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Painting the Town Red? The Contemporary Legacies of One Hundred Years of Public Muralism and the Left
  • ISSN: 2042-793X
  • E-ISSN: 2042-7948

Abstract

Taking the centenary of the publication ‘Manifesto of the syndicate of technical workers, painters and sculptors’ as the inspiration for this Special Issue, this article introduces the volume through an investigation of the historical, historiographical and theoretical interrelationship between mural painting and leftist politics from 1924 to 2024. It is divided into two main sections. The first section presents a comparative survey of the historiography of murals made in Mexico and the United States in the inter-war period to argue against revisionist readings that interpret them as the unmediated expression of top-down state imperatives. The second section explores exterior mural painting in the decades after 1968 through a focus on two murals produced in London to challenge the notion that they constituted the unmediated bottom up expression of subaltern communities. Both sections argue for a nuanced theoretical model of state patronage and politicized mural production that registers the complex relationship between structure and agency within the context of the heightened class struggle that marked both periods.

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2025-02-28
2026-04-22

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