializing one of the central ideals of muralism: the integration between art and life.

Although exploring European influences might seem like an anachronistic stance today compared to the global and anti-Eurocentric readings that are dominant today, the exhibition is paradoxically original: in the face of a Mexican historiography that has tended to construct national modernity outside of that heritage, the exhibition claims precisely that contact as the key to its formation, although with a much more modern vision.

The essays in the catalog, including those by Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama and Sandra Zetina, propose a renewed reading of the European experience of Mexican artists. They emphasize that they had to face prejudices and racist attitudes – as happened with Diego Rivera, whose creative capacity was questioned by the poet Pierre Reverdy due to his origins and accent – ​​while actively participating in international artistic life. Far from being mere disciples, they assimilated languages ​​such as cubism to reinterpret them from their own cultural codes. Rivera, for example, produced more than a hundred Cubist works between 1913 and 1917 that placed him among the leading figures of the Parisian avant-garde and even led him to creatively rival Picasso.

Organized into four thematic sections, the exhibition traces the origins of modern Mexican art in the academic tradition of the 19th century. Trained in Rome, Juan Cordero and José Salomé Pina illustrate two different paths: while the former applied European technique to the representation of mestizo and contemporary Mexican characters, anticipating a national sensibility, Pina remained closer to the classicist ideal of that continent. Their contrast suggests that Mexicanidad did not emerge through a rupture, but rather as a gradual transformation from within academicism itself.

Rivera’s European training is proposed as a determining factor for the emergence of muralism. If Parisian Cubism provided him with the formal structure, his trip to Italy in 1920-1921, which Clara Bargellini described since the 1980s as a “second academy”, revealed something deeper to him: the unity between art and community life. This double heritage, integrated with indigenous and popular Mexican traditions, gave rise to a universal artistic language at the service of a modern and revolutionary identity.

The exhibition proposes a reading of Mexican modernity not as an isolated phenomenon or nationalist affirmation, but as a result of cultural exchanges and appropriations.