Curtis Swope
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Introduction
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The Introduction explains Siqueiros’s significance, briefly sketches his biography, and states the main arguments of the book. Siqueiros used avant-garde visual innovations tactically to create a modernist aesthetic that blended monumentality and estrangement. His internationalism was based on a Marxist world view that saw the national liberation of oppressed peoples as dovetailing with the global ambitions of the communist movement. While Siqueiros remained loyal to the Soviet Union in the later part of his career, his artworks straddled the line between reformist and orthodox Marxism as his iconography drew on democratic working-class traditions and dramatizations of Soviet power. His work of the early 1950s was his most monumental and represented his closest approach to Socialist Realism. His work of the late 1950s, by contrast, was much more agitational and much more interested in representing a popular, emancipatory politics in line with the reformist impulses of de-Stalinization. His work of the 1960s was more elegiac: a profound rumination on the history of the global working class during a time of both hope and pessimism for the painter and his comrades in France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

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Mexican muralist, international Marxist

David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1941–74

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