The movement, with Diego Rivera as its most internationally famous figure, in which the Mexican state turned the walls of its public buildings over to painters who covered them with a vast, fierce epic of Mexican history -- from the Aztec past through the Spanish conquest to the promise of revolution -- making art a weapon of the people and giving a wounded nation a new image of itself.
After a decade of revolution had killed perhaps a million people, the new Mexican government handed its painters an unusually ambitious modern task: cover the bare walls of the schools and palaces with the whole story of the nation. Diego Rivera and the other muralists answered with a public epic in fresco -- brown-skinned workers and peasants as heroes, the conquistadors as villains, the Aztec past restored to glory. They painted history where the illiterate could read it, and a country that had torn itself apart found a new face on its own walls.