Santa Rosalía (actualmente Ciudad Camargo), 1896 – Cuernavaca (México), 1974
By Francisco Alambert
A prolific artist known for both his murals and easel paintings, David Alfaro Siqueiros began his art studies in 1908 under Eduardo Solares Gutiérrez while also attending the National Preparatory School. From 1911 to 1914, he studied at the San Carlos Academy and the Open-Air School of Santa Anita. He contributed to the revolutionary newspaper La Vanguardia, where other notable figures such as painter José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), whose mural work was markedly political and poetic, and Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo, a well-known naturalist painter) also worked.
Siqueiros left his studies to join the Constitutional Army of the Mexican Revolution, eventually reaching the rank of second captain. After the Revolution ended in 1918, he joined the Bohemian Center in Guadalajara, where discussions focused on the artist’s role in the revolutionary process. In 1919, he was sent to Europe as a military attaché (a position he lost the following year). In Paris, he met Diego Rivera, with whom he developed the idea of a “monumental and heroic” style of painting, inspired by the spirit of the Revolution and pre-colonial traditions of the Americas. While in Europe, he also encountered the French Modernist Movement. In Barcelona in 1921, he published the magazine Vida Americana and Manifesto to the Artists of America. He returned to Mexico in 1922 to begin his first mural, The Elements, at the National Preparatory School.
In 1923, Siqueiros joined the Communist Party. He founded the Union of Workers, Technicians, Painters, and Sculptors, where he became general secretary, and in 1924, he edited the weekly El Machete, which dealt with artistic and social issues. Politically active (he helped found a miners’ union, among other efforts), he led the Mexican delegation at an International Communist meeting in the Soviet Union (1928). In 1930, he was imprisoned for six months in Taxco for his subversive activities. It was not until 1932 that he held his first solo exhibition at the Espinal Casino in Mexico City. While in California in 1932, he painted Worker’s Meeting at the Chouvinard School of Art, Tropical America at the Plaza Art Center, and Portrait of Modern Mexico at Dudley Murphy’s residence, and he also became interested in the use of industrial materials in his compositions.
In 1933, Siqueiros was deported to the United States. He later traveled through Uruguay and Argentina, where he painted a mural using new techniques. In 1936, he founded the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop in New York, a laboratory for modern techniques in art where he experimented with industrial materials and photography. The following year, he fought in the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, earning the title of lieutenant colonel. Upon his return to Mexico in 1940, he became involved in a series of radical political activities, including his involvement in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. In 1941, he went to Chile, where he created a mural at the library of the Mexico School in Chillán.
In 1943, he painted The New Day of Democracies at the Sevilla-Baltimore Hotel in Havana, Cuba (now in the National Museum of Cuba), as well as other murals in Mexico City. In 1951, he created murals for the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National Polytechnic Institute. He was imprisoned again in 1961, halting his work on two large murals for the Theater of the Mexican Actors Association and the Museum of Anthropology. In 1964, he began his largest mural, The March of Humanity, at the Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum (which he founded) in Mexico City. In 1966, he received the Mexican National Art Prize, and in 1967, the Soviet government awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize. That same year, a major retrospective of his work was presented in Mexico City.
In addition to his artwork, Siqueiros was known for his writings and lectures. He published several controversial texts, including There Is No Other Way but Ours (1945), They Called Me the Big Colonel (an autobiography published in 1977), How to Paint a Mural (a book published in Havana in 1985), and Art in Revolution (an anthology). He experimented with techniques, materials, projections, and new mediums, many of which were lost or damaged due to their experimental nature. He also worked with photography, aiming to achieve a project of plastic integration in line with his idea of “sculpture-painting,” striving for a total, modern, popular, and politically engaged artistic expression.
