‘The process that transpires in artworks and is brought to a standstill in them, is … the same social process in which the artworks are embedded’; The Blue House; Towards a Free Revolutionary Art (2017), GCGCA(i)

Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Scene of a Manifesto

The Blue House, Mexico City

23 Sep - 21 Dec 2017

Two years after the Moscow Show trials, Andre Breton - French writer, poet and anti-fascist and principal theorist of Surrealism - travelled to Mexico while on tour, and Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary, Marxist theorist, and Soviet politician, who was there in exile, introduced him to Diego Rivera, a prominent Mexican muralist and husband to Frida Kahlo. The meeting of these three produced the manifesto entitled ‘Towards a Free Revolutionary Art’ (1938).

‘True art … insists on expressing the inner needs of … mankind in its time … true art is unable not to be revolutionary … true art is unable not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society.'

‘Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective talents to create something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance … the manifestation, more or less spontaneous, of necessity.'

The exhibition is staged in the room where they met - the scene of the manifesto - on the ground floor of The Blue House, now the Frida Kahlo Museum, where Rivera and Kahlo used to live.

‘I believe in the future resolution of … dream and reality … into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality…’; Walkway leading to the entrance to The Blue House; Towards a Free Revolutionary Art (2017), GCGCA(i)