Picturing the Proletariat

Picturing the Proletariat revisits the familiar territory of art, labor, and politics in postrevolutionary Mexico. Even though these topics dominate the historiography on modern Mexico, this thoroughly researched and copiously illustrated book is a welcome addition. John Lear offers expert analysis of visual culture, a feature often lacking in the historical literature on labor politics. Simultaneously, he provides a deeper and more nuanced account of the intellectual identification with the working classes than one typically finds in the art historical scholarship. The book is thereby an impressive hybrid that will be of great interest to scholars in both disciplines.Lear focuses on representations of workers in Mexican visual culture from the turn of the twentieth century through the end of Lázaro Cárdenas's presidency. He traces shifts in how the proletariat was pictured, from Saturnino Herrán's “worker-citizen” and the “worker-victim” popularized by José Guadalupe Posada to the “worker-victim-militant” that characterized imagery produced by artists affiliated with the Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s and the “worker-citizen-consumer” that emerged first within the pages of Revista CROM but would eventually dominate official culture after 1938. Avoiding the tendency in scholarship to conflate the campesino-peasant and the urban worker, Lear carefully parses these types, noting that the former signified Mexico's traditions while the latter was fundamental for articulating its future. He situates this image typology within a detailed history of labor and pays careful attention to the tensions between unions, communist organizations, and the institutionalizing state. Relatedly, he contextualizes national frictions within broader international forces like the rise of mass politics, opposition to the Spanish Civil War, and the internecine struggles on the left that followed from the vagaries of Soviet policy toward fascism.Lear focuses on print culture—broadsheets, magazines, and posters—produced by artists working directly with labor organizations and the Mexican Communist Party. While graphic arts receive the most attention, Lear also discusses murals and photography, reexamining major monuments as well as less well-known archives, like commercial advertisements. He shows that artists sought not only to represent the working classes but also to craft their own relevance to the nation's proletarianization. In addition to exploring the masculine aesthetics of the working classes' art, Lear chronicles women's participation in industry, labor politics, and artistic production. Likewise, he takes on the persistent sexism and homophobia that accompanied celebrations of working-class virility.Lear's book is divided into seven chapters, with a short introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1 sets the stage, crediting modernistas with introducing allegories of work into artistic discourse and contrasting their academic approach with the artisanal appearance and satire found in the penny press on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. While academic artists generally celebrated Porfirian progress, illustrators emphasized the victimization of the working and popular classes. This divide is intensified across the book, as Lear explores the competing imperatives of vanguardism, mass politics, and liberal versus militant notions of progress within Mexico's proletarian art. Chapters 2 and 3 are dedicated to the radicalization of artists within the context of the revolution and to the development of a postrevolutionary vanguard, surveying the prints executed in the Estridentistas' Horizonte and the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors' El Machete. Chapter 4 carries this discussion through the Maximato via a comparison between the aesthetic and political ideologies of communist publications and the pro-capital and consumerist imagery promoted by the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM). Chapters 5, 6, and 7 focus on the proliferation of proletarian imagery within the context of antifascism and Cardenismo. Here Lear explores Frente a Frente and Lux, the organs of the League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists (LEAR) and the Mexican Electricians Union (SME), respectively. These chapters are his richest, significantly expanding our knowledge of the poorly chronicled LEAR while also contributing to the extensive scholarship on Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, the mural that David Alfaro Siqueiros and his team executed in the SME headquarters. These last chapters chronicle the transformation of working-class culture into nationalist propaganda, as calls for “unity at all costs” surfaced to confront the growing threat of war.Lear's book is immersed in archival sources and conversant with a wide array of scholarship from multiple disciplines. His ability to analyze works of art is impressive, although as the book progresses and pictures proliferate, careful exegesis at times gives way to a mere chronicling of images. This is a minor complaint, however, as readers will find more than enough material to undertake their own investigations. The prose is jargon-free, although some may find the byzantine politics of Mexican labor challenging to follow, especially as the acronyms pile up and the protagonists multiply. Lear's book will, nonetheless, reward experts and novices alike as the topic is inherently fascinating, and the illustrations exemplify the best of Mexico's proletarian art

Aesthetics · Art · Communism · Historiography · Militant · Political science · Politics · Proletariat · Scholarship · Sociology · Visual culture · Anthropology · Law · Photographic and Visual Arts