New World Rebels: From Diego Rivera and the Epic of One's People to Ti-Jean, Folklore, and Alfred Codallo

Walcott's interest in masters and masterpieces of the past and his debt to Craven's A Treasury has recurrently been framed in terms of European art. Yet, in his 1939 introduction to his artbook, the Kansan Craven declared: ‘the hope of painting lies in America’. Predictably, Craven's ‘America’, far from being the entire continent, was circumscribed to the United States, and his belief that ‘American’ art should be an organic manifestation of ‘American’ life governed his inclusion of painters who represented what he considered the most ‘authentic’ part of ‘America’, namely the Midwest. Craven enthusiastically championed Regionalist painters and muralists like Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood or the New Deal muralist John Steuart Curry who, however, were not the only muralists featured in his book: Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, in fact, were also mentioned as artists who gave ‘wall painting on a grand scale its first modern impetus’ and produced art inspired by the ‘turmoil of their own people’ and ‘passionate belief in the regeneration of [their] countrymen’.

Mexican muralism was the first modern art movement to emerge from the Americas in the twentieth century and, as such, it was bound to capture the attention of the young St. Omer and Walcott, and of their tutor Simmons. In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott explains that the two young apprentices ‘adored’ the Mexican muralists whose ‘anger capsized the laid-out trestle tables of the Academy with the ferocity of [their] New World’ (OTC21, 18). In Another Life, Walcott puts Simmons side by side with artists like Raphael, Orozco and Siqueiros in a constellation of ‘people's medals’ (AL125) while in his notes for the poem, he remembers that, apart from modelling himself after Van Gogh and Gauguin (‘madness and isolation’ or ‘madness’ and ‘degeneration’), St. Omer ‘wanted to be not only Raphael, [his] “sweet painter” (that was [his] Catholic side) but Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera ([his] violent Trinity, the new world rebel in [him])’ (ALms1, 18, 110).