Author Description

In the first half of the 20th century, Mexico was home to a burgeoning of art comparable in energy to the political revolution that shook the country between 1910 and 1920. This surge of artistic activity is the subject of this compelling new book, which presents the work of Mexican artists--from the social-realist painters Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros to the photographers Agustin Jimenez and Manuel Alvarez Bravo--alongside that of their international contemporaries, figures as diverse as Philip Guston, Josef and Anni Albers, and Edward Burra. Illustrated with some 150 striking images, Adrian Locke's incisive text explores the artistic documentation of the dramatic changes wrought by the revolution, the government's role in employing artists to promote its reforms, the emergence of a native modernism, and the remarkable contribution of European and American artists and intellectuals, including Eisenstein, Trotsky, and Andre Breton, to Mexico's cultural renaissance.