In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions
to modern art. John Lear's new book, Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940, examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. We asked Professor Lear to pick a handful of images studied in the book to represent the progression and politics of the Mexican proletariat.
Eleven Images from Picturing the Proletariat
The late John Berger proposed a fundamental “way of seeing” art. He wrote, “The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?” As a historian of Mexico’s working people, I began my research for Picturing the Proletariat with the related assumption that art both reflects and shapes the world in which it is produced. This would hardly be a surprise to the politically engaged, Communist-inspired artists who came of age during Mexico’s 1910 revolution, or to anyone who has seen the monumental, government-sponsored murals painted on public buildings in subsequent years by “los tres grandes” (Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros). At one level, my new book is about how post-revolutionary artists “discovered” the working people of Mexico after 1910, came to see and organize themselves as “intellectual workers,” and reached out to newly organized unions. On another level, my book is about the ways these artists “pictured” working people stylistically and discursively over three decades. I found hundreds of long-forgotten or largely ignored prints, photographs, and murals. Many were embedded in journals and street posters, or painted on union and market walls instead of government buildings; and many were by lesser-known artists with more intimate ties with working people.
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Eleven Images from Picturing the Proletariat
By John Lear
The late John Berger proposed a fundamental “way of seeing” art. He wrote, “The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?” As a historian of Mexico’s working people, I began my research for Picturing the Proletariat with the related assumption that art both reflects and shapes the world in which it is produced. This would hardly be a surprise to the politically engaged, Communist-inspired artists who came of age during Mexico’s 1910 revolution, or to anyone who has seen the monumental, government-sponsored murals painted on public buildings in subsequent years by “los tres grandes” (Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros). At one level, my new book is about how post-revolutionary artists “discovered” the working people of Mexico after 1910, came to see and organize themselves as “intellectual workers,” and reached out to newly organized unions. On another level, my book is about the ways these artists “pictured” working people stylistically and discursively over three decades. I found hundreds of long-forgotten or largely ignored prints, photographs, and murals. Many were embedded in journals and street posters, or painted on union and market walls instead of government buildings; and many were by lesser-known artists with more intimate ties with working people.
1. The Pre-revolutionary “Worker-Citizen”
Saturnino Herrán began Allegory of Construction/Allegory of Labor in 1910, before the revolution, as a commission for the government of dictator Porfirio Díaz. Immersed in the urban transformations of the capital and aware of recent landmark strikes at Rio Blanco and Cananea, he was one of the first fine arts painters to introduce the worker as a subject, using the visual strategies of symbolism and allegory. His strong, fair-skinned construction workers labor at essential tasks, building the monumental structures of Mexico City, while a wife feeds her resting husband and children on the margins of the worksite. They invoke the shared goals of the pre-revolutionary elite and mutualist workers’ associations, by which male workers were to reject recent labor conflicts yet assume their proper roles as “worker-citizens” who construct the nation.
2. The Pre-revolutionary “Worker-Victim”
By contrast, the artisan printmaker José Guadalupe Posada developed years earlier a primitive style of relief prints for the satirical penny press for workers that challenged elite notions of development and highlighted conflict between the working class and its exploiters. As this 1903 front page of La Guacamaya demonstrates, he distinguished between two subsets of the exploited working class: in the masthead, the virile and outraged artisan class (with whom he himself identified), and in the caricature below, the victimized worker-campesino, literally consumed by factories, his flesh converted to gold. But while Posada’s prints denounced abuses of this “worker-victim,” they never advocated strikes and suggest an ambivalence to the outbreak of the 1910 revolution. Herrán and Posada, who both died during the decade of revolutionary fighting, offered two distinct archetypes of the worker that would clash and mingle over the next thirty years.
3. The “Worker-Citizen-Consumer” of the 1920s
This is a typical cover of the post-revolutionary union periodical Revista CROM, published for around a decade starting in 1926. Artists organized and participated in the revolution’s first several years of mobilization3 and fighting, but only in the national reconstruction of the 1920s did their representations of the working class flourish, in the context of intense labor organization and cultural politics. The officialist CROM labor federation, closely allied with President Calles, published its own journal illustrated by commercial artists. Drawings blended the earlier style of Herrán with art deco and art nouveau styles and conveyed the reformist politics of the federation itself. Like this cover, illustrations depicted attractive, muscular, Europeanized and above all individual workers who, together with industrialists and government leaders, constructed the post-revolutionary nation with their tools and the national flag in hand. This worker was also bound to middle-class consumer aspirations featured in articles and advertisements aimed at their wives, a “worker–citizen–consumer” with an explicit and unprecedented political role and palpable aspirations of individual social mobility.
