Curtis Swope
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History at Chapultepec
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Chapter 4 treats From Porfirianism to the Revolution (1957/66), Siqueiros’s large-scale mural at the Museum of National History, which was more directly agitational in its forms and iconography than the works of the late 1940s and early 1950s and placed much greater emphasis on the role of direct action and self-organized working-class agency, a quality that brings the work tentatively into the orbit of New Left de-Stalinization, especially in the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). Siqueiros had numerous friends in the PCI, including Guttuso and Zavattini, whom he visited in the fall of 1956, just before starting work on the mural. Yet the work’s portrait detail and panoramic sweep allow for interpreting it, in part, as an example of so-called “critical realism,” a sub-version of socialist realism that was hotly debated in nearly all communist parties in the period during which Siqueiros was conceiving and working on the mural. In addition, the work’s references to anarchist traditions in Mexico make it somewhat less orthodox and Soviet-oriented than the works of the 1944–55 period.

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Mexican muralist, international Marxist

David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1941–74

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