When an Argentine architect, Luis Laplace, saw a neglected mural by the North American artists Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish at the Regional Museum of Michoacán, in the Mexican city of Morelia, seven years ago, he resolved immediately to try to save it.
“What struck me was the scale of it, the beauty, the history,” he said of the mural, titled “The Struggle Against Terrorism.” It is a kaleidoscope of persecution and resistance made in 1934-1935, when the artists were barely in their 20s.
Painted on a wall in a colonial palace in the heart of Morelia, the pink-stoned capital of Michoacán State, the surreal, Renaissance-influenced composition of broken bodies, ominous hooded figures and tools of cruelty was crumbling and faded. Whole sections of the piece were missing. The patio was being used to store chairs.
“I was quite astonished,” said Laplace, who is based in Paris but at the time was working on a project in Morelia.
On Friday, the 1,000-square-foot mural was unveiled anew in Mexico following a six-month restoration that has re-created missing sections and returned its original vibrancy. It is being inaugurated at a moment of heightened tensions between Mexico and the United States over the steep tariffs President Trump is moving to impose.
As well as a team of conservators and contractors, the effort involved the Guston Foundation, which paid around $150,000 for the project; several Mexican cultural institutions; a local grandee; and a lot of diplomacy, Laplace said. He joked that the people of Morelia had never “seen so many people interested in a single mural.”
Guston (who at the time still went by his birthname, Goldstein) and Kadish were commissioned by the museum to paint the fresco at the recommendation of the renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whom they had met in Los Angeles in the early 1930s while Siqueiros was working there. They are among a handful of American muralists who produced work in Mexico in the 1930s; a mural by Grace Greenwood, a Brooklyn artist, covers a wall in a different area of the Morelia museum.
The Americans drove some 1,700 miles to Morelia from Los Angeles in a beat-up car in the fall of 1934 and spent six months there, working feverishly with help from Jules Langsner, a friend and future art critic. After the piece was unveiled in early 1935, Time magazine described black-clad civil servants and farmers in straw hats gazing at the mural in “open-mouthed wonder.”
The wonder didn’t last, however. By the mid-1940s, the mural, with its inverted crucifixes and naked bodies, was deemed so offensive to clerics that the museum agreed to conceal it behind a huge canvas screen, said Jaime Reyes Monroy, the musuem’s director. His predecessor, Eugenio Mercado López, said he had been told angry locals had damaged the mural in some way and that the canvas was intended, in part at least, to protect it.
In exchange for obscuring the mural, the church gave the museum an 18th-century oil painting known as “The Transfer of the Dominican Nuns to a New Convent,” which still hangs there.
The mural languished, hidden, until 1973, when it was uncovered during repairs to the patio, Reyes said. Over the next 50 years, there were sporadic efforts to patch up the work, but they were overwhelmed by the strong sun and relentless humidity.
“It had been covered for so long,” said Reyes, “people had honestly forgotten about it.”
It wasn’t only Morelians who overlooked the mural. Ellen G. Landau, an art historian and author of a book about the impact of Mexico on American modernism, said the art world and even Guston and Kadish diminished the importance of the Morelia fresco, which she believes reverberated through their careers.
Mexico gave the artists latitude to explore their preoccupations, Landau said. This was a contrast to the prescriptions of the Works Progress Administration in the United States, for which both artists also produced murals.
“When the W.P.A. wanted a mural for a post office, they wanted a certain topic,” said Sally Radic, executive director of the Guston Foundation. In Mexico, she said, “they just did what they wanted and that’s why it was so universal.”
With that freedom, Guston and Kadish created a work where the horrors of the Inquisition intersected with those of the Ku Klux Klan and the Gestapo, said Landau. The mural includes a swastika and three hooded figures perched on ladders and a scaffold above scenes of torture — images that would recur in Guston’s later work. To the left is a cartoonlike depiction of people being burned alive that Landau identified as a rendition of a 15th-century woodcut showing the slaughter of Jews at Trent.
The references to repression in the mural were personal as well as historical and global, Landau and Radic said. Guston and Kadish had experienced right-wing thuggery in 1933, when members of the Los Angeles Police Department’s so-called Red Squad destroyed portable murals that the artists had helped produce for the Communist-affiliated John Reed Clubs. Kadish’s family’s apartment was ransacked by the police a few years earlier, according to an essay by Landau, and he witnessed a cross burning on the lawn of a Jewish home.
For Mercado, the former museum director, the mural holds an urgent message for Michoacán, a lush, beautiful state that is plagued by brutal drug-related violence.
“It’s agonizing,” he said. “It’s a call to the local community that we can’t be indifferent to suffering.”
Radic said the mural’s resonance made saving it a “pet project.” She and Laplace spent years trying to navigate Mexican bureaucracy before Alejandro Ramírez, a Morelian resident and chief executive of the movie theater chain Cinépolis, helped them find “the right door to knock on,” Laplace said.
Before restoration began, engineers used ground penetrating radar technology to identify the source of humidity that had caused the mural to fade and crumble. They moved downspouts that were causing damp in the wall and used infrared lights and fans to dry it out.
“Humidity is like an illness for frescos,” said David Oviedo Jiménez, a mural conservator at the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts and Literature who was part of a four-person team that just finished restoring the work. When the team started work, the fresco “was in a terrible state,” he added.
Starting in September, Oviedo and his team stabilized the surface with sealant and repaired blank areas with a mixture of slaked lime and marble sand. They used photographs and traced the original outlines of the painting to re-create missing sections. They painted these with vertical brush strokes, a technique called rigatino that is used in fresco restoration so that people looking at the work can distinguish the new paintwork from the original.
Radic, who saw the restored mural for the first time this week, said the transformation was “beautiful.” Speaking from Morelia by phone on Thursday, she said that the greater vibrancy intensified the sense that the colossal figures in the work are descending upon you, adding, “They did an amazing job.”
Laplace, the architect, who has yet to see the restored fresco, predicts that the restoration will rekindle interest in the work among fans of Guston and Kadish but also among Morelians.
“Now that we have created awareness, people will take care of it,” he said. “They know that they have something precious.”
