L’« énergie synthétique ». Espace esthétique et espace politique dans la peinture murale mexicaine (1920-1940)

• Main Author: Ana Cecilia Hornedo Marín
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre de Recherches sur les Mondes Américains 2014-10-01
• Series: Nuevo mundo - Mundos Nuevos
• Subjects: avant-garde; esthetics; political regime; mestizaje; Mexico
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/67383

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.