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Curtis Swope

The conclusion deals with some of the very thorniest questions of Siqueiros’s mural production. Siqueiros was indeed at times authoritarian. He never wavered in his support of a Soviet Union that was increasingly seen by progressive communists as an unsalvageable shill for Stalinism; he had a “star” position within the communist art world of the time that gave him privileges unavailable to the working class he sought to represent. Yet, the murals of his late career are highly valuable. They dramatize the need for organization, leadership, and analysis as core components of an effective left-wing politics. They never descend into the kind of theoretical solipsism that began to characterize Marxist debate in the academy in the 1970s. They were unfailingly attentive to the travails of the global working class and, as such, create a kind of dialogue with the dead meant as a productive spur to revolutionary political action. They stand as a testimony to the one-time power of the organized, international, communist movement which in many contexts—and despite its many problems—served as a progressive political force. Thus, they stand too as an emblem of the massive cultural and political gap that separates Siqueiros’s time period from our own, in which progressive politics lacks a coherent center and seems too often to fail at the day-to-day work of political organization based on a rationally arrived at program.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist
Curtis Swope

If Siqueiros’s political murals during the war had taken their energy from the hard edges of military struggle, his murals of 1950–51 had a plastic clarity and monumental directness that represented the painter’s closest approach to orthodox socialist realism. Chapter 2 interprets two murals of this period, painted at the Palace of Fine Arts—The Apotheosis of Cuauhtémoc (1950) and The Torment of Cuauhtémoc (1950/51)—along with his Man, Master Not Slave of Technology (1951) painted at the Polytechnic School. The strident dialectical duality and plastic clarity of these murals suggest that Siqueiros was sensitive to the amplified “anti-formalism” campaigns of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. The works emphasize the role of strong individual leadership to the mobilization of the “masses,” which helps explain the resemblance of the heroic human figures in the murals to contemporaneous sculptures of Lenin in the Eastern Bloc. The murals are national in outlook, but envision national resistance movements as dovetailing with Leninist ideas about the nature of revolution. Yet Siqueiros’s brand of socialist realism remained different from Soviet academic models: highly concentrated, dynamic, and committed to a complex understanding of communist ideas about anti-imperialist and the “new man” that were crucial in Marxist cultural production of the period. Cuauhtémoc is an emblem of the organized, anti-imperialist working class and a visual lens through which the proletarianization of the developed world is imagined. Man, Master Not Slave of Technology is similarly pared down and structural in its approach, but introduces to Siqueiros’s work in a new way of the theme of science, which he renders not as a historical force in its own right, but as a tool to be harnessed and controlled by the working class as it makes history.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist
Curtis Swope

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.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist
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Curtis Swope

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.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist
David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1941–74
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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.

Curtis Swope

Chapter 6 treats Siqueiros’s History of Theater and Cinematography in Mexico (1959), painted at the Jorge Negrete Theater and not yet complete upon Siqueiros’s arrest in 1960. Like the other two murals from the late 1950s, the work stands somewhat closer to reformist strands of Marxism, again through references to Mexican anarchist traditions, but also in the media critique the work exacts. Painted at the dawn of the television age, the mural, in dialogue with Siqueiros’s Spanish–Mexican Marxist acquaintance Adolfo Sánchez-Vázquez, mourns the fading possibilities of a truly democratic media sphere in which the masses create theater and film growing from their own everyday lives and seeks to resurrect the possibility of such a sphere by pointing to the radical theater of the Mexican Revolution. The dead worker depicted in the mural comes to represent the death of media democracy as the painting depicts the capitalist degeneration of working-class culture. This loss of what Sánchez-Vázquez called, “truly popular culture,” is a tragedy that runs in tandem with the tragedy of the striking railroad workers, depicted in the mural being beaten down by federal goons. The result, here, is that the anarchist penchant for direct action appears less heroic than at Chapultepec, as a premature attempt at agitation meets with failure.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist
Curtis Swope

Apology for the Future Victory of Medical Science over Cancer (1958), the subject of Chapter 5, painted at the oncology hospital in Mexico City’s Centro Médico, was produced as part of a tentative dialogue about reformist Marxism and about the role of Marxism outside the Soviet Union. In its composition and iconography, Siqueiros poses a dialectic of technology and society that charts a middle course between the apocalyptic view of modern systems found in Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse and the utopian technophilia of post-Stalinist culture in the Soviet Union. The mural is quite frank in its depiction not only of the horrors of cancer cells themselves but also of the machinery used to detect them. The radioscopy machine depicted is fearsome looking, inducing feelings of alienation even as it is meant to banish fear. Through the relationship of machines to figures in the painting, Siqueiros seeks to present technology not as a symbol of universal progress but as a tool to be instrumentalized democratically by mobilized masses for their own benefit. The mural’s depiction of the unevenness of modernization processes as created by capital makes it a more reformist Marxist vision than was usual for Siqueiros. In addition, its representation of an anti-imperialist group of doctors working in tandem with peasants indicates an increase in Siqueiros’s attention to rural contexts and a flirtation with the less dogmatic leftism of the non-aligned movement at a time when Siqueiros was in contact with Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist
Curtis Swope

The death of Stalin in 1953, the suppression of a workers’ uprising in East Germany and the continued ill-fortunes of the PCM initiated a period of transition and contradiction in Siqueiros’s work covered in Chapter 3. That sense of transition was increased by the long, complicated process of finishing the only two major state mural commissions of 1952–56: For the Complete Safety of All Mexicans at Work, at the Hospital de la Raza, and The University to the People, the People to the University on the rectory building at the UNAM campus. In these works, Siqueiros tipped the scales of his tactical modernism back toward the experimental and dynamic. Capitalism is represented as an expressionist machine for the manufacture of dead bodies, while humanoid figures are rendered in a futurist idiom that gives visual expression to notions of labor as theorized by Lenin, and by Henri Lefebvre in Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 1, written while Lefebvre was still the leading intellectual in the firmly PCF. Siqueiros mobilized the technique of polyangularity to signal the necessity for a close relationship between proletarian action, education, and worker safety. However, rigid bifurcation and a strong sense of direction remained key aspects of the compositions, retaining and expressing the mechanical view of history characteristic of orthodox Marxism and envisioning proletarian leadership in terms of Leninist ideas. That view was tempered by an iconography that envisioned democratic, working-class control of the means of production revealed Siqueiros’s continued interest in the syndicalist political model and foreshadowed his return to a more agitational aesthetic in his murals of the late 1950s.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist
Curtis Swope

Upon his release from prison, Siqueiros completed work at Chapultepec, received the Lenin Peace Prize in the Soviet Union, and began work on a large-scale mural project that was to become The March of Humanity (1966/71), installed at the Polyforum complex in Mexico City. The mural, the subject of Chapter 7, was an articulation, with a broad and emotion-laden view of twentieth-century history, of the crisis of Marxist politics in Mexico and globally. It combines the emotional force of leftist existentialism, associated with Jean-Paul Sartre to whom Renau compared Siqueiros, with the analytical force of Marx’s method of historical materialism. The work is suffused with Siqueiros’s socialist humanism which in some respects, unlike the works of the late 1950s, de-emphasized class struggle and returned to abstracted allegories of larger historical structures. In its kaleidoscopic iconography of suffering, revolution, and cosmic hope, the mural does not foreclose on possibilities for radical change, but defers those changes to a distant future. The work is also concretely social, its iconography drawn from an attempt to convey the historical significance of contemporary events such as the Vietnam War, the prospect of atomic destruction, the pervasiveness of corruption, and the then-recent traumas of World War II and the Holocaust. Ultimately, the work is a kind of memorial to the working class and, in many respects resembles the great modernist war and holocaust memorials of the Eastern Bloc, which Siqueiros appreciated on his trips to East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union during the late 1960s.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist
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Curtis Swope

Chapter 1 treats three of Siqueiros’s politically charged murals of the World War II era: Death to the Invader, completed in Chile in 1942, Cuauhtémoc against the Myth (1944), originally located in Siqueiros’s mother-in-law’s house, which doubled as his Center for Modern Realist Art, and New Democracy (1945), along with the accompanying panels Victims of War (1944/45) and Victims of Fascism (1944/45) at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. These murals are treated in the international context of communist resistance art during and just after World War II, during much of which Siqueiros was in exile after the attack on Trotsky but still in touch with his friends Neruda and Ehrenburg. The murals form a “war trilogy” in which Siqueiros reserved a central role for the Soviet Union even as he negotiated the possibility for nationally specific versions of communist politics to emerge in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The works use the abstract qualities of composition to reveal history in terms of larger structures and forces that appear to transcend the agency of particular people and groups. At the same time, Siqueiros’s representation of the body—often in highly eroticized ways—is very much in keeping with existentially inflected resistance art from the contemporaneous films of Roberto Rossellini to the contemporaneous texts of Italo Calvino, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean-Paul Sartre which tap into the elemental, biological rudiments of human existence as a potential source of revolutionary action.

in Mexican muralist, international Marxist