The presence of Mexican art in New York between the World Wars: Cultural exchange and art diplomacy

In the 1920s and 1930s Mexican art was widely influential in New York due to a series of exhibitions, mural commissions, publications, and the immigration of Mexican artists themselves. In those decades New York became the place that congregated more diverse Mexican art expressions outside Mexico; it was also where the most comprehensive and determining Mexican exhibitions occurred during that period---including Mexico itself.; A series of artistic, cultural, and political factors made possible that unique phenomenon. In the case of Mexico, those factors were related to the end of the 1910 Revolution, and the need of an emerging nationalist state to develop a broader base of relations with the United States, that included cultural and artistic exchanges. In the U.S. case, those factors were related to the end of World War I and the nation's new leading position in the world, a situation that encouraged the search of a cultural identity autonomous from European traditions.; The evolution of Mexican art was an appealing model because it represented the history of a nation that, as the United States, had been mostly dependent from European art canons, but which after its revolution, had succeeded in liberating itself from those patterns, becoming deeply connected with its own roots. Remarkably, all at once, the Mexican model had been able to re-create select concepts and forms of the international avant-garde, and by doing so Mexican art remained connected---but under new basis---to the Western art world. Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s Mexican art succeeded in what New York artists were searching for American art.; Based on empirical evidence I argue that the successful presence of Mexican art in New York between the World Wars was the result of artistic and non-artistic factors, specifically the interplay between the modernist and internationalist quests of both Mexican and American artists, and---on the other hand---the political and economic interests of the Mexican state and particular U.S. sponsoring groups, individuals, and institutions.