Los Murales de Osaka: Mexican Modernism at the 1970 World's Fair

Abstract

In 1969 curator Fernando Gamboa commissioned eleven abstract artists to paint a collective mural to be displayed in the Mexico Pavilion at the 1970 World’s Fair held at Osaka, Japan. He instructed the artists to paint large sized individual paintings on stretched canvases that when joined collectively would form a mural measuring 400 sq ft. The artists selected by Gamboa were working in a style that broke the conventions of traditional Mexican muralism. They were a generation of painters who abandoned the ideologies of José Vasconcelos and the conception that artists should be responsible for changing society. Instead they embraced the words of José Luis Cuevas and based their work on the individual’s subjectivity. The binary Gamboa raises by linking Mexican muralism and modern painting problematizes the conception of murals in Mexico. Traditional muralism focused on public spaces and state forums for social communication. In contrast, mural-sized stretched canvases, which hung on the walls of the pavilion intended to provoke an international audience, produced an alternative meaning of muralism and questioned what artistic attributes constituted a Mexican mural in the 1970s