Word: muralism
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Mexican Artist José Gutierrez, an instructor at the National Polytechnic Institute, has experimented with every kind of medium from ordinary house paint to the newest plastics to determine which can best withstand the elements. Last week Gutierrez made a gloomy prediction about Diego Rivera's latest mural in the water distribution chamber of Mexico City's new water system (TIME, June...
Diego Rivera, the Western Hemisphere's greatest living painter, is working on a mural that will be half under water. Last week, at 64, the frog-shaped Master was completing his work in a Mexico City tank that looks like an empty swimming pool; actually, it is the distribution chamber of a new water-supply system for Mexico City...
...surprising thing about the mural, for Rivera, is its consistent planning; he began it by picturing a drop of water in the center of the floor, showed underwater forms of life evolving out and up from the center. Along the walls are people and symbols of the civilizations they have created in Mexico. The ceiling, when done, will represent the sky, heavy with rain...
Rubber & Reflections. When the mural is half submerged, the protoplasmic life painted on the floor will waver greenly and the figures along the walls will stand reflected upside down in the pool. To protect his work from the water, Rivera has mixed a plastic called polystyrene with his fresco pigments, plans to varnish the whole with transparent rubber...
...Undoubtedly one of the great pictures of our day is Picasso's Guernica mural, just as he himself is one of the greatest artists of our time . . . But the fresh symbols that come forth from this masterly hand reveal the scars and shocks of our sad era, with not even the faintest hints of a new integration ... At times the emotion is so lacerating that the next step beyond would be either insanity or suicide, violence and nihilism; the death of the human personality. This is the message that modern art brings to us at its purest...