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Diego Rivera, an acclaimed Mexican painter active during the first half of the 20th century, painted multiple frescoes in Mexico and the United States. Some include depictions of bacteria, their interactions with human hosts, and processes related to microbiology and public health, including the microbial origin of life, diagnosis of infection, vaccine production, and immunization. Microbiological subjects in Rivera's murals at the Mexican Ministry of Health in Mexico City; the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit; Rockefeller Center, New York/Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Chapultepec Park, Mexico City; and the Institute of Social Security, Mexico City, span almost 25 years, from 1929 to 1953. Illustrating the successes of the application of microbiological discoveries and methods to public health and the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, they benefited from Rivera's creativity in melding microbiology's unique technological and scientific aspects and public health elements with industrial and political components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diego Rivera's mural El hombre controlador del universo (1934) can be read as foreshadowing the anxieties and optimisms about atomic power that shaped popular culture in Mexico during the nuclear age. In epic fashion, Rivera's vision affirms the agency of ordinary people in the face of a technological epoch while eerily anticipating the bipolarity of the Cold War, themes that would be revisited by Julián Soler in his film Santo contra Blue Demon en la Atlantida (1969), which bears out the prophecy of Rivera's mural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how Yiddish writing in Mexico illuminates the ambiguous position of Jews both within their local context and as part of a global network of Yiddish modernist writers. Through an analysis of the poetry of two Jewish immigrants to Mexico, Yitzjok (Isaac) Berliner (1899–1957) and Jacobo Glantz (1902–1982), this article argues that these immigrant poets adopted local themes and styles characteristic of Mexican modernism as a way to rhetorically write Jews into the nation. Although Mexican modernist literature and art was most typically expressed in Spanish, these poets took on local forms but preserved Jewish difference by writing in Yiddish. At the same time, Berliner and Glantz also engaged with a global, diasporic network of Yiddish modernism centered in New York and Warsaw. Focusing on the so-called "Mexican" subject matter enabled these poets to participate in a larger conversation about expanding the boundaries of Yiddish literature, proposing the literature's worldliness by speaking beyond an explicitly Jewish experience. The works of these immigrant writers, therefore, demonstrate the emergence of a Third Space at the intersection not only of the immigrant and the nation, but also between the periphery and the centers of a transnational Yiddish network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The City at the Crossroads of History was commissioned for the Puffin Gallery of Social Activism, Museum of the City of New York. Despite the unanimous approval by the museum's own committee of leading academics and intellectuals, it was censored on political grounds by the museum and the Puffin Foundation. Composed of four panels, the 16'x21' mural is now on display at Red Square, New London, CT. The mural gives visual expression to the great spirit of social activism in New York City, recognizing the collective contribution of millions of people in the ongoing struggle for social and economic justice—a dynamic, ever-present, interrelated social process. Revolutionary struggle is now an essential element of life – critical for the very survival of our species. Complete mural and more information can be found at . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• GPR high frequency surveys allow estimating the state of alteration of the mural by Diego Rivera • 3D images of the interior of the wall to detect the arrangement of cracks • 1D synthetic method for interpreting the type of material that causes the anomalies The aim of this paper is to verify whether GPR surveys using high-frequencies allow estimating the state of alteration of murals and, through the generation of three-dimensional images of the interior of the wall at different depths, detect the arrangement of cracks, the texture and structure of the building materials, and their relationship with the mural painting preservation. The results obtained are required to determine the causes of the recurrent damages, previous to its restoration of a mural painting by Diego Rivera located in a cultural heritage colonial building in Mexico City, where invasive or destructive techniques cannot be applied. Additionally, in order to refine results, synthetic modeling and comparison with real traces were used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I will analyse the links between the revisionist historiography of the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 and the revisionist literature on the Mexican murals produced in the period immediately afterwards, as well as the theoretical arguments that underpin both, before making a call for a "post-revisionist" reading of the art. I will then finish by making a post-revisionist iconographical analysis of Diego Rivera's History of Mexico mural produced between 1929-35 as a counterpoint to revisionist ones that instead read it as government propaganda pure and simple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frida Kahlo once wrote that her husband, the great muralist Diego Rivera, was 'fundamentally a constructor, an investigator and above all, an architect'. Delving into this unexplored aspect of his artistic production, this article reassesses Rivera's muralism in light of his contribution to post-revolutionary architectural discourses and his relationship with the architect Juan O'Gorman to demonstrate how concepts of building design influenced his approach to visual composition. In 1931, O'Gorman constructed a house-studio for Kahlo and Rivera which exemplified the functionalist style that rose to prominence in public architecture during that decade. Drawing attention to the anatomical analogies employed by O'Gorman to articulate his utilitarian architectural vision, the author examines how Rivera's contemporary architecturally themed mural The Making of a Fresco (1931) integrates functionalist principles to establish a parallel between the discipline of built spaces and the bodies inhabiting them. Although both O'Gorman and Rivera later rejected functionalism in favour of an organic style, they continued to rely on physiological metaphors to conceptualise the relationship between architectural form and function. By following their shifting theorisations of the organic in modern architecture, the author traces the development of their shared thinking and an evolution in post-revolutionary building design from functionalism to a post-Taylorist organicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief essay uses Pandurang Khankhoje, an Indian scientist and political refugee in Mexico, as an example of the value of using a largo dislocare approach to write histories of science. Largo dislocare is an invitation to dislocate known histories not just geographically but also chronologically to better understand the motion of people, ideas and objects. By examining the largo (long) trajectory of science in spaces that do not conform to traditional history of science markers we acknowledge that our established chronologies are in need of expansion. For the where with which we begin these histories is as essential as when we begin them. In addition, this approach challenges us to consciously and constantly search for evidence to write about how those on the fringes of society - migrants, refugees, members of ostracized ethnic groups, etc. - in the so-called global margins produce science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mid-twentieth century Mexican hospitals – the buildings themselves and their interior and exterior walls – became stages that depicted national hopes and aspirations. Hospitals and clinics became ideal spaces that married science and medicine with the state’s version of a triumphant social revolution. Visitors and patients to hospital waiting rooms, lobbies and auditoriums would see, indeed be surrounded by, depictions of the complicated hopes placed on science and medicine as interpreted by politicians, architects, and artists. Hospital walls became contested spaces where art depicted Mexico’s embrace of modern technology and medical practices while also showcasing, in vivid color, citizens challenging the government’s broken revolutionary promises, especially the right of all to health and social security. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The critical discourse on Carlos Chávez's music is full of contradictions regarding the presence within it of signifiers of the Mexican, the pre-Columbian, and the indigenous. Between 1918 and 1928 Chávez in fact developed, from stylistic preferences that appeared early in his compositions, a polysemic language that he could use equally well to address the very modern or the primitive, the pre-Columbian or the contemporary mestizo, in and only in those works in which he chose to do so. Chávez's referents emerged in dialogue with the cultural and political contexts in which he worked, those of post-revolutionary Mexico and modern New York. But he was attracted above all to modernism and modernity, and was impacted by cosmopolitan forces at home and abroad. By the end of the decade he had earned a position within the modern musical field's network of social relations, and had drawn the attention of agents of recognition such as Edgard Varèse, Paul Rosenfeld, Aaron Copland, and Henry Cowell. These composers and critics added Chávez's constructed difference to their much-sought collective difference as Americans within a European art. Chávez's own use of explicit Mexican referents in some of his works shaped the early reception of his music as quintessentially American/Mexican, eventually influencing the way we understand it today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the development of Mexican art after the Mexican Revolution. This text identifies and investigates historical figures, vanguard art movements and artists who have contributed to the development of Mexican art in general and Mexican Muralism in particular. By considering how the Mexican civil war enabled the convergence of interests of both the state and artists and examining developments in vanguard Mexican art of the twentieth century, the author invites rethinking about whether mural painting was or was not official or state art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The most recent revisionist accounts of Mexican muralism – and in particular that provided by Leonard Folgarait – have read the murals produced by los tres grandes – Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros – through a Foucauldian prism based upon a Poulantzian theory of the state. Eliding the concept of human agency and its complicated relationship to state patronage, these interpretations read off the imperatives of state ideology into the various murals sponsored by successive post-revolutionary governments. Consequently, the muralists become unreflexive agents of counter-revolution, and the political differences between them, and between them and the post-revolutionary governments that patronized them, largely insignificant. Following the suggestive readings of Meyer Schapiro and David Craven, the author introduces a more complex theory of the Mexican state into an analysis of the murals that it sponsored to allow for a far more differentiated and nuanced reading that properly contextualizes this important political medium as a site of active struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the influence of parents on the development of their offspring; less has been written about the effect of older children on their younger siblings. Yet those growing up within the same family may have had different experiences, the younger ones usually having been exposed to greater or more intense educational opportunities. The pages that follow examine the gap in education and sophistication that existed between Frida Kahlo and her two older sisters. Based on the correspondence archived in the Frida Kahlo papers, Nelleke Nix and Mariane Huber Collection, housed in the Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, D. C., we have reconstructed the rela-tionship among the Kahlo sisters during the period 1932-1933, when Frida Kahlo experienced three traumatic events that had a profound effect on her life: a miscarriage; the death of her mother; and the willful destruction of a mural that her husband, Diego Rivera, had painted in New York's Rockefe-ller Center. Beyond the intrinsic value of sharing this correspondence with a broader audience, the letters shed light on the close relationship between one of the most famous artists of the 20th century and two key members of her immediate family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beyond his work as Diego Rivera's assistant in San Francisco and Detroit, little has been written about the British mural painter Viscount ‘Jack’ Hastings, creator of theWorker of the Future Upsetting the Economic Chaos of the Presentat the Marx Memorial Library in London. Drawing on a range of documentary sources and discussing some hitherto unknown murals in both the US and the UK, this article will examine the development of Hastings’ work as an artist and political activist. A key theme of this article will be to explore Hastings’ role in attempts to promote mural painting and socially committed art in England through his involvement with the Artists International Association and his writings forLeft ReviewandArchitectural Review. This article will also examine the relationship between Hastings’ work and his political interests, which culminated in his abandoning his artistic career in order to serve as a junior minister in Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The essay takes its cue from Diego Rivera's murals accomplished in the thirties in the United States in order to localize in them an allegory of North-South relations, North America and Latin America. The Mexican muralist's trip to the United States allegorizes this relationship in which are formulated strategies for combining technology and nature, the machine and the body, in these murals which represent the Fordist production line and the racionalization of time in physical labor. Rivera's trip also allegorizes the constitution of "Latin Americanism", as an Academic field in which are introduced Cultural representations of Latin America in the United States. Drawing from this model the essay studies the politics of the Spanish language as a diasporic language in the United States, following the translation paradigm, and embodying itself in possible ways of enlisting the body as a body of language in the poems of Rosário Castellanos and Pablo Neruda's classic, "Alturas de Macchu Picchu". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the representation of the feminine archetype in Diego Rivera's murals, considering not just his learned use of traditional allegorical symbols, but also, his personal experiences, in particular those in regard to filial love, maternity/paternity, and his very complex amorous relationships with some outstanding women of his time, which in a more or less conscious way, the artist intertwined with extraordinary lyrical imagination in his ample and complex iconographic programs. I conclude that for Rivera, muralism was not only an instrument of political action, such as it is normally recognized by specialized literature, but also, an opportunity to elaborate personal themes, in which paradoxically he reaches a greater degree of universality and transcendence that the one which characterizes his history paintings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In using key texts of Marx and Engels against all dogmatic schools of Marxism, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez accomplished a major theoretical shift by revalidating ‘modern art’ from within the Marxist tradition, so that ‘socialist pluralism’, and not any single doctrine of ‘social realism’, seemed most consistent with the vantage point of Marx. Sánchez Vázquez wrote significant art criticism about the murals of Diego Rivera in which he deftly applied his concept of non-normative Marxism. Remaining focused on Rivera, in this article Sánchez Vázquez concentrates on the characteristics and deliberates the roles of political art. The author examines how and why Rivera's artwork is political in nature and cites a diverse range of evidence to make his point. Sánchez Vázquez also evaluates the aesthetic quality of Rivera's work and makes connections between the Mexican artist and Pablo Picasso, Francisco Goya, Eugène Delacroix and Honoré Daumier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]