Mexican Market

The Indian mestizos who rule Mexico love nothing so much as a mural full of anti-capitalist symbolism, though they themselves number some of the richest men in North America. Last year they had Diego Rivera repaint in Mexico City's pink-domed National Theatre the magnificent fresco mural the Rockefellers had ordered out of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center (TIME, May 22, 1933, et seq.). Last week the world's biggest mural project was being smeared across the walls and ceilings of Mexico City's vasty Abelardo Rodriguez Market by nine youthful painters, the eldest little more than 30. Five of them had never done a mural before.

The Abelardo Rodriguez Market, covering four blocks of Mexico City's slum section, was finished last year and named for Mexico's immensely wealthy President Rodriguez. Besides being one of the world's largest markets, it is a community recreation centre for the city's poor. The area assigned to the nine muralists was 16,000 sq. ft., about 1,800 sq. ft. apiece, to be covered by the end of 1935. Each was permitted to pick his own theme, subject to esthetic supervision by Diego Rivera, topical supervision by the Federal Government's Civic Action Department. Sole theme limitation was that each must have something remotely to do with the market or the Socialistic ideology of Mexico's National Revolutionary Party or both.

Ringleaders of the little group were not Mexicans but two sisters from Brooklyn, Grace and Marion Greenwood, and a young man from California named Paul Esteban O'Higgins. The other six were Mexicans.

Pretty, angry-mouthed Grace Greenwood, 27, undertook to slap the theme of Motiey on two walls of the main lobby. Her first panel takes money from mine to mint, shows Mexican laborers drilling, digging, trucking ore; smelters refining and casting the metal; and finally, a porcine bureaucrat receiving and counting the bars. Last week Grace Greenwood finished drawing the design on the second wall, taking money from mint to rich man's pocket.

In the same lobby Grace's sister Marion, 25, is working on Fruits & Vegetables. Both sisters went to Manhattan's Art Students' League but while Grace finished her studies in Paris and Italy, Marion wandered to Mexico. Last year both did frescoes for the Michoacan State capital in Morelia. A faster worker than her sister, Marion last week started on her third wall. Her peasants, a little looser in the joints than Grace's, bring to market bags of papaya, cashew fruit, guava, yams, cabbages, carrots and bananas. Among Fruits & Vegetables Marion includes a few fish and a great deal of sugar cane, bundled like the Fascist emblem. On Marion's second wall the peasants who go to the Abelardo Rodriguez Market can see themselves being swindled by the merchants who buy their produce.

Paul O'Higgins was a onetime Rivera assistant. He has taken for his theme the Peasant's Economic Struggle, showing in broad cartoon masses the peasant, his sad wife and child, his grain and his disastrous relations with the middlemen. Overhead O'Higgins has put a massive design of factories, cannon, two soldiers fighting to the death under the calm gaze of a fat overlord. Legend: "Against Imperialistic War!!"

Not quite so embattled as these U. S. expatriates are the six native Mexican muralists. Two from Yucatan, Fernando Gamboa and Miguel Tzab, have done simple, Maya-like designs. Pedro Rendon applies himself to the Adulteration of Milk; Antonio Pujol to Cereals; Ramon Alva Guardarrama. eldest of the group, to a simple landscape of a Mexican wheat farm, hard and exact in detail.

Angel Bracho, borrowing from Rivera's famed mural, has taken on Vitamins. A fish spews up Vitamin A, thoughtfully labeled, into one composition, dividing the subjects into the healthy Mexicans who get it, the dreadful wrecks who do not. In a companion piece the whole grains of rice and wheat divide the composition into B-glutted, sleek-skinned, joyful extraverts, and Bless emaciates with beriberi.

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