The Mexican Revolution, Essay Example

Art is all about human creative skills and application into real life situations. Art employs the use of imaginative designs and is bound to undergoing various revolutions. The Mexican revolution marks a revolution that had a pivotal influence on the Mexican mural art movement. This paper discusses the way the Mexican art movement came about and the importance of Rivera and Orozco in the Mexican art movement.

In the twentieth century, significant developments occurred that had an immense influence on art. There were rapid changes across all spheres, science, medicine, technology architecture, and psychology. These changes transformed the human condition and art in general. This revolution that raised hope for a prosperous future did not last long, and sooner than expected, a labor organization that created a class conflict emerged. There was the collapse of the European empire, negated revolutions and world wars. Several remarkable observations occurred and brought in the birth of the Mexican revolution social movement Barbara Haskell summarizes the whole scenario in five steps:

1. With America’s ingenuity technological power and manufacturing efficiency it entered the twentieth century with confidence
2. American was proud of its outstanding power, as no other nation possessed the so illuminating revolutions in communication and transportation.
3. The living standards of the wealthy elite Americans were of the highest order, whereas there were some Latin Americans who also looked forward to the comfortable future.
4. With this difference in the living standards, capitalists from prosperous countries as Angelina, Mexico and Chile brought in a labor organization that created a class conflict.
5. Thereby, due to the class conflict, Latin America encountered its first social revolution, which was the Mexican Revolution, running from 1910 through 1920.

The Mexican Revolution took effect in 1911 after the overthrow of the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz. Having ruled the country continuously as from 1877, Diaz brought in a steady economic development that focused on moving towards modernization. The development was okay, only that it benefited the white Mexicans and the foreign investors, while the peasant community gained little from his regime and theirs was oppression. The middle-class population, including the peasants realized that they also needed their share of benefits. It is at this point that  Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros took their positions. They played a substantial role in fighting for the sake of the rights of the oppressed through art.

The three men, Rivera, Orozco and Alfaro aimed at uplifting the peasant worker in Mexico. They viewed the indigenous workers as the true heroes of Mexico and thus painted the Pre-Columbian peoples of Mexico as the true Mexican people, who included the Mayans and Aztecs. They painted these heroes in a simplified form expressing the peasants, the intellectuals and artists as pitted against the landowners and foreign industrialists who expressed exploitation on the Mexican workers. The U.S. murals represented the worker as the ones with a dominating force in the American cultural life all in the Depression decade.

There were yet other murals on concrete surfaces or on the facade of a building. The main themes in such paintings included events of the political climate of the time of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

In conclusion, the best thing people out to do is speak out themselves. The manner of expression does not matter, provided the information reaches the required audience. Taking the example of the three artists, they spoke themselves through art, and they even obtained commissioning by the local government to official institutions’ walls. They not only earned their living through that, but they also received honors.