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The Murals
Festival de Las Flores: The murals' first scene depicts the annual Festival of the Flowers in Tehuantepee, a pre-Columbian tradition that continues in Oaxaca to this very day. A watercolor study of the "Tirada de las Flores," the memorable scene at the top of the stairs, served as cover for a 1933 edition of Town and Country; the Washington Post marveled at its "joyousness and gayety" in 1941. While the eye is most immediately drawn to the striking male in Pre-Columbian headdress at center, Cueva del Rio took care to paint his women in the traditional tehuana dress, which Mexican artist Frida Fahlo employed in her work as a symbol of solidarity with indigenous Mexican women in the 20th century.
Rural Mexico: The festival scenes stand in stark contrast to the somber, quotidian second-floor, which features Mexico's legendary volcanoes, Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, on the left and right, respectively. The mountains form a "most harmonious composition" with the elegantly-dressed Mexican paisanos, bringing wheat to market and making tortillas.
Industrial Mexico: The following panel celebrates the arrival of a modern, industrialized Mexico, with rows of a modern, industrialized Mexico, with rows of men and women on horseback to symbolize the continuity of Mexico's old and new. While perhaps now as explicit as some of mentor Diego Rivera's work, the tank-like tractors and minatory plane formations recall the "uneasy synthesis of promise and threat" that Rivera associated with modern ... [???] |