Politically themed murals are a unique aspect of modernism in the visual arts in Mexico, especially in the period immediately after the Mexican Revolution and from the presidency of Álvaro Obregón (1920–1924). Beginning in 1921, President Obregón’s minister of public education, the philosopher and educator José Vasconcelos, patronized artists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, commissioning them to paint murals on the walls of public buildings under his jurisdiction. Initially, these artists painted in figurative form the universal allegorical and philosophical themes of interest to Vasconcelos. By 1924, the mural painters, many of whom had joined the Communist Party, began to produce works that figured the history of Mexico, issues of race, ethnicity, and class in the country, the experience of the Mexican Revolution, and the promise of Marxism. Such themes did not meet with Vasconcelos’s approval, nor, in fact, did the policies of Obregón’s...

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