The History of Mexico: From Conquest to the Future 1935

Diego Rivera painted this mural, The History of Mexico, here in the Palacio Nacional using fresco – paint applied to wet plaster - to tell a story. The way Rivera layers images and events is fascinating. It feels like time is collapsing, right? Look at the lower part of the mural, all that churning chaos of clashing armies and bodies! Rivera wants us to really feel the physical struggle, but then our eye travels upwards and things seem to calm and consolidate into something more like a solid, stable nation. But, is that really what's going on? Maybe those guys up top are just the guys who survived the mess at the bottom! It's a huge, dense painting, and like a dream, it gives you more questions than answers. For me this picture speaks to Picasso's Guernica in that the violence of war is presented as an event which shapes the future of a place and its people.