David Alfaro Siqueiros

David Alfaro Siqueiros , 1896-1974, Mexican painter, b. Chihuahua. Siqueiros was among Mexico's most original and eminent painters. His career as an artist was always related to his vigorous socialist revolutionary activities. He enlisted in the Batallón Mamá ( "Baby's Brigade" ) in the Carranza army and at 17 was a staff officer. As military attaché at the Mexican legation in Paris (1919-21), he came into contact with stimulating contemporary artistic movements. Upon his return to Mexico in 1922, he became a leader of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Artists, and Sculptors and a founder of the magazine Machete, which expounded the principles of a new national "people's art." After frequent imprisonment for political activities and extensive travel abroad, Siqueiros served as an officer in the Spanish republican army (1938).

Siqueiros, Diego Rivera , and José Clemente Orozco are often referred to as "los tres grandes" —the three greats of Mexican mural painting. Siqueiros's art is one of violent social protest expressed in dynamic, swirling brushwork, dramatic contrasts of light and shade, brilliant colors, and heroic themes. Among his best-known works are murals at the National Preparatory School, Mexico City (1922-24) and for the Plaza Art Center, Los Angeles (1932; destroyed); the mural Portrait of Mexico Today, originally painted in a Los Angeles residence in 1932, is now in the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His other major murals include the vast Liberation of Chile, at the Mexican school, Chillán, Chile (1942); New Democracy, at the National Institute of Fine Arts, Mexico City (1945); a series at the Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City (1952); and the culmination of his work, The March of Humanity (1968, Hotel de Mexico, Mexico City).

Bibliography: See B. S. Myers, Mexican Painting in Our Time (1956).

Siqueiros, David Alfaro (1896–1974). Mexican painter, one of the trio of muralists (with Orozco and Rivera) who dominated 20th-century Mexican art. He was a political activist from his youth and in 1914 abandoned his studies at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City to join the revolutionary army fighting against President Huerta. His services were appreciated by the victorious General Carranza, who in 1919 sponsored him to continue his studies in Europe, where he was friendly with Rivera (later they became rivals). On returning to Mexico in 1922 he took a leading part in the artistic revival fostered by President Alvaro Obregón. Siqueiros was active in organizing the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors and was partly responsible for drafting its manifesto, which set forth the idealistic aims of the revolutionary artists: ‘our own aesthetic aim is to socialize artistic expression, to destroy bourgeois individualism … We proclaim that this being the moment of social transition from a decrepit to a new order, the makers of beauty must invest their greatest efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people, and our supreme object in art, which today is an expression for individual pleasure, is to create beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle.’

Siqueiros's political activities led to his imprisonment or self-imposed exile several times; from 1925 to 1930 he completely abandoned painting for political activity and he later fought in the Spanish Civil War. It was not until 1939 that he eventually completed a mural in Mexico—Portrait of the Bourgeoisie for the headquarters of the Union of Electricians in Mexico City (his slow start had prompted Rivera to retort in answer to criticism from him: ‘Siqueiros talks: Rivera paints!’). Thereafter, however, Siqueiros's output was prodigious. He painted many easel pictures as well as murals, and though he insisted they were subordinate to his wall paintings, they were important in helping to establish his international reputation. His murals are generally more spectacular even than those of Orozco and Rivera—bold in composition, striking in colour, freely mixing realism with fantasy, and expressing a raw emotional power. In contrast with the sense of disillusionment and foreboding sometimes seen in Orozco's work, Siqueiros always expressed the dynamic urge to struggle; his work can be vulgar and bombastic, but its sheer energy is astonishing. He often experimented technically—working on curved surfaces and using airbrushes and synthetic pigments—and his last major work, the Polyforum Siqueiros in Mexico City (completed 1971), is a huge auditorium integrating architecture, sculpture, and painting. In his late years Siqueiros was showered with honours from his own country and elsewhere; he received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967, for example, and in the following year became the first president of the newly founded Mexican Academy of Arts.