Edgar Miller’s Influences:
The Mexican Modern Art Renaissance

The art of Edgar Miller is so interesting to us today in large part because of the multitude of cultural antecedents that it incorporates. While Miller himself would later expound on his conscientiousness of art as an innate human invention, akin to something as fundamental as language, he spent much of his early career intentionally drawing from a number of established artistic styles and movements, developing a practiced hand that could blend together a number of techniques. However, Mexican art as a blend of traditional, Catholic, and modern approaches stood out to Miller as a movement of radical aesthetics and progressive thought that helped formulate his distinctive style for the rest of his career. 

The Tres Grandes Come to the Midwest

Miller’s affinity towards a modern Mexican aesthetic was only heightened by the proliferation of Mexican fine art after the Revolution that swept the United States was already making inroads by the mid 1920s. For classically trained American artists, the “Tres Grandes” painters— Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros— had become icons of heterodoxy. Their murals brought together values of both traditionalism and of revolution, juxtaposing everyday events with pre-Columbian cultural motifs and forms. Portraying the common laborer on a grand scale as a mythological, heroic figure, their unique Modernist painting style would soon become world renowned. Mexcian Muralism was unequivocally driven by the socialist politics of the artist class during the Revolution, a fact that was effectively obscured by art critics who appreciated the aesthetic but not always the social commentary. 

By the late 1920s, Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros had become sought after artistic celebrities in North America, with works being commissioned by major institutions across the United States. Orozco, who had moved to the States in 1927, was showing exhibitions in prominent venues in New York City, and even at the Chicago Arts Club and the Art Institute of Chicago, by 1929. It is almost assured that Miller as a young artist visited these exhibits in Chicago and viewed Orozco’s work. Rivera would also sweep through the Midwest, painting one of his most groundbreaking fresco murals for the Detroit Institute of Art, in 1932, depicting the great modern industries of automotives and pharmaceuticals. These great artists’ notable contributions to Midwestern art were not without controversies.

The artists’ modern aesthetics and progressive politics became at once a curiosity and also an ideological problem, especially for commercial society in middle America. Rivera was at the center of the infamous Rockefeller Center mural disagreement, in which he was commissioned to paint a fresco at the newly designed New York City site based on tight specifications. Rivera, though, took artistic license in expressing the mural’s “New Frontiers” theme as an opportunity to highlight the issue of workers’ rights, going so far as to depict Lenin as a part of a group of revolutionary laborers within the fresco, much to the consternation of the Rockefellers. Unfortunately, his refusal to erase his portrayal of Lenin in his piece saw the fresco whitewashed over. Having been commissioned for a mural for the General Motors pavilion at the 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition, Rivera traveled to Chicago, along with his wife Frieda Kahlo. However, amidst the tense disagreement around the Rockefeller Center controversy, Rivera was ousted from the World’s Fair commission before he even began to execute its design. The trip to Chicago was not a complete loss, as Rivera was widely lauded by local Modern artists and was able to tour the city. It is recorded that both Rivera and Kahlo even visited Miller and Sol Kogen’s Carl Street Studios shortly after the artist colony was completed, during their stay in Chicago. 

Mexican art’s influence on Midwestern public works cannot be overstated. Not only were its foundational aesthetics, its amalgam of traditional motifs, and its use of Modernist forms becoming more commonplace as Art Deco was coming into vogue, but so too was the movement’s progressivism. In the years of the Great Depression and the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Arts Project (FAP) programs would hire artists and designers heavily influenced by the Mexican Muralism, as can be seen in the numerous public works created throughout the Midwest at the time. Miller served as the volunteer head of the technical committee for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), and would oversee the selection of pieces by other artists. Miller himself was never hired to produce a WPA mural, but the “Animal Court” sculptures at the Jane Addams Homes public housing project were part of the PWAP, and their handcrafted, figurine-like aesthetic intentionally hearkened back to the traditional Mexican craftwork he had come to strongly appreciate. Miller’s privately commissioned works, like the large windows of the Trustees System Service Building, in the Loop, show clear signs of inspiration from the Mexican Muralist Movement he had come to know and appreciate so well. 

Miller’s work of the early 1930s employed the aesthetic of indigenous artists from North and Latin America, and he portrayed the subject of the laborer in a celebratory light, much like socialist artwork. In the 1968 essay “Mural Art and the Midwestern Myth," Chicago muralist Mitchell Siporing wrote: “Contemporary artists everywhere have witnessed the amazing spectacle of the modern renaissance of mural painting in Mexico, and they have been deeply moved by its profound artistry and meaning. Though the lessons of our Mexican teachers, we have been made aware of the scope and fullness of the 'soul' of our environment.”  Many Chicago artists whose work we admire today drew directly from the Mexican Muralism and Modern Art Renaissance, and these movements’ ethos of expressing ideals through traditional and Modernist artwork.

Mexico as a country had become a cultural touchstone for American artists, with many of them making trips to the major Mexican cities, and some also visiting provincial localities around the country. As the Mexican muralist movement and fine arts culture reached its apex, the country became a nearby mecca for American artists to regularly sojourn, learn, and expand and challenge their classically trained points of view. Miller began to travel to Mexico semi-regularly over the decades starting in the early 1920s, after the end of the Mexican Revolution. One of his last, great explorations of Mexico came towards the end of his early career in Chicago. In 1957, he took a long trip, returning to his favorite area, the Veracruz region northeast of Mexico City along the Gulf coast.

This particular trip of 1957 spanned the winter holidays and went on well into the spring months, spending weeks traveling along the roads between idyllic village towns. In these more secluded locales, Miller took a particular interest in the resurgence of small town and rural life, voraciously drawing scenes of daily activities and inspiring landscapes, as exhibited in his many sketchbooks. He was especially fascinated with the revival and rehabilitation of Catholic churches and rural communities that had once again become a central part of Mexican life, several decades removed from the Revolution. His trips to Mexico offered an inspiring array of architectural styles, traditional motifs, and a daily celebration of culture. He meticulously chronicled his journeys in his sketchbooks, with studies later being incorporated into drawings, paintings, murals, and architecture designs back home. As much as the Handmade Homes superficially exhibit a thoroughly Modern confluence of Western artistic influences, a great deal of what a visitor sees upon further examination is a direct celebration of the Mexican cultural way of life and artistic approach.