Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park
Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park. Diego Rivera. 1947–1948 C.E. Fresco.
- In Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park, hundreds of characters from 400 years of Mexican history gather for a stroll through Mexico City’s largest park.
- A confrontation between an indigenous family and a police officer; a man shooting into the face of someone being trampled by a horse in the midst of a skirmish; a sinister skeleton smiling at the viewer.
- A scene composed of disparate historical personages, including Hernán Cortés (the Spanish conqueror who initiated the fall of the Aztec Empire), Sor Juana (a seventeenth-century nun and one of Mexico’s most notable writers), and Porfirio Díaz (whose dictatorship at the turn of the twentieth century inspired the Mexican Revolution).
- Perhaps the most striking grouping is a central quartet featuring Rivera, the artist Frida Kahlo, the printmaker and draughtsman José Guadalupe Posada, and La Catrina.
- Chinese symbol becomes a metaphor for Rivera and Kahlo’s complex relationship: Rivera began as Kahlo’s mentor; they then married, separated, and got back together; they were political comrades; and they painted each other frequently. Their double-portraits often reflect the state of the couple’s relationship at that moment.
- Stepping away from the center, if one reads the mural like a text, a chronology emerges: the left side of the composition highlights the conquest and colonization of Mexico, the fight for independence and the revolution occupy the majority of the central space, and modern achievements fill the right.
- More often than not history is written by the victor and thus reflects an incomplete story.
- Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park is an antidote to this: Rivera guarantees that histories normally edited out (the stories of the indigenous and the masses) have a place in this grand narrative.
- The artist reminds the viewer of the struggles and glory of four centuries of Mexican history.
- Fifty feet long; thirteen feet high
- Conquest and colonisation of Mexico by the Spanish, Diaz dictatorship, Revolution in 1910
- Sor Juana, Jose Marti, Frida Kahlo, La Catarina, Hernan Cortez, Porfirio Diaz
- Revival of fresco painting