David Alfaro Siqueiros

David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), Mexican painter, muralist, and political activist. Together with his Mexican contemporaries Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, Siqueiros is known as one of the tres grandes (three greats) of the Mexican mural painting movement. This movement, which began in the 1920s, was sparked by government commissions for large mural decorations in public buildings.

Siqueiros was born in Chihuahua, Mexico. From 1911 to 1913 he studied at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City and in 1913 at the Barbizon School of Santa Anita Ixtapalapa, one of a group of so-called open air schools that emphasized painting outdoors, directly from nature. That same year he joined a protest movement against General Victoriano Huerta, who had recently taken over the presidency of Mexico. This was an early manifestation of Siqueiros’s lifelong commitment to left-wing political causes. In 1919 he traveled to Europe, spending time in Paris, France, and Barcelona, Spain, and studying fresco painting in Italy with Diego Rivera. Soon after he returned to Mexico, Siqueiros painted his first mural, The Elements (1922-1923), for the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, where both Rivera and Orozco also painted murals. Although Siqueiros sometimes created smaller, portable paintings, he felt that murals in public buildings, which would be seen by large numbers of people, were his most important work.

Siqueiros is regarded as the most technically innovative of the Mexican muralists because of his bold experiments with materials. For some murals, he shaped the surfaces of walls so that they curve dramatically around corners or project forward into the viewer’s space. Many of Siqueiros’s murals reflect his political views as a member of Mexico’s Communist Party. The vivid colors, contorted figures, and sculpted surfaces of his murals help convey the artist’s urgent desire for political change.

In 1936 and early 1937 Siqueiros was in New York City, where he conducted the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop. Through experiments with the use of synthetic industrial paints, spray guns, drip painting, and photomontage, the artists in the workshop developed new techniques for mural painting. Among the workshop members was American painter Jackson Pollock, who later pioneered the movement known as abstract expressionism. Pollock and other abstract expressionist painters adopted a number of these technical innovations.

Siqueiros was repeatedly jailed and deported for left-wing political activities in Mexico. During periods of exile he led painting workshops and received commissions for murals in the United States, Argentina, Cuba, Chile, and other countries. Some of his best-known murals, however, are in Mexico City. In a room with curving walls constructed to his specifications, Siqueiros painted a series of frescoes entitled The Revolution Against the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1957, Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City). The series portrays the corruption of the military regime of Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz and his subsequent overthrow by revolutionaries in 1911.

Siqueiros’s last and most ambitious mural, The March of Humanity (1965-1971, Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum, Mexico City), decorates the inside and outside of a building designed specifically for this project. Siqueiros used symbols and his characteristically dynamic forms to trace the progress of humanity from a distant, oppressive past to a future of freedom and scientific progress. In places, three-dimensional sculptures jut out from the visually active surfaces of the murals. On the exterior of the 12-sided building are 12 panels that make up The March of Humanity in Latin America. The largest mural project ever painted, Siqueiros’s work inside and outside the Cultural Polyforum covers 4331 sq m (46,618 sq ft) of curved and sculpted wall space.