UNAM: 100 years of muralism

Abstract

ABSTRACT

In a certain way, the history of the modern National University and the history of Mexican muralism have gone hand in hand. Just over a decade after its refoundation, and as part of the cultural project of the then rector, and later Secretary of Public Education, José Vasconcelos, encaustic and fresco mural painting began to cover the walls of the buildings that housed the National Preparatory School: the former Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo and San Ildefonso schools, where not only the so-called "big three" (José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the latter two recently returned from long stays among the European avant-garde), but also painters of the stature of Jean Charlot, Roberto Montenegro and Fermín Revueltas would intervene. A few decades later, when the University left the old part of the city to occupy the spaces designed expressly for study and research in the new University City, Rivera, Siqueiros and a new generation of muralists (José Chávez Morado, Francisco Eppens, Juan O'Gorman), in conjunction with the architects in charge of its construction, would now cover the exterior walls of the buildings, experimenting and developing new techniques and materializing what would become known as plastic integration, a major achievement that contributed to the fact that for 15 years now they have been part of the world heritage declared by unesco.

Today the University, according to the records of the General Directorate of Heritage, houses more than 150 modern and contemporary murals in its collection, in addition to the colonial and nineteenth-century murals preserved in its historic university buildings. This publication gathers a selection of the most representative ones and arises from an initiative of the General Directorate of Social Communication and the Aesthetic Research Institute of unam, to disseminate this heritage and celebrate the 100 years of the mural painting movement. Based on an academic seminar coordinated by Renato González Mello and integrated by Rita Eder, Dafne Cruz Porchini, Sandra Zetina, Ricardo Alvarado Tapia and Cecilia Gutiérrez Arriola, all of them academics from the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, this project resulted in a multiplicity of research essays with new approaches, This project resulted in a multiplicity of research essays with new approaches, as well as reports and interviews that appeared week after week throughout the year in Gaceta unam, but it also derived in new photographic shots with advanced technology, in a series of video capsules and, finally, in this book that we present here and for which we all congratulate ourselves.