THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART OF THE LATINO WORLD

Exhibition: VIDA AMERICANA: MEXICAN MURALISTS 

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Until May 17, 2020

For historians and lovers of art, we have recently learned what was hidden for several decades, but what we all knew: the influence of Mexican art on American art in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s around the time of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal 

 In 1936, David Alfaro Siqueiros had a workshop in New York, the Siqueiros Experimental Workshopwhich was attended by the young, 21-year-old Jackson Pollock and his brother. The Mexican muralist Siqueirosan artist in the technical avant-garde, painted without a brush and used industrial paint to produce his murals. 

 In the white supremacist thinking of that era, much like the Donald Trump thinking of today, this renewal of painting couldn’t come from that racially mixed—and Latino—peoplethe USA had invented everything.** When the Cold War began, socially and communist-leaning Mexican artists who talked about the real America, its Indigenous history, its exploited poor women and its Black people, had to be expungednarrative of the history of the “real” America appeared, an art without any reference to history and poverty, an art to suitably fill the head offices of capitalism, an art that didn’t disturb. The Cold War purged history, and everything once again became an America reinvented in an art without references, an art that didn’t disturb anyone. 

 The Cold War is long over. It was time to finally tell the truth, and thanks to the Whitney Museum of American Artanother history is surfacing at last. Donald Trump will no doubt fire off some unconsideredoff-the-wall tweets about his MUR DES RAPACES (Raptor Wall) now being built. There are still major museums in the United Statethat are finally telling the truth about the history of America. 

 René Derouin, 

Artist of the America 

 * En chemin avec René DerouinManon Regimbald and Montserrat Galí, Éditions de l’Hexagone, 2005. 

*Graphie d’atelier. Le trait continu. René Derouin and Gilles Lapointe, Les Éditions Fides, 2013.