"M" for Mexico (part 2)

Mexico is also the Murals. 

The Mexican Muralism movement began in the early 1920s after the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican government commissioned artists to make art that would educate the mostly illiterate population about the country’s history and present a powerful vision of its future. Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Rufino Tamayo became the most famous Mexican muralists. You can admire their idealistic and politically charged art in some of the most beautiful buildings of CDMX and around.

Behind the impressive facade of Palacio de Bellas Artes in art nouveau and neoclassical styles - another building in Mexico City commissioned by President Porfirio Díaz and designed by Adamo Boari, the muralists painted several major artworks making them accessible to the average Mexicans. 

You will find Diego Rivera's “Carnival of Mexican Life”, as well as his "Man at the Crossroads" commissioned for New York's Rockefeller Center. The Rockefellers had the original destroyed because of its anti-capitalist themes but Rivera recreated it in Palacio de Bellas Artes in 1934. 

Several works of other big muralists are also featured in the building, amongst them Tamayo’s “Mexico Today” and “Birth of Nationality”, Siqueiros’ “New Democracy” and Orozco's “Catharsis”. 

The palace is gorgeous and one way to admire its stained-glass curtain is to attend the two-hour show of the Ballet Folklórico de México - a Broadway-worth kaleidoscope of costumes, music, songs and dances from all over Mexico!

Another building displaying a gorgeous mural by Orozco is Casa de los Azulejos with its blue and white tiles produced in China and a gorgeous internal courtyard hosting a restaurant.

Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros also painted murals at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso where Frida Kahlo attended high school and met Rivera for the first time. 

Underneath the staircase is a nude portrait of Hernán Cortés and his indigenous concubine, La Malinche, and the amphitheater holds Rivera’s first mural “The Creation”.

The Museo Mural Diego Rivera hosts a single mural but what a beauty it is! You can admire the 15.6m-long "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central” for hours. The story of the mural is fascinating as well. It was initially painted on the walls of the Hotel Del Prado but had to be restored and moved to the museum after the disastrous 1985 Mexico City earthquake which rendered the hotel uninhabitable. It depicts famous and ordinary people passing through the Alameda Central Park at different periods of Mexico’s history, including Rivera himself as a child, Frida Kahlo, Benito Juárez, Porfirio Díaz and Hernán Cortés. The crowds are gathered around the La Calavera Catrina character, created by the Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada who holds her hand on the mural. The skeleton is associated with the Day of the Dead (el Día de Muertos) both in Mexico and around the world and has become an icon of Mexican identity. Rivera originally painted a sign reading "God does not exist" on it, which is the reason the mural was not shown to the public until he agreed to remove the words nine years later… 

The tiny museum also showcases colorful sweets for the Day of the Dead in the shape of skulls, coffins, crosses, you name it! 

If you want to attend the famous Day of the Dead celebrations, you will have to time your visit around late October and early November. 

The actual religious holidays are on 1 November for All Saints’ Day and 2 November for All Souls’ Day. 

We learnt that the Hollywood-style Day of the Dead parade was adopted by Mexico City only in 2016 to mimic a parade invented for the script of the 2015 James Bond movie “Spectre” shot in Mexico’s capital. 

The Day of the Dead is not a morbid event - it honors relatives who have passed away while celebrating life.

In Mexico, you do not need to go to a museum to see some gorgeous Mexican art!

In CDMX you can come across some temporary, fascinating and free exhibitions like the one in the beautiful Palacio de Cultura Banamex featuring Mexican nativity art with trees of life and nativity scenes.

There is also some stunning, and very Mexican, street art everywhere from Paseo de la Reforma - the equivalent of Champs-Elysées and Fifth Avenue - to the chic Roma neighborhood.

If you are an art fan, you will never be out of surprises, the best of them being Mexico’s ancient civilisations…