Stephanie J. Smith brings Mexican politics and art together,
chronicling the turbulent relations between radical artists and the
postrevolutionary Mexican state. The revolution opened space for
new political ideas, but by the late 1920s many government
officials argued that consolidating the nation required coercive
measures toward dissenters. While artists and intellectuals,
some of them professed Communists, sought free expression in
matters both artistic and political, Smith reveals how they
simultaneously learned the fine art of negotiation with the
increasingly authoritarian government in order to secure clout and
financial patronage. But the government, Smith shows, also had
reason to accommodate artists, and a surprising and volatile
interdependence grew between the artists and the politicians.
Involving well-known artists such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and
David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as some less well known, including
Tina Modotti, Leopoldo Mendez, and Aurora Reyes, politicians began
to appropriate the artists' nationalistic visual images as weapons
in a national propaganda war. High-stakes negotiating and co-opting
took place between the two camps as they sparred over the
production of generally accepted notions and representations of the
revolution's legacy—and what it meant to be authentically
Mexican.