Mexican Modern Art 1910 - 1950 (27)


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Source: WTL photograph© at the Special Exhibition of "Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910 - 1950," at the Philadelphia Art Museum, December 13, 2016.
Image: "George Gershwin in a Concert Hall" (1936) by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). Oil on canvas.
Comments: In 1935, George Gershwin, the famous American composer, befriended Siqueiros in New York City. A year later Siqueiros painted this canvas of Gershwin seated at a grand piano on the stage at New York's grand and elegant Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center before an audience of the rich and powerful. Art critics have noted that Siqueiros painted Gershwin's family and friends in the front row with Siqueiros, slightly larger than the others on the far left of the front row. Note the disjunction between this grand painting celebrating a great modernist composer at the same time that Siqueiros (and other Mexican artists) were supporting the leftist politics of President Lázaros Cárdenas in Mexico, Stalinist communism, and the League of Revolutionary Artists and Writers in Mexico.
For a photograph of Rivera and Kahlo at the head of a parade of this this league (sindicato), see: => Rivera #15.
For other paintings and murals by Siqueiros in this series on Mexican Modern art, see: => #4; => #16; => #17; and => #29.
Humanities Question: Since this is a modern painting rather than a image of photgraphic realism, what interpretation--seemingly both positive and somewhat negative--do you think Siqueiros has given to this scene and theatrical reality in the United States?


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