It’s a good lesson in what more laconic modernists using a similar vocabulary deliberately weren’t doing with it

It’s a good lesson in what more laconic modernists, using a similar vocabulary, deliberately weren’t doing with it.But the most shameless example of this sort of thing is seen in a couple of pictures by Jean Charlot, an emigre French artist who did much to get Mexican print-making going. They’re both called First Steps, showing a mother getting a toddler walking, and one of them in particular demonstrates how the geometrization of the figure can be given the smoochiest turn. The mother is converted into a snug mushroom, her large head bent over head-on to make a semi-circle that is enclosed in the wider semi-circle of her shoulders. But these edges, which another artist might have made hard, are softened, and the whole body is a model of bungy compactness, cuddlier than anything in Spencer even You hardly need the baby between her arms.

And the so-called “big three” of the muralists – Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros – were among the signatories to the Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors that was quoted in the first paragraph. It was issued in 1922, shortly after the Mexican revolution had consolidated its hold on the country, and the artists got access to a lot of public walls.They also made prints, and work by those three dozens of others are included in Mexican Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Is the idea that it’s OK because it was in a good cause? Or because this is Mexico and different standards apply?Diego Rivera, for instance: one of the main things that is attractive about his work is that it’s cuddly. I’m not sure, that is, whether it quite earns the dispensation it generally received from normal modernist good taste. It certainly makes most other modern art contemporary with it look very tight-lipped, almost wilfully inexplicit. Conversely, the Mexicans get away with a lot that in (say) a European artist would be frowned on as much too cute or lurid. There are over 100 pictures in the show, going up to the 1950s, and the majority take public-spirited, populist or propagandist themes: scenes of labour or revolutionary heroism or the capitalist and fascist menace.I’m not quite sure about the Mexican thing.

It’s the Mexican muralists who are the most serious contenders for great, state sponsored, left-leaning art. The Federal Art Project of Roosevelt’s New Deal administrations was a happier affair. At least it kept many artists in work (another obvious attraction of this sort of project), but the results – mainly a plethora of folksy murals in post-offices – didn’t really make the grade art-wise.Only in one place, so the story usually goes, did the idea bear good fruit In Mexico. And in actuality, attempts at this alliance haven’t proved good. After the Bolshevik Revolution there was a short-lived collaboration between the Communists and the Russian Futurists, which produced some exciting works but ended in clamp-down and the dead hand of Socialist Realism. It’s been one of the big dreams of the century that governments on the left would make a working alliance with forward-looking art.