Murals and Wall Drawings

Images painted or drawn straight onto walls, from Buddhist caves and Maya palaces to civic murals, street pieces and instruction-based wall drawings.

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About

A wall painting belongs to its building, and that fixity shapes its subject and scale. The Buddhist caves at Ajanta in India preserve murals from around the 5th century, and the Maya rooms at Bonampak, painted around 790, show a court in ceremony and battle. In Italy fresco, pigment brushed into fresh lime plaster, carried stories around chapels, as in Giotto's cycle for the Arena Chapel in Padua (c. 1305).

The 20th century made the mural public and political. After the Mexican Revolution, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros covered government buildings with histories of labour and conquest, and New Deal programmes in the United States paid artists to decorate post offices. Keith Haring's Crack is Wack (1986) went up on a Harlem handball court. In 1968 Sol LeWitt began writing instructions that others draw onto a wall, so the idea outlasts any single drawing.