David Alfaro Siqueiros
1896-1974
As taken from
Wikopedia...
David Alfaro Siqueiros (December 29, 1896 in Camargo,
Chihuahua, Mexico - January 6, 1974 in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico) was
a social realist painter (muralist), and also a Stalinist, known for
large murals in fresco that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance
together with work by Diego Rivera, Orozco, and others.
His notable projects include his collaborative mural at the Mexican
Electricians' Union (1939-40), From Porfiriato to the Revolution at the
Museum of National History (1957-55), March of Humanity and the
Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros on Avenida Insurgentes (1965-71), and his
role in procuring mural commissions for artists on the University City
campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1950s Mexico
City.
Siqueiros was one of several well-known Mexican muralists working at the
time, including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo.
His art directly reflected the time period in which he flourished as an
artist. His art was deeply rooted in the Mexican Revolution, a violent
and chaotic period in Mexican history in which various social and
political factions fought for recognition and power. The period from the
1920s to the 1950s is known as the Mexican Mural Renaissance, and
Siqueiros was active in the attempt to create an art that was at once
Mexican and universal. From 1919 to 1922 he traveled to Belgium, France,
Italy, and Spain to study art. Throughout his career he traveled
internationally, promoting his version of muralism in the United States,
South America (including Uruguay, Argentina and Chile), Cuba, Europe,
and the Soviet Union. In 1966 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.
Political activism was an important piece of Siqueiros' life. A
self-proclaimed Marxist, he was at times both the favorite and the enemy
of the Mexican Communist Party. He was exiled twice from Mexico, once in
1932 and again in 1940, following his assassination attempt on Leon
Trotsky.
Siqueiros was born the second of 3 children to a low class family in
Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1896. His father, Cipriano Alfaro Siqueiros, was
well-to-do, and his mother, Teresa, came from a Chihuahua family of
musicians, actors, and poets. Siqueiros had two siblings: a sister, Luz,
three years older, and a brother Chucho, one year younger. David was
just two years old when his mother died and his father sent the children
to live with their paternal grandparents. Siete Filos, David’s
grandfather, would have an especially strong role in his upbringing.
However, Cipriano, a devout Catholic, disapproved with the way that his
parents had been raising the children in the countryside, so in 1907 he
brought them back to live with him in Mexico City.
There David attended a Franco-English religious school. He credits his
first rebellious influence to his sister, who had resisted their
father’s religious orthodoxy. Around this time, David was also exposed
to new political ideas, mainly along the lines of anarcho-syndicalism.
One such political theorist was Dr. Atl, who published a manifesto in
1906 calling for Mexican artists to develop a national art and look to
ancient indigenous cultures for inspiration. In 1911 when he was only
fifteen years old, Siqueiros was involved in a student strike at the
Academy of San Carlos of the National Academy of Fine Arts that
protested the school's method of teaching and urged the impeachment of
the school's director. Their protests eventually led to the
establishment of an “open-air academy” in Santa Anita.
At age 18, Siqueiros and several of his colleagues from the School of
Fine Arts, joined Carranza’s Constitutional Army fighting the Huerta
government. When Huerta fell in 1914, Siqueiros became entrenched in the
“post-revolutionary” infighting, as the Constitutional Army had to
battle the political factions of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata for
control. His military travels around the country exposed him to Mexican
culture and the raw everyday struggles of the working and rural poor.
After Carranza’s forces had gained control, Siqueiros briefly returned
to Mexico City to paint before traveling to Europe in 1919. First in
Paris, he absorbed the influence of cubism, intrigued particularly with
Cezanne and the use of large blocks of intense color. While there, he
also met Diego Rivera, another Mexican painter in “the big three” just
on the brink of a legendary career in muralism, and traveled with him
throughout Italy to study the great fresco painters of the Renaissance.
Although many have said that Siqueiros’ artistic ventures were
frequently “interrupted” by his political ones, Siqueiros himself
believed the two were intricately intertwined. By 1921, when he wrote
his famous manifesto in Vida Americana, Siqueiros had already been
exposed to Marxism and seen the raw images of the working and rural poor
while traveling with the Constitutional Army. In “A New Direction for
the New Generation of American Painters and Sculptors,” he called for a
“spiritual renewal” to simultaneously bring back the virtues of
classical painting while infusing this style with “new values” that
acknowledge the “modern machine” and the “contemporary aspects of daily
life". The manifesto also claimed that a “constructive spirit” is
essential to meaningful art, which rises above mere decoration or false,
fantastical themes. Through this style, Siqueiros hoped to create a
style that would bridge national and universal art. In his work as well
as his writing, Siqueiros sought a social realism that at once hailed
the proletariat peoples of Mexico and the world while avoiding the
clichés of trendy “Primitivism” and “Indianism".
In 1922, Siqueiros returned to Mexico City to work as a muralist for
Obregón’s revolutionary government. Then Secretary of Public Education
José Vasconcelos made a mission of educating the masses through public
art and hired scores of artists and writers to build a modern Mexican
culture. Siqueiros, Rivera and Jose Orozco worked together under
Vasconcelos, who supported the muralist movement by commissioning murals
for prominent buildings in Mexico City. Still, the artists working at
the Preparatoria realized that many of their early works lacked the
“public” nature envisioned in their ideology. In 1923 Siqueiros helped
found the Syndicate of Revolutionary Mexican Painters, Sculptors and
Engravers, which addressed the problem of widespread public access
through its union paper, El Machete. That year the paper published –
“for the proletariat of the world” – a manifesto, which Siqueiros helped
author, on the necessity of a “collective” art, which would serve as
“ideological propaganda” to educate the masses and overcome bourgeois,
individualist art.
Soon after, Siqueiros painted his famous mural Burial of a Worker (1923)
in the stairwell of the Colegio Chico. The fresco features an indigenous
women mourning over a coffin, decorated with a hammer and sickle. But as
the union became ever more critical of the revolutionary government,
which had not instituted the promised reforms, its members faced new
threats to cut funding for their art and the paper. A feud within the
union over whether to cease publishing El Machete or lose financial
support for the mural projects left Siqueiros at the forefront, as
Rivera left in protest of the decision to uphold politics over artistic
opportunity. Despite being let go from his “teaching” post under the
Department of Education in 1925, Siqueiros remained deeply entrenched in
labor activities, in the union as well as the Mexican Communist Party,
until he was jailed and eventually exiled in the early 1930s.
In the early 1930s, including his time spent in the Mexican Lecumberri
Prison, Siqueiros produced a series of politically-themed lithographs,
many of which were exhibited in the United States. His lithograph Head
was shown at the 1930 exhibition “Mexican Artists and Artists of the
Mexican School” at The Delphic Studios in New York City. In 1932, he led
an exhibition and conference entitled “Rectifications on Mexican
Muralism” at the gallery of the Spanish Casino in Taxco, Mexico. Shortly
after, he traveled to New York, where he participated in the Weyhe
Gallery’s “Mexican Graphic Art” exhibition. With a team of students, he
also completed a mural, known sometimes as Tropical America, in 1932 at
the Italian Hall at Olvera Street in Los Angeles Painting fresco on an
outside wall – visible to passersby as well as intentional viewers –
forced Siqueiros to reconsider his methodology as a muralist. He wanted
the image – a red-shirted orator captivating a group of women on the
street – to be accessible from multiple angles. Instead of just
constructing “an enlarged easel painting,” He realized that the mural
“must conform to the normal transit of a spectator.”Eventually,
Siqueiros would develop a mural technique that involved tracing figures
onto a wall with an electric projector, photographing early wall
sketches to improve perspective, and new paints, spray guns, and other
tools to accommodate the surface of modern buildings and the outdoor
conditions.
Back to New York in 1936, he was the guest of honor at the “Contemporary
Arts” exhibition at the St. Regis gallery. There he also ran a political
art workshop in preparation for the 1936 General Strike for Peace and
May Day parade. The young Jackson Pollock attended the workshop and
helped build floats for the parade. Continuing to produce several works
throughout the late 1930s – such as Echo of a Scream (1937) and The Sob
(1939), both now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – Siqueiros
also led a number of experimental art workshops for American students.
He spent the better part of 1938 with the Republican Army in Spain
fighting against Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship before
returning to Mexico City to work on a project for the electrician’s
union. In a stairwell of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas,
Siqueiros designed one of his most famous works, Portrait of the
Bourgeoisie, warning against the duel foes of capitalism and fascism.
The piece shows these two forces operating as a single political
machine, swallowing workers to create wealth. Yet an armed, brave-faced
revolutionary, of unnamable class or ethnicity, dives into the scene to
rescue the workers, and a blue sky on the ceiling flanked by electrical
towers displays hope for the proletariat in technological and industrial
advances. Before the mural’s completion in 1940, however, Siqueiros was
forced into hiding and later jailed for his links to an attempt to
assassinate Leon Trotsky, then in exile in Mexico City from the Soviet
Union.
Siqueiros participated in the first ever Mexican contingent at the XXV
Venice Biennale exhibition with Orozco and Rivera in 1950, a mark that
the artists had met absolute international acclaim. Yet by the 1950s,
Siqueiros returned to accepting commissions from what he considered a
“progressive” Mexican state, rather than painting for galleries or
private patrons. He painted an outdoor mural entitled The University to
the People, The People the University at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico in Mexico City in 1952. In 1957 he began work on
4,500-square-foot government commission for Chapultepec Castle in Mexico
City; The Revolution Against the Porfirian Dicatorship was his biggest
mural yet.
Yet near the end of the decade, his staunch political views, and loud
expression of those views, had again gained him skepticism from the
government as well as the public. Under pressure from the National
Actors’ Association, which had commissioned the mural, the government
suspended his work on The History of Theater in Mexico at the Jorge
Negrete Theater in 1958. Siqueiros was eventually arrested in 1960 for
supposedly inciting a May Day riot, though the charges were commonly
known to be false. Numerous protests ensued, even including an appeal by
well-known artists and writers in a New York Times ad in 1961. Unjustly
imprisoned, Siqueiros continued to paint, and his works continued to
sell. He was finally released in spring of 1964.
Siqueiros’ last major project was also his largest: the multi-paneled
mural of The March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the Cosmos at the
Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros in Mexico City. Completed in 1971 after
years of extension and delay, the mural broke from some previous
stylistic mandates, if only by its complex message. Known for making art
that was easily read by the public, especially the lower classes,
Siqueiros message in The March is more difficult to decipher, though it
seems to fuse two visions of human progress, one international and one
based in Mexican heritage. The mural’s placement at a ritzy hotel and
commission by its millionaire owner also seems to challenge Siqueiros’
anti-capitalist ideology.