David Alfaro Siqueiros
David Alfaro Siqueiros (born José de Jesús Alfaro Siqueiros, December 29, 1896, in Chihuahua – January 6, 1974, in Cuernavaca, Morelos) was a Mexican social realist painter, better known for his large murals in fresco. Along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, he established “Mexican Muralism.” He was a Stalinist in support of the Soviet Union and a member of the Mexican Communist Party who led an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky in May 1940.
His surname would normally be Alfaro by Spanish naming customs; like Picasso (Pablo Ruiz y Picasso) and Lorca (Federico García Lorca), Siqueiros used his mother’s surname. It was long believed that he was born in Camargo in Chihuahua state, but in 2003 it was proven that he had actually been born in the city of Chihuahua, but grew up in Irapuato, Guanajuato, at least from the age of six. The discovery of his birth certificate in 2003 by a Mexican art curator was announced the following year by art critic Raquel Tibol, who was renowned as the leading authority on Mexican Muralism and who had been a close acquaintance of Siqueiros. Siqueiros changed his given name to “David” after his first wife called him by it in allusion to Michelangelo’s David.
Youth
Many details of his childhood, including birth date, birthplace, first name, and where he grew up, were misstated during his life and long after his death, in some cases by himself. Often, he is reported to have been born and raised in 1898 in a town in the state of Chihuahua, and his personal names are reported to be “José David”.
Siqueiros was born in Chihuahua in 1896, the second of three children. He was baptized José de Jesús Alfaro Siqueiros. His father, Cipriano Alfaro, originally from Irapuato, was well-off. His mother was Teresa Siqueiros. Siqueiros had two siblings: a sister, Luz, three years older, and a brother “Chucho” (Jesús), a year younger. David’s mother died when he was four; their father sent the children to live with their paternal grandparents. David’s grandfather, nicknamed “Siete Filos” (‘seven knife-edges’), had an especially strong role in his upbringing. In 1902 Siqueiros started school in Irapuato, Guanajuato.
He credits his first rebellious influence to his sister, who had resisted their father’s religious orthodoxy. Around this time, Siqueiros 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, at age fifteen, 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 teaching methodology 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 the age of eighteen, Siqueiros and several of his colleagues from the School of Fine Arts joined Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutional Army fighting Huerta’s government. When Huerta fell in 1914, Siqueiros became enmeshed in the “post-revolutionary” infighting, as the Constitutional Army had to battle the diverse 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 classes. 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 Paul Cézanne and the use of large blocks of intense color. While there, he also met Diego Rivera, another Mexican painter of “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.
Early oppression and racism
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 manifesto in Vida Americana, Siqueiros had already been exposed to Marxism and saw the life 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 Álvaro 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 José 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 a group of pre-Conquest style workers in a funeral procession who are carrying a giant coffin, decorated with a hammer and sickle. The mural was never finished and was vandalized by students at the school who did not agree with the overtly political subject matter in the painting. Eventually, the entire painting was whitewashed by the new Minister of Education who succeeded Vasconcelos. 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 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.
After spending many years in Mexico and heavily involved in radical political activities, Siqueiros went to Los Angeles in 1932 to continue his career as a muralist. Working in a collective unit that experimented with new painting techniques using modern devices such as airbrushes, sprayguns and projectors, Siqueiros and his team of collaborators painted two major murals. The first mural, Street Meeting, was commissioned for the Chouinard School of Art. It depicts a group of workers of mixed ethnicities listening to an angry labor agitator’s speech during a break in the workday. The mural was washed over within a year of its unveiling due both to weather-related technical issues, and perhaps, to the pro-Communist content of the work. Siqueiros’ other significant public Los Angeles mural, Tropical America (full name: América Tropical: Oprimida y Destrozada por los Imperialismos, or Tropical America: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism), was commissioned shortly after the unveiling of Street Meeting, and was to be painted on the exterior wall of the Plaza Art Center that faced the busy Olvera Street. Siqueiros’ Tropical America depicts the United States’ imperialism in Latin America, a much more radical theme than was intended for the mural. Although Tropical America received generally favorable criticism, some viewed the mural as “Communist propaganda”, which led to a partial covering in 1934 and a total whitewash in 1938. Eighty years later, the Getty Conservation Institute performed restoration work on the mural. As no color photographs of Tropical America are known to exist, conservators used scientific analysis and best practices to get at the artist’s vision of his piece. It became accessible to the public on its 80th birthday, October 9, 2012. The América Tropical Interpretive Center that opened nearby is dedicated to the life and legacy of David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Artistic Career
In the early 1930s, including his time spent in 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, Guerrero. Shortly after, he traveled to New York, where he participated in the Weyhe Gallery’s “Mexican Graphic Art” exhibition. Also in 1932, Nelbert Chouinard invited Siqueiros to Los Angeles to conduct mural workshops. It was at this time that, with a team of students, he also completed 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 – an Indian peon being crucified by American oppression – 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. He was unceremoniously deported from the United States for political activity the same year.
Back in 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. In fact, Siquieros has been credited with teaching drip and pour techniques to Pollock that later resulted in his “allover” paintings, made from 1947 to 1950, and which constitute Pollock’s greatest achievement. In addition to floats, the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop produced a variety of posters and other ephemeral works for the CPUSA and other anti-fascist organizations in New York. These ephemeral works possessed the ability to reach the masses in a way different from mural painting because they were accessible to a wide audience outside of an institution or gallery. The Siqueiros Experimental Workshop only lasted for a little over a year until Siqueiros went to fight in the Spanish Civil War in April 1937, but their floats were featured in both the 1936 and 1937 May Day Parades in Manhattan’s garment district.
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 Spanish Republican Army fighting Francisco Franco’s fascist coup before returning to Mexico City. After his return, in a stairwell of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, Siqueiros collaborated with Spanish refugee Josep Renau and the International Team of Plastic Artists to develop one of his most famous works, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, warning against the dual foes of capitalism and fascism. The original mural shows a giant generator using the opposition of fascist and capitalist democracies to generate imperialism and war. An armed, brave-faced revolutionary, of unnamable class or ethnicity, confronts the machine, and a blue sky on the ceiling flanked by electrical towers displays hope for the proletariat in technological and industrial advances.
Attempted assassination of Leon Trotsky
Before the mural’s completion in 1940, however, Siqueiros was forced into hiding and later exiled for his direct involvement in an attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky, then in exile in Mexico City from the Soviet Union:
In the early morning of May 24, 1940, he led an attack on Trotsky’s house in Mexico City’s Coyoacán suburb. (Trotsky, granted asylum by President Cárdenas, was then living in Mexico.) The attacking party was composed of men who had served under Siqueiros in the Spanish Civil War and of miners from his union. After thoroughly raking the house with machine gun fire and explosives, the attackers withdrew in the belief that nobody could have survived the assault. They were mistaken. Trotsky was unhurt and lived till August, when he was killed with an ice pick wielded by an assassin
Trotsky’s 13-year-old grandson was shot, yet survived. Following the attack, police found a shallow grave on the road to the Desierto de los Leones with the body of New York Communist Robert Sheldon Harte, executed by one shot to the head. He had been one of Trotsky’s bodyguards. The theory that Sheldon was a Soviet agent who had infiltrated Trotsky’s entourage, aiding in Siqueiros’ attack by allowing the hit squad to enter Trotsky’s compound, was discounted by Trotsky and later historians. Siqueiros’s colleague Josep Renau completed the SME mural, transforming the generator into a machine that converts the blood of workers into coins.
American-born poet and eventual fellow Spanish Civil War participant Edwin Rolfe was a great admirer of Siqueiros’s “ability to function” as “artist and revolutionary”. His 1934 poem “Room with Revolutionists” is based on a conversation between ″New Masses″ editor, poet, and Left journalist Joseph Freeman (1897-1965) and Siqueiros; in it, Siqueiros is described as “a revolutionist / a painter of great areas, editor / of fiery and terrifying words, leader / of the poor who plant, the poor who burrow / under the earth in field and mine. / His life’s an always upward-delving battle in / an old torn sweater, the pockets always empty.”
Later life and oppression
Siqueiros participated in the first ever Mexican contingent at the XXV Venice Biennale exhibition with Orozco, Rivera and Tamayo in 1950, and he received the second prize for all exhibitors, which recognized the international status of Mexican art. 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 People to the University, the University to the People at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City in 1952. In 1957 he began work on 4,500-square-foot (420 m2) government commission for Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City; Del porfirismo a la Revolución was his biggest mural yet. (The painting is known in English as From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz to the Revolution or The Revolution Against the Porfirian Dictatorship.)
In the lobby of the Hospital de la Raza in Mexico City, he created a revolutionary multi-angular mural using new materials and techniques, For the Social Welfare of all Mexicans. After painting Man the Master and Not the Slave of Technology on a concave aluminum panel in the lobby of the Polytechnic Institute, he painted The Apology for the Future Victory of Science over Cancer on panels which wrap around the lobby of cancer center.
Yet near the end of the decade, his outspoken communist views alienated him from the government. Under pressure from the government, the National Actors’ Association, which had commissioned a mural on the theater in Mexico suspended his work on The History of Theater in Mexico at the Jorge Negrete Theater and sued him for breach of contract in 1958.
Siqueiros was eventually arrested in 1960 for openly criticizing the President of Mexico, Adolfo López Mateos, and leading protests against the arrests of striking workers and teachers, though the charges were commonly known to be false. Numerous protests ensued, even including an appeal by well-known artists and writers in The New York Times ad in 1961. Unjustly imprisoned, Siqueiros continued to paint, and his works continued to sell. During that stay, he would make numerous sketches for the project of decorating the Hotel Casino de la Selva, owned by Manuel Suarez y Suarez. After international pressure was put on the Mexican authorities, Siqueiros was finally pardoned and released in the spring of 1964. He immediately resumed working on his suspended murals in the Actors’ Union and Chapultepec Castle.
When the mural planned for the Hotel de la Selva in Cuernavaca was moved to Mexico City and expanded, he assembled a team of national and international artists to work on the panels in his workshop in Cuernavaca. This project, his last major mural, is the largest mural ever painted, an integrated structure combining architecture, in which the building was designed as a mural, with mural painting and polychromed sculpture. Known as the Polyforum Siqueiros, the exterior consists of 12 panels of sculpture and painting while the walls and ceiling of the interior are covered with The March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the Cosmos. 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.
Siqueiros Workshop
His most outstanding pupil without a doubt was the painter Jackson Pollock and then in the Street of Venus in Cuernavaca Morelos was created The Tallera was in the words of Siqueiros “bring to reality an idea that since 1920 we had Diego Rivera and I, that is, the creation of a true workshop of muralism where new techniques of paintings, materials, geometrical aspects, perspectives, etc. will be tried out ”
It was perhaps the first workshop for muralism in the world. “A workshop – said Siqueiros – large, immense, full of machines, with supermobile scaffolding, with laboratories to test the chemistry and durability of colors, with plastic materials in abundance, without the suffering of limitation, with a photography department, with film cameras, with everything, everything a muralist painter needs, even with the elements and accessories to penetrate the rugged field of color dynamics and the relativity of geometric shapes in active space “. It will be something like an immense barn, with light from above, but without doors. To get to it we would make an underground passage. Nobody would know its objective.
The idea was carried out, when it responds to the initial contract of Don Manuel Suárez y Suárez to produce 18 mural paintings of thirteen and a half by four meters to decorate the congress hall of the Hotel Casino de la Selva in Cuernavaca. Later Siqueiros enters the jail, there he conceived the idea to make, instead of the pictures, a mural of extraordinary proportions. In his cell he paints approximately 200 paintings, which would serve the theme of the mural. In these he scaled a portion of the work to scale.
Style
As a muralist and an artist, Siqueiros believed art should be public, educational, and ideological. He painted mostly murals and other portraits of the revolution – its goals, its past, and the current oppression of the working classes. Because he was painting a story of human struggle to overcome authoritarian, capitalist rule, he painted the everyday people ideally involved in this struggle. Though his pieces sometimes include landscapes or figures of Mexican history and mythology, these elements often appear as mere accessories to the story of a revolutionary hero or heroes (several works depict the revolutionary “masses”, such as the mural at Chapultepec).
His interest in the human form developed at the Academy in Mexico City. His accentuation of the angles of the body, its muscles and joints, can be seen throughout his career in his portrayal of the strong revolutionary body. In addition, many works, especially in the 1930s, prominently feature hands, which could be interpreted as another heroic symbol of proletarian strength through work: his self-portrait in prison (El Coronelazo, 1945, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City), Our Present Image (1947, Museum of Modern Art, Mexico), New Democracy (1944, Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City), and even his series on working class women, such as The Sob.
Murals
The Tecpan building currently houses the Cuauhtémoc mural against the myth of 1944. This is the artist’s first mixed plastic work in which he combines modern paintings and wooden supports, masonite and sculptures made by Luis Arenal Bastar. Through the three-dimensional perspective Siqueiros tries to recreate the movement of the figures. On the right and in the foreground is Cuauhtémocwielding weapons and opposing the destruction of their civilization at the hands of the Spanish conquerors, the latter are represented as centaurs whose forces are religion and firearms (above and left). Under the legs of the horse is the head of an indigenous beheaded and in front Quetzalcoatl appears as a symbol of the millenarian development of prehispanic Mexico. At the center, Moctezuma II implored the gods to be puzzled to explain why the supposed return of Quetzalcoatl (in the figure of Cortes) implied the fall of his empire, appreciating in the background the burned temples.
David Alfaro Siqueiros died in Cuernavaca, Morelos, on January 6, 1974 in the company of Angélica Arenal Bastar, who was his inseparable companion since the Spanish Civil War. His body was buried in the Rotunda of the Illustrious Persons. 17 Days before his death, Siqueiros donated his house in Polanco to the town of Mexico, which since 1969 had dedicated it to Public Art Rooms and the Museum of Mural Painting Composition.
Its loss caused a deep sorrow in those Latin American artists who identified with their social art, among them, Dr. Teodoro Núñez Ureta:
The death of Siqueiros stops us suddenly in the middle of the street. It surprises us all. It does not matter that until that day many did not know about him or his dreams. Siqueiros? Siqueiros. From the street we make a recount. Bad years these. First Matisse, then Picasso, Casals, Neruda. And now Siqueiros. We see that they all reached 70, 90 years. That all are glorious examples of the culture that we are still living. Great old people who would seem to agree to die together. And suddenly we understand that it is not by chance that this happens. These men, for 70, 90 years were the main actors of the last drama. And the drama is over…
The Siqueiros mural: characteristics, techniques and location 1922-1971
1922-1924
Elements. Painted to the encaustic, in a vaulted ceiling of the Colegio Chico National High School. San Ildefonso # 43, Mexico, DF
Burial of the sacrificed worker.
The call to freedom, cool.
1932
A workers ‘ rally. Cool on reinforced concrete. Painted with airbrush. Chovinard School of Arts, Los Angeles, outer wall (destroyed).
The tropical America. Cool on reinforced concrete. ArtCenter Plaza, Los Angeles. Exterior wall (restored).
Current portrait of Mexico. Initially, the Mexican bourgeoisie emerged from the Revolution in the hands of imperialism. Residence of the film director Dudley, Santa Barbara, Cal. USA, frescoed on three boards of 16 m²
1933
Plastic exercise. Country house of Natalio Botana, in Don Torcuato near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Local tunnel shaped, painted fresco on black cement, with airbrush. Argentine artists Lino Eneas Spilimbergo, Enrique Lázaro, Juan Carlos Castagnino, Antonio Berni and filmmaker Leon Klimovsky collaborated.
1939
Portrait of the bourgeoisie. Mexican Union of Electricians, Antonio Caso # 45, Mexico DF Walls and ceiling of the stairs: 100 m², pyroxylin on flattened cement applied with airbrush and brushes. The Spanish poster and painter José Renan and the Spanish painters Antonio Rodríguez Luna and Miguel Prieto collaborated, as well as the Mexican artists Antonio Pujol, Luis Arenal, Fanny Rabel and Roberto Berdecio.
1941- 1942
Death to the invader. Library of the School Mexico, in Chillán, Chile. Two frontal walls of 8 x 5 m each and a ceiling of 160 m² that Siqueiros joined eliminating the right angles in a surface without solution of continuity. Painted with pyroxylin, on racks of masonite and celotex, with the collaboration of the German Erwin Werner, the Colombian Alipio Jaramillo and the Chileans Luis Vargas Rosas, Camilo Mori and Gregorio de la Fuente.
1943
Allegory of the equality and confraternity of the white and black races in Cuba. Mural of 40 m², today destroyed, which reproduces a photo and fragments in Siqueiros edited by the INBA in 1951.
The new day of democracy. 7.5 m² mobile board made for the Hotel Sevilla Baltimore in Havana, Cuba. Today it is located in the National Museum of Cuba. Painted to pyroxylin on masonite.
1944
Cuauhtémoc against the myth. Completed for a private house, Mrs. Arenal in Sonora # 9 and later moved to the Tecpan building in Tlatelolco, where it is now. This mural measures 75 m² and is painted with pyroxylin on canvas, celotex and plywood. Two small polychrome sculptures by Luis Arenal were added to this mural.
1945
New democracy, victim of war and victim of fascism. A central board of 54 m² and two separate sides of 4 x 4.6 m each. Pyroxylin on cloth and celotex. Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico, DF
1945 – 1966
Patricians and patricides. Ex office of Santo Domingo, Republic of Brazil # 31, Mexico, DF Side walls and vault of the central staircase, 400 m² of surface. The union of the vault with the wall is achieved in concave form by means of compressed plates covered with glass cloth and painted with acrylic.
1949
Monument to Captain General Ignacio Allende. School of Fine Arts of the former convent of Santa Rosa, San Miguel Allende, Guanajuato. Room 17 x 7 m with vaulted ceiling. Layout for a mural painting course, was interrupted. Vinellite on flattened cement.
1951
Cuauhtémoc redivio and Tormento de Cuauhtémoc. Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico, DF Two transportable boards of 8 x 5 m each. Pyroxylin on celotex.
1952
The man loved and not slave of the technique. National Polytechnic Institute, National School of Biological Sciences. Prolongation of Carpio Street. Elongated and relatively narrow board, with the concave top of 72 m² surface. Pyroxylin on aluminum foil.
1953
Speed. Automex Factory, Avenida Alberto Alberto # 320, Mexico, DF Sculpture-painting, made on the facade of the building and partially covered with tiles and glass mosaic, of 22.5 m² of surface.
1952 – 1954
For social security and for all Mexicans. Zone Hospital No. 1 of the Mexican Institute of Social Security (Hospital de la Raza), Calz. Vallejo and Av. Insurgentes. The architect Enrique Yáñez taking into account the Siquean conception of an integral plastic, realized the vestibule of the forum without right angles that interrupted the continuity between the walls and the vaulted ceiling. Thanks to this the mural is continuous, extending from one wall to the other and from these to the ceiling without breaking the unit. As a technique, Siqueiros used pyroxylin and vinylite on celotex frames.
1952 – 1956
The town to the university, the university to the town. Ciudad Universitaria, México, DF Relief on a salient panel of the Rectory Building, measuring 304.15 m², made of cement and covered with glass mosaic.
The right to culture. In the same building (north side); vinylite on concrete, with an area of 250 m².
New university symbol. 150 m², also vinylite on concrete.
1953
Excomunión and firing of Hidalgo. Nicolaita University, Morelia, Mich. Transportable board of 16 m². Pyroxylin on masonite.
1958
Apology of the future victory of medical science on cancer. Oncology Pavilion of the Medical Center. Baja California and Av. Cuauhtémoc. Lobby of 70 m². Acrylic on plastic and plywood.
1957 – 1966
From the Porfiriato to the Revolution or the Revolution against the Porfirian dictatorship. National Museum of History, Castillo de Chapultepec, México, DF Room with two small walls perpendicular to the front walls, whose murals cover an area of 419 m². Acrylic on canvas and glass on celotex and plywood.
1958-1959
The scenic art in the social life of Mexico. Lobby of the theater Jorge Negrete. National Association of Actors, Altamirano # 128. Glass fabric on plywood painted with acrylic.
1965- 1971
The march of humanity. Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum, Insurgentes Sur y Filadelfia, former Parque de la Lama. Inside: 72 asbestos-cement boards reinforced with angular iron frames. The sculptures-paintings were made with sheets of steel die-cast, molded and welded. The exterior in a dodecagonal shape was covered with asbestos cement sheet and painted with acrylic; 2,166 m² surface.
Tribute to Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, José Guadalupe Posada, Leopoldo Méndez and Gerardo Murillo (Dr. Atl) ”, composed of five portraits of 4,6 m high in the wall that connects Avenida Insurgentes with Filadelfia, sculpture- paint made on steel sheets and asbestos-cement. Architecture by Guillermo Rosell de la Lama and Ramón Miguel Jáuregui.
The look to the Muralist
Self-portrait by David Alfaro Siqueiros The work is also known under the title of El Coronelazo nickname that Siqueiros received from a journalist on his return from the Spanish Civil War – where he was lieutenant colonel of the 46th and 82nd brigades of the 8th. Spanish Republican Army – and that he adopted with pleasure. The work shows the grandiloquent personality of the painter, an impression that is reinforced by the dynamism of the gesture represented.
Portrait of Angelica, 1947 We observe her smiling despite the deep sadness that betray her huge eyes. Angelica was the wife of the Mexican painter, who met her in the United States in 1932 after being expelled from Mexico for violating the order that had been imposed on her and forcing her to stay in Taxco. They married in 1937.
Birth of fascism At the center of the composition, on a turbulent sea floats a barge of boards with a mast and a sail shaken by the wind. Above the planks she is giving birth, hugging the mast, the universal prostitute. The product of the birth is amorphous and bleeding. Above the left, on the water and as if it were foam, sails a swastika cross, symbol of National Socialism. In the upper right, on a mound of sand, there is a developed industrial complex that symbolizes the Soviet Union: it is the vanguard, socialism and is far from the waves that promises to wreck fascism from its gestation.
Death to the Invader Begins 1941, this work of “Pictorial Oratory” character of 249 m², where it is used as a plastic element, pyroxylin on masonite and celotex in mobile metal frames, painted on two walls joined by a vaulted ceiling in the school’s library, with an expressionist, epic and dramatic neo-baroque style, the image of Mexico and Chile in a resistance against the Spanish conquest, is shown in this mural the similarity that exists in the historical trajectory of both peoples, with some historical figures from both countries as, Cuauhtémoc, Caupolican, Miguel Hidalgo, O’Higgins, Benito Juárez, Galvarino, Emiliano Zapata, Lautaro, José María Morelos and Pavón and Francisco Bilbao, surrounded by voracious Spanish conquerors.
The Esclavismo Represented by two children and some men and women, symbolizes the work without pay, which is of economic base, this stage of development is dark because of the great misery that humanity.
Portrait of George Gershwin It is a charity concert that took place at the Metropolitan Opera House, where Gershwin directed Americano in Paris and performed as a soloist his own concert in F major, this event came as a memory, which he asked Siqueiros to make his portrait.
Peasant Mother Not only the noble work, but even the smallest expression of the spiritual and physical life of our race springs from the native (particularly from the Indian), its admirable and extraordinarily peculiar talent to create beauty.
Source from Wikipedia