In the wake of the critical reactions to two exhibitions of Mexican art—at the 25th Venice Biennial in 1950 and the 1952 Paris Biennial —this long document offered readers a summary of events. The Venice Biennial was deemed a success while the Paris Biennial, according to David Alfaro Siqueiros, sparked harsher critical reactions, most particularly one from the André Breton group that had bent to Trotsky’s ideas, and others from the new school in Paris where realist propositions were considered passé. This article (in reality, the transcript of a speech) explains how the critics reacted to the exhibition when it opened in Stockholm and London. In general, opinions regarding the Mexican School of Painting were quite positive. The article mentions that the Metropolitan Museum of Art requested the exhibition, but without the contemporary section. When the exhibition arrived in Mexico, it was presented in incomplete form. The text also discusses the incident caused by Diego Rivera’s mural, Pesadilla de Guerra y Sueño de Paz [Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace], as well as the dismissal of Andrés Iduarte. The Mexican movement was viewed as a leftist movement to which the Communist Party belonged, and this was seen negatively during the 1950s, as the U.S. campaign against socially oriented painting began to gain momentum. In Los Angeles, José Clemente Orozco was expelled; in Mexico, Andrés Iduarte, director of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, [INBA, National Institute of Fine Arts], was fired for placing a Communist Party flag on the coffin of Frida Kahlo. Cold War is at its peak; so that this was a time in which the Mexican State needed to implement a cultural policy that functioned in the same way as its agrarian policy.
