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Michael David Snodgrass, John Lear. Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940., The American Historical Review, Volume 122, Issue 5, December 2017, Pages 1659–1660, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/122.5.1659
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During the 1920s and 1930s, revolutionary upheaval and labor struggle inspired a global movement of proletarian art. From Spain to the United States, painters and printmakers dedicated their artistic work and their political activism to the cause of working-class empowerment. Today no country is more closely associated with this cultural renaissance than Mexico. Its 1910 revolution produced an artistic legacy that made Diego Rivera as internationally renowned as Pancho Villa. In Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940, John Lear traces the genealogy of the visual and ideological representation of workers by Rivera’s generation of politicized artists. Lear authored a pioneering history of Mexico City’s working class of the 1910s. Here he turns mostly to the 1920s and 1930s and investigates images of that city’s proletariat in a study that is “more about elite discourses regarding the working class” than it is about the workers those artists depicted (9). In the latter’s collective telling, Mexico’s industrial proletarians—muscular men clad in overalls with fists raised high—became the dominant protagonists of revolutionary Mexico.
