What Is a Mural? Painting That Belongs to a Wall
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A painting on a wall cannot be bought, moved, or seen in private, which changes everything about what it is for. It addresses whoever passes, it lasts as long as the building does, and it is made at a scale where the viewer is inside the work rather than in front of it. That combination is why murals have been the preferred medium of religions, states and political movements for as long as there have been walls.
The techniques
The method determines the durability and the working conditions, and there are four main ones:
- •Buon fresco, painting with pigment in water onto wet lime plaster, so that as the plaster cures the pigment becomes chemically part of the wall. It is the most durable method, it cannot be corrected once dry, and it must be completed in daily sections while the plaster remains workable, which is why the joins in a Renaissance fresco can be traced
- •Fresco secco, painting onto dry plaster with a binder, which allows correction and detail and flakes off over time, which is why Leonardo's Last Supper began deteriorating within twenty years
- •Mosaic, setting cut stone or glass into mortar, which is the most durable of all and the most laborious, and which reflects light from the slightly irregular surfaces of the tesserae
- •Modern methods including acrylic, mineral paint and aerosol, applied to primed masonry and protected with an anti-graffiti coating, which last decades rather than centuries
- •Scale management, historically by squaring up a small drawing onto a grid or by pouncing charcoal through a pricked full-size cartoon, and now frequently by projection
What walls were used for
The historical uses are consistent across cultures. Religious instruction is the largest, with church, temple and tomb walls carrying narrative cycles for populations that could not read, from Egyptian tomb paintings through Buddhist cave complexes at Ajanta and Dunhuang to the Sistine ceiling. Political display is the second, with rulers recording victories and legitimacy on public surfaces. Domestic decoration is easy to forget and was enormous, and the best-preserved examples are the houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum, where the walls of ordinary rooms carry illusionistic architecture, garden scenes and mythological panels. Civic pride and commemoration account for much of the rest. The common feature is that a mural is commissioned by whoever controls the wall, which makes the medium an unusually direct record of who held power and what they wanted said.
The Mexican muralists
The most consequential modern mural movement began in Mexico in the 1920s, when the post-revolutionary government under education minister Jose Vasconcelos commissioned artists to cover public buildings with works depicting Mexican history and identity for a largely illiterate population. Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, known collectively as the three great ones, produced enormous cycles in ministries, schools and palaces, drawing on pre-Columbian imagery, on Italian fresco technique that Rivera had studied in Europe, and on explicitly socialist politics. The movement travelled, with all three working in the United States, where Rivera's mural for the Rockefeller complex in New York was destroyed in 1934 after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin, an episode that became the standard illustration of the tension between patron and painter in public art. It influenced the American public works art programmes of the Depression, which employed thousands of artists and covered post offices and schools across the country, and it shaped the Chicano mural movement from the 1960s and community mural practice worldwide.
Murals as territory
Because a wall is public and permanent, painting one is a claim, which is why murals appear wherever a community is asserting something contested. The political murals of Belfast and Derry are the most studied case, with loyalist and republican communities marking territory, commemorating dead and stating allegiance in a tradition running back to 1908 and comprising thousands of works, several of which have been repainted as part of peace-process efforts to replace paramilitary imagery with sport and history. Chicano murals in Los Angeles asserted a cultural presence in a city that had erased it. Palestinian murals and the works painted on the separation barrier make claims in the same way. Commemorative murals of individuals appear rapidly after deaths that a community regards as unjust. The state responds in kind, since anti-graffiti policy, commissioning programmes and the whitewashing of particular works are all decisions about whose claim the wall carries.
The takeaway
A mural cannot be bought or moved, addresses everyone who passes and is commissioned by whoever controls the wall, which makes it a direct record of power and intention. True fresco binds pigment chemically into curing plaster and lasts for centuries while permitting no correction, which is why its daily working sections remain visible. Historical uses run from religious instruction for non-readers to domestic decoration at Pompeii, and the Mexican movement of the 1920s made the form a political instrument that spread worldwide.