Diego Rivera, the Antique, Utopia

From the end of the 17(th) century onwards an awareness had been developing in Mexican culture of the importance of the pre-Colombian past and the nat ive world. This had influenced the best minds in Mexico, Siguenza y Gongora , Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Pedro Marquez. 19(th) century academic art, in fact, be it classical or romantic, also brought to light in its own way th e ancient native world, but there was a stiffness, a rhetoric, about it, ra ther than a real awareness of the cultural role which such a world had in t he past or might have in the present. In the age after the Revolution, the political and cultural agitation had also made much of the native world and it became a requisite of art that it should interpret that which had deep roots in the native community, albeit with a certain ambiguity in its attit ude. Diego Riviera was one of the artists who took on this role, planning a "national art" which was soon to become for him an art with an ideological function, i.e. which was to have not only a national and social role, but also a political one. Mural art, of which the painter was one of the most w ell-known exponents, became the most original form of propaganda, the publi c instrument by means of which the social Utopia of the artist was to be re vealed. The "native" became for Rivera a vehicle of certain values, but at the same time a recipient of that cultural reelaboration which should have helped it to developed so as to integrate itself into a nation which was ch anging and recovering its spirit. In Rivera's poetry, the stress laid on th e past was the way to delineate the future of his country. Nostalgia for a pre-Colombian world apparently supplied him with a paradigm, foreshadowing a future society. In thirty years mural activity in Mexico and the United S tates he projected - albeit with a certain discontinuity (his vision of the world and his vision of art, in total opposition - more theoretical than r eal) to the "corrupt theories" of bourgeois art.