Mesoamerica 2019 - Day Sixteen, Mexico City Finale (Actual)

On our last day in Mexico City, one of my primary objectives were to see two museums that featured the work of the two great muralists - Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orosco. I took enough pictures to make an entire separate post which I will present here. It was really hard to understand all the themes that were being exposed because most of the information was in Spanish only. I probably should have done some of the research I did afterwards beforehand...but that would be so NOT in keeping with my philosophy of just going and discovering whatever it is we run into as part of our travels LOL.

Museo Mural Diego Rivera

This museum was built to house one of Rivera's major works that was in a building damaged in the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City.

Here is what is written in Wikipedia on the Mural

"In 1946, architect Carlos Obregón Santacilia proposed to Diego Rivera the creation of a mural for Del Prado Hotel's Versalles dining room. The subject for the mural was the Alameda Central, considering the closeness of this park. The artist made a fresco of 4.70 x 15.6 m and it was finished in 1947. The mural shows more than 150 characters, some of them are protagonists of the history of Mexico: Hernán Cortés, Benito Juárez, Maximiliano de Habsburgo, Francisco I. Madero, Porfirio Dia In addition, characters of everyday Mexicans from different social classes appear as vendors of cakes, and as revolutionaries. It also shows Frida Kahlo and other spouses of Diego, as well as some of his daughters; finally, the Alameda Central park can be seen at the bottom.
The painter said: "The composition (of the mural) are reminders of my life, my childhood and my youth and covers from 1985 to 1910. The characters of the walk all dream, some sleeping on the benches and others, walking and talking ":^[5] 

In the same museum was a temporary exhibit about the influence Mexican artists and particularly muralists had on Chinese art from the 1930's through the 1970's. So the photos here are from a Chinese mural but which have images of Rivera and Frida Kahlo in them. Unfortunately I was not able to find a specific description of it

Finally these last ones are from the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso and are the works of Orosco

This is a MASSIVE set of works and dripping with symbolism and emotion, none of which I could quite understand at the time as there were virtually no descriptions nor did we get any kind of a guide in English

HOWEVER, for you, here is a link to the Wikipedia page that goes into much more detail than we had at the time (scroll down to the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria section)

And finally there are murals by Jean Charlot, a French citizen who was a major participant in the Mexican art and mural movement and contemporary of Rivera and Orosco

Whew!