Mexico

In the first half of the twentieth 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 who visited Mexico in search of inspiration, political sympathies or an alternative way of life, figures as diverse as Philip Guston, Josef and Anni Albers, and Edward Burra. Illustrated with some 150 striking images, Adrian Lockes incisive text explores the artistic documentation of the dramatic changes wrought by the revolution, the governments 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 Mexicos cultural renaissance.