Summary: | Mexican muralism in the years 1920-40 constitute an avant-garde in which the political and the esthetic are indissociable. It is an avant-garde that claims to be in a process of construction, contrary to the negative avant-garde of Dadaism; and that draws on tradition, contrary to futurism. This article formulates four hypotheses to interpret the avant-garde of the artistic and political space of Mexican muralism: the synthesis of time (present, past, future); the synthesis of space (on the painted wall); the anthropological/cultural synthesis of mestizaje; and the political synthesis via the state, that is, the constitution of the authoritarian regime, which the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) will come to embody a few years later.
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