Redeemers by Enrique Krauze Page B

aesthetic. In architecture he argued for a return to the old colonial tradition, especially the Mexican eighteenth century. Aesthetics dominated his entire outlook, including his sometimes idiosyncratic but impressive assemblage of literary heroes. In those days he thought that opera was destined to disappear (though not Wagner), and that music and dance—like Isadora Duncan interpreting Beethoven—would be the unified art of the future.
    For the good of his native Mexico, Vasconcelos took hold of the aesthetic ferment dating back to 1915 and helped to give it an unexpected dimension, above all in the new mural painting. He coordinated the work of the three great muralists—Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros—as well as lesser talents and he gave them the walls of public buildings so that they might present the cultural rebirth of the country to the widest possible audience. Around 1931, in his short essay on “Mexican Painting”—with its subtitle of “The Maecenas,” presumably comparing himself to Virgil’s famous patron—he allows God Himself to speak in support of his project, as if to praise a cosmically sanctioned cultural caudillo in distinctly authoritarian terms:
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    In the breast of all this anarchic humanity there will periodically appear those men who make order: to impose my law, forgotten because of the dispersal of paradisiacal faculties. They will be unified men, born chiefs . . . Through them the rhythm of the spirit will be victorious! Sometimes illuminated Buddhas, sometimes coordinating philosophers, their mission will be to unite the dispersed faculties, to give complete expression to the epochs, the races and the worlds.
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    Like many patrons, he overstates his own purely artistic importance. Without his plan, his “religious” doctrine that he had transmitted to them—as an intermediary of God (rather like the Plotinian demiurge who is an intermediary for the featureless One without qualities)—he asserts that these great painters would have remained only “noisy mediocrities.”
    What is true—above and beyond all that Vasconcelian noise—is that their patron gave them the support and venues that opened the gates to the golden age of Mexican muralism. To decorate the centuries-old walls of the National Preparatory School (the former College of the Jesuits) Vasconcelos contracted José Clemente Orozco, a powerful painter of anarchist predilections who participated in the Revolution. His murals would reflect the pain and striving and tragedy that Orozco had witnessed, including moments of redemption but with little propagandistic charge. For the corridor of his Ministry of Public Education, Vasconcelos wanted a festive, hopeful vision and so he invited “our great artist, Diego Rivera.” The role of the Maecenas, according to José Vasconcelos, necessarily involved a measure of interference: “ . . . the Maecenas not only gives . . . money but also the plan and the theme.”
    Rivera arrived with sketches of women in costumes typical of each state in the republic and a plan for the stairway that Vasconcelos described as an “ascending frieze that, starting from sea level with its tropical vegetation, would change into the landscape of the high plains and end with the volcanoes.” These might have been Diego’s responses to the initial guidelines laid out by Vasconcelos but from then on it was all Diego, there and elsewhere, including the 239 panels (within a space of 17,060 square feet) in the corridors of the ministry. The specific subjects that he set beside each other, from 1923 to the completion of the project in 1928, were not dictated by Vasconcelos, who was capable of a more modest presence before the creation of great art: “The best artistic epochs are those in which the artist works with personal liberty, but subject to a clearly defined philosophical or religious