Mexico City - School of Fine Arts

(Local Name: Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas) The same building as Teatro de Bellas Artes also houses the Museum of Art (Museo de Artes Plásticas), which is notable for its collection of works by Mexican artists of the 19th and 20th c. It also has rooms for periodic special exhibitions and a number of lecture and concert halls. On the second and third floors can be seen murals by the leading Mexican exponents of this genre. In the corridors on the second floor hang two large works by Rufino Tamayo, "The Birth of our Nationality" and "Mexico Today". On the third floor can be seen a painting by Diego Rivera, "Man at the Turning-Point" (1934), a copy of that done for the Rockefeller Center in New York which was painted over because of its Marxist trend. There is also an interesting series of frescos by David Álfaro Siqueiros depicting Democracy and the last Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc, done in the then new technique using a spray-gun. The work entitled "Catharsis" by José Clemente Orozco was painted in 1934.