Mexican muralist, international Marxist

David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1941–74

Author:
Curtis Swope
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David Alfaro Siqueiros was perhaps the most important communist painter of the twentieth century. The realist and experimental murals he created in the later part of his career were strident yet intricate expressions of his political commitments. Meant to foster analysis, articulate political strategy, and provoke emotions, his works were attuned to the tactical needs of the working-class movement and to the international communist art of war-time and the post-war period. That art, from Mexico to Britain to France to Italy to the Soviet Union, remained committed to the representation of the human figure yet used abstraction to render the movements of history in a Marxist way and to heighten the emotional effect of scenes depicting the struggles of indigenous freedom fighters, the travails of striking workers, and the suffering of the global proletariat. Seeing Siqueiros in an international context makes clear that his politics, while strident and occasionally dogmatic, were highly complex: they provided a foundation for—rather than an obstacle to—his efforts to create an art embedded in the day-to-day concerns and theoretical debates of the worldwide mass movement he saw himself as a part of. Siqueiros’s late murals—at times troubling, at times prescient—are aesthetically innovative and politically provocative: they deserve the close interpretation and careful contextualization they are given in this book.

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