Warren Carter co-ordinates a session at the Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians

31/01/2007

Warren Carter co-ordinates a session at the Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians, University of Ulster, Belfast, 12-14 April 2007

‘We Capture the Walls’: Politics and Twentieth-Century Muralism

Jody Patterson, University College London
Warren Carter, University College London

Muralism is a centuries-old practice that stretches back to Antiquity. Yet in terms of its twentieth-century manifestations, the precedent set by los tres grandes is pivotal for locating the mural as a site of contestation. Whilst the Mexicans looked back to the Renaissance in terms of technique and the accessibility of the medium, the murals they produced were intrinsically linked to a more overtly radical political project. Although the radical ideals of the Mexican Revolution may have been compromised, the artists commissioned by the subsequent regimes were clearly committed to bringing art to a broader and more inclusive audience outside the conventional confines of the bourgeois art market. As such, the Mexican example has served as an important model for a diverse constellation of twentieth-century mural practices attempting to circumvent the restrictive parameters of autonomous art. Seeking to wrench art from its ivory tower, instances of such practices range from the murals created under the auspices of the New Deal art projects to those linked to nationalist struggles in Latin American and Belfast. As Orozco claimed in 1929: “The highest, the most logical, the purest and strongest form of painting is the mural . . . . It is for the people. It is for ALL.”

This session addresses the mural as a vehicle for the communication of issues and ideas across a wide spectrum of aesthetic, political and cultural registers. Papers will examine muralism from a diversity of historical and theoretical perspectives in an effort to encourage a dialogue around the mural as a strategy for circumventing market forces and critiquing standard frameworks of institutional patronage.

Christopher Fulton (University of Louisville) Siqueiros Against the Myth: Four Paeans to Cuauhtémoc, Last of the Aztec Emperors

Warren Carter (University College London) Justice for Artists: New Deal Murals and the Constitutional Revolution of 1937

Jody Patterson (University College London) Towards a Radical Realism: Painters, Politics, and Public Murals in New Deal New York

Janice Anderson (Concordia University) Rereading tradition: Revealing Disorderly Practices in the Interstices of the Conventional Mural

Maria von Bonsdorff (University Of Helsinki) Reflecting the Past and the Future – Finnish Mural Art at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Joseph McBrinn (University of Ulster) Picturing the Nation: Identity and Politics in the Irish Mural Revival, 1922-59

William Rolston (University of Ulster) From war to peace: issues in the transformation of political wall murals in Northern Ireland

Leonard Folgarait (Vanderbilt University) Respondent

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