The Power and Politics of Art in Postrevolutionary Mexico

Most scholars of Mexico have at minimum a passing knowledge of artists as official culture makers embroiled in the politics of revolutionary state building. This book delves into that heady artistic milieu, with its epicenter in Mexico City, and in particular into the nature of individual affiliations with the Mexican Communist Party (PCM). Stephanie Smith tactfully resists indulging in gossipy rumors of romantic trysts between and among Frida, Diego, and their contemporaries and focuses instead on their less salacious yet still promiscuous flirtations with Communist elements. While some of these stories are known, the author makes innovative use of the newly available spy reports from the Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales to reveal details of previously unexamined government surveillance of artists' political activities as they moved about the city, associated (and disassociated) with Leon Trotsky in his Mexican exile, and navigated state sponsorship of their art.The book revolves around two themes. The first is the multilateral transnational flow of individuals and ideas that brought artists and the Communist Party into mutual embrace in the wake of Mexico's revolution. Smith opens with an overview of the formation of the PCM in 1919, demonstrating that the small but influential party drew clout from the prominent artists in its ranks. Yet Smith argues that the PCM closely monitored the public actions and private lives of these party members. Artists' stints abroad in Russia, the United States, France, Italy, and Spain forged circuits that led back to Mexico as a central hub, known to be a Communist-friendly haven as fascism escalated around the globe. Yet Smith demonstrates through spy reports that Mexican officials kept a wary eye on the phalanx of avant-garde types. In many ways chapter 3 is the heart of the book, as it situates Trotsky at the center of intersecting spheres of art, state, and party politics. Though not an artist, Trotsky relied on the lofty political connections of Anita Brenner and Diego Rivera to orchestrate the delicate conditions of his exile, at which point he ensconced himself among Mexico's creative elite.The second theme is the gender politics within PCM ranks, which, when conflated with the chauvinistic culture of the art world, complicated women artists' reception. Chapter 2 features Italian photographer and avowed Communist Tina Modotti as a case study that demonstrates the ambivalent gender politics that prevailed in the Mexican state, the PCM, and the art world, all of which allowed women artists unprecedented opportunities even while subjecting them to extra surveillance and measures of patriarchal control. Despite welcoming women into the party, the PCM showed recalcitrance in supporting their full political enfranchisement. Embattled on all sides by secret operatives who obsessively traced her movements and interrogated her motives and alienated by artist friends for refusing to support Trotsky's exile, Modotti nevertheless provided through her photography the visual script for the revolutionary Left. Chapter 4 presents brief political biographies of four women associated with Mexico's art milieu: Frida Kahlo, Aurora Reyes, Frances Toor, and Anita Brenner. Their stories provide evidence of Smith's thesis that the revolutionary context, while it allowed women's art to gain traction, extended to women considerably fewer liberties in their private lives. The conscious inclusion of women at the center of this book notwithstanding, Smith triangulates the narratives of their lives within a framework defined by the outsize personalities of Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Trotsky, whose fraught allegiances and bitter enmities played out in the public sphere for decades.An excellent chapter on the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios and its influential successor, the printmaking collective Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), contributes to a growing scholarly interest in the politics of artistic production. This chapter most effectively places art production in the context of evolving national politics, as Smith makes direct correlations between the TGP's internal policies and changing official ideologies.Although the title suggests that Smith's book will be about art, in fact the artwork itself receives very light treatment by the author. Readers will have to turn elsewhere for visual evidence of the claim that “art produced during the times of state endorsement often lost the sharp edge that delineated visionary art from work more modest in intent and outcome” (p. 189). Instead, the artists and their party politics occupy center stage. The book contributes fruitfully to the recent historiographical trend dismantling the myth of the muralists as los tres grandes; by emphasizing their fluctuating relationships to the PCM, Smith is able to draw distinctions between the ideological flaccidity of Rivera and Siqueiros's strident militancy (in fact, José Clemente Orozco scarcely makes an appearance here). Organizationally, the book suffers a bit from repetition of vignettes across the chapters, especially those involving the public disputes and reconciliations between Rivera and Siqueiros. In all, this book will no doubt appeal to the nearly insatiable popular interest, unmitigated by time, in the transnational bohemian cohort gathered in revolutionary Mexico

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