Lewisohn and Viano, Essay Example

For this paper I read the 1935 article by Sam A. Lewisohn, and then a segment from Professor Viano’s introduction to the Mexican muralists. It’s been a fascinating assignment. I noticed that Lewisohn got the title of one painting wrong: it’s Liberation of the Peon, not Death of the Peon, a fatal mistake in meaning that robs the work of its poetic ambiguity. But Lewisohn does perceptively describe the dead peon as a leader, whereas other observers have called him a naked slave or simply followed the title with peon. Lewisohn’s view, although probably his own, at least realistically explains the humble and sympathetic demeanor of the men surrounding the body. Instead of them expressing a soulful and ideological solidarity with a peasant Christ, they are showing the natural respect of fighting men for their captain.

Two comments by Prof. Viano interested me particularly: Since murals are for the public to view without having to pay, [Rivera’s] purpose is even more powerful. I think he is saying that such availability invited the creation of  messages in Rivera’s murals, and that the messages were political. But I also think a point can be made that the messages actually are more powerful because the murals in public buildings have been paid for by the people via government taxation. Economically and politically, they are not free. This plays into another comment by Prof. Viano: The first mural, The city of Tenochtitlan, depicts a way of life, that of the Aztecs … before the arrival of the Spanish. Here is where the issue of  messages and the politics of public murals heats up: that mural is arguably propaganda because it shows no Aztec sacrifices being held. Those sacrifices, an integral and inescapable part of Aztec life in Tenochtitlan and throughout its empire, were one of the reasons the Aztec empire failed: victimized satellite tribes had to tragically ally themselves with the invading Spanish, whose diseases were already killing them.

What would the message be in mass Aztec cruelty paid to an artist of Spanish descent?