David Alfaro Siqueiros

Paper Summary:

Perhaps with the exception of Andre Malraux, no painter affiliated with the arts has been involved in direct political action as heavily as David Alfaro Siqueiros. The paper shows that as a student activist, soldier, and a leader of an assassination crew, Siqueiros was also considered one the artistic masters of the twentieth century, a member of that great Mexican school of mural painting that includes Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. Inventive, insightful, and always in search of new techniques and experiments with materials, Siqueiros frequently used pyroxylin, a substance related to gun-cotton, which dries with amazing speed. The paper shows that with the ability to produce art with remarkable efficiency, Siqueiros' career was prolific, deep and inspiring.

From the Paper:

"Released in 1964, Siqueiros continued as a partisan of international Marxism. A supporter of Castro's Cuba and a foe of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. And in the final decade of his life, Siqueiros set up a workshop in Cuernavaca and painted his most ambitious work, a huge mural called "The March of Humanity." When it was inaugurated, on December 15, 1971, President Luis Echeverria was in attendance. Because he had been blamed for the Tlatelolco massacre, that took place while he was interior minister, Echeverria was trying to project a populist image and mend fences with the left."

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