PA: Siqueiros - fighting people's artist
Scott Marshall
(Reprinted from the July issue of Political Affairs, monthly
journal of the Communist Party, USA. For subscription information
see below - all rights reserved.)
by Phil Stein
Editor's Note: From the time he took part in the famous student's
strike of the San Carlos Academy in Mexico at the age of fifteen,
David Alfaro Siqueiros remained throughout his life committed to
the working class. He was born in Santa Rosalia de Camargo,
Chihuahua on December 29, 1896 and died in Cuervavaca, Morelos,
January 6, 1974. His long and prolific painting career had known
many interruptions. Beginning with the Mexican revolution, there
were the years of union organizing, the time spent as a soldier
in the Spanish Civil War, and the years spent in jail, a victim
of political repression. Through it all, Siqueiros struggled to
create a modern realism in painting. In 1932, in Los Angeles, he
innovated the use of the cement fresco and the spray gun for fine
art. He developed a whole theory of mural painting that derived
from the moving spectator and that unified composition over
disappearing picture planes.
In 1950, for his artistic achievement he was awarded the first
prize at the Venice Biennial. In 1960 he was imprisoned for a
period of four years, the reasons were political and the crime
was called "Social Dissolution," a law that has since been
abolished. On his release from prison at age 68, he proceeded to
create two mural masterpieces, the Mexican Revolution, in the
Chapultepec Castle, and remarkably, the world's largest mural,
The March of Humanity, in the Siqueiros Polyforum. Siqueiros was
the leader of the Mexican Mural Movement and responsible through
the years for its cohesiveness, vitality, and strength.
Siqueiros was a member of the Communist Party for most of his
life. He organized and led the miner's union of Jalisco, founded
the Confederaction Sindical Latinoamericana (The Confederation of
Latin American Trade Unions), served as member of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party and was at one time its General
Secretary. Outlined below are some of the great artist's views on
realism and art.
As nominal head of the Front of Revolutionary Painters, Siqueiros
next attempted to bring art into the district where the working
poor lived. He organized an exhibit, which he called the "Salon
of May," and quite unlike its French namesake, it was presented
in a storefront gallery in the neighborhood of the people's
Lagunilla Market. More than twenty-five artists participated,
with paintings that expressed the theme of the show: "Mexican Art
for National Independence and Peace, and Against Poverty."
The work that Siqueiros contributed was awesome. A large
painting, 2.5 by 1.5 meters, bore the title The Good Neighbor, or
How Truman Helps the Mexican People. Depicted with a fiendish
smile on his face, Truman grips the chains that are wound around
the wrists of a kneeling naked Indian. Forcing the Indian to his
knees with one hand, Truman holds high a packet of dollars in the
other. A machine gun is slung on the victim's shoulder and both
are surrounded by a pool of blood.
Unremittingly political in theme, and without question
unacceptable in the mercantile art establishment, the painting
was a technical and aesthetic masterpiece, rivaling the great
bloody Christs of the Renaissance. The theme itself was a direct
response to Truman's attempt at the time to buy off Mexico with a
$3 billion inducement to join the United States in a military
pact to defend the American continent against aggression. In
February of 1952, President Alemlin agreed to hold talks with the
United States, provoking the National Council of the Partisans of
Peace, of which Siqueiros was a member, to mount a great protest.
At that time Siqueiros's painting of Truman was reproduced on the
front page of Lombardo Tolodano's newspaper, El Popular.
To promote the Salon of May exhibit, Siqueiros produced two
handbills. The first, "Picasso and Us," exploited the fact that
Picasso had painted a work against the Korean War. When a
reproduction of that painting reached Mexico, Siqueiros sent
Picasso a telegram congratulating him and welcoming him to the
side of the social realists. Picasso's powerful painting,
Massacre in Korea, is a relatively literal depiction of a firing
squad of mechanical soldiers executing a group of naked women and
children. Siqueiros's handbill read:
Has Pablo Picasso - the most important abstractionist painter of
the School of Paris - entered the road of political new-realism,
which has been the character of our modern Mexican paining for
the last thirty years?
If this be the case, does such a stance by Picasso constitute a
new personal modality, or is it rather a part of a general
current in Paris and Europe that is the consequence of
instability in all aspects of social life?
Visit the exhibition, Salon of May. You will see there the most
recent work of Picasso, Massacre in Korea exhibited this past
month of May in Paris.1
On view in Mexico's Salon of May was only a small black-and-white
newspaper reproduction of the Picasso, but even amid the larger
politically compatible Mexican paintings, its significance was
not lost.
The second handbill was an announcement that Siqueiros would give
a lecture at the Salon the day the exhibit was to close, and the
subject was: "The Judgment of the People on our Political
Painting."
Is it possible to judge modern Mexican painting without pointing
simultaneously to the social process in which it unfolds and was
produced?
Is it possible at the same time to analyze it without judging the
full political history of the workers' movement of our country,
especially that which in the last fifteen years is referred to as
governmental proletarianism and collaborative Marxism, that is,
Marxism outside the Communist Party?
Can this painting, our modern Mexican painting, reach a third
stage of greater perfection, a stage of Socialist Realism,
supported by a workers' movement that is destroyed and almost
inert?3
The Salon of May fulfilled its objective and was a great success.
During the two weeks it was open, some 30,000 working-class and
poor people entered the storefront gallery. These were not the
art-buying public, no paintings were sold, but this had not been
the object of the show. The humble souls who flocked to the show
inscribed innumerable comments of gratitude in the gallery
notebook and left tiny amounts of money that helped defray
expenses.
Siqueiros and the Communist Party (which shared in organizing the
event) were well satisfied with the experiment, but Siqueiros
wrote an overall critique, Notes for a Critical Examination,
which he addressed to the Central Committee of the Party. In it
he pointed out that the PCM, as the vanguard of the working
class, was obligated to orient artists, not only those in the
ranks but non-members as well, to the problems of creating
"Socialist Realism that would inspire our national culture, even
before the defeat of capitalism."4
Of the paintings, Siqueiros expressed satisfaction with the level
of realism the exhibit had produced, and explained just how close
to Marxist political theories he believed art should be. In
general, he found too many works had weaknesses in their lack of
aesthetic quality, beauty and political content. After 30 years
of the Mexican Movement, he found the results disheartening. The
role of the Communist Party, he held, must be to encourage the
further development of the modern Mexican school of art,
especially murals and printmaking "for within the bourgeois
world, this school is one of the highest and most advanced
exponents of the national aspiration of the people in their
struggle for economic, political and cultural independence."5
Siqueiros stressed that the Party must assist art to advance. He
considered it a shortcoming that in no case had the Soviet Union
been presented as the bulwark and leader of the world struggle
for peace, nor had the significance of the Chinese Revolution
been considered. The political and social restlessness of the
radical painters did not compensate for their generally low level
of political awareness. He noted the abundant negativeness and
confusion in the paintings, and said that the artists were
isolated from the life of the popular masses. Also, he found the
theme the Party had selected too vague and abstract, making
concrete solutions difficult.
Added to political deficiencies were problems of the cohesion of
form and content. From the beginning, he pointed out, the
movement had experienced contradictions between practice and the
theoretical base, and he urged the Party to promote discussions
among the artists of all styles to solve this problem. It was
understood that an art for the people had to be made, yet the
social-aesthetic path had been all but abandoned. This, Siqueiros
explained, was caused by the economic dependence of painting on
the bourgeoisie, which
consolidating itself as a class, divorced itself from the program
of the Mexican Revolution and gradually pulled painting into its
camp, converting it, as it did with all natural and human
products, into articles to be bought and sold, causing immediate
corruption. This social crushing was not recognized or corrected
by the working class, for by not moving closer to the artists,
they did not create an economic base that would permit Mexican
art to fulfill its popular social function and create the
cultural forms of Socialism.6
More precisely, what he considered to be the failures of the
artists were the repetitious use of symbols, an excess of
intellectualism, and religious mysticism - all confused and
understood only by a small minority. Siqueiros advised artists to
go back and
find the essence of reality and then, only when they were able to
communicate with clarity their message to the people, can they
resort to the symbol. [Also offending] an abuse of formalism the
most notable tendencies were Epicurreanism, cubist derivations,
archaism, primitivism, as well as bestial deformities,
dehumanization of the figure, and other social and cultural
contaminations of the bourgeoisie.7
Delving deeply into the innumerable flaws, at least as he saw
them, Siqueiros raised the point of static anti-dialectic
conceptions that failed to show life in its developing form which
is the premise of social realism. Thus, for him, most of the
works of the Salon of May were incomplete, giving little hope and
producing negative results. He did point out that socialist
realism was not
a happy Socialist ending. Nothing could be further from what
socialist realism asks of an authentic work of art, since as an
expression of the revolutionary class resolving contradictions by
means of class struggle, it is of no use to demogogically falsify
reality in art nor to apply mechanical slogans from outside.
In consequence, the positive feeling ought to arise from within
the artist, to sense and interpret forms, to transform social
history, whether in a scene, a figure or a landscape, and at
times for this a gesture or an attitude is sufficient to make the
contradiction in the struggle felt.
Confusion also exists in believing that in order to make
revolutionary art the artist must depict only the negative, the
brutal, or simply objective reality. This lack of resolve has
produced the existentialists and the many badly oriented artists
and spectators. Contrary to being a revolutionary position, it is
I depressing and reactionary.
The mission of all great art is to encourage humanity to struggle
to reach a future of real happiness. The art of socialist
realism, with its feet firmly planted in the reality of daily
living, sees the future with a romantic, heroic and passionate
vigor that is the product of historic determinism and not the
result of a decadent romanticism that is false and utopian.
We consider it a shortcoming, which persists from the period of
the founding of Modern Mexican School of Painting, to use almost
exclusively the theme of the peasant presenting the Mexico of
today as a homogeneous mass of peasants.
This fixation is indicative of a lack of knowledge of Mexican
social evolution. New forces have developed, and even though the
peasants continue to be numerically greater, the working class
has been able to show its strength, and its intervention is a
qualitatively superior and greater determining factor in the
revolutionary struggle of the country.
The artist attracted to the beauty of the peasant tradition sees
the past with a feeling of nostalgia derived from a reactionary
position and forgets the rising of a new life, which is felt to
be hostile and deprived of enchantment. This effects a creative
impotence; the artist must produce poetry with the new materials,
both social and physical. The proletariat and its function as the
producers of the elements of life, offers the artist a new rich,
complex, and strong world with which to dominantly complete their
vision of a dynamic Mexico.8
Siqueiros attempted to educate his Party to the necessity of
active support for an art movement that had already played an
important role in the country's social development and that had a
strong political potential. He ended his critique with a number
of concrete proposals, which included the Communist Party
sponsoring exhibitions throughout the country of paintings that
would educate politically; Party- led meetings of artists to
discuss and solve their problems; and the formation by the PCM of
an artists' organization and workshop, geared to serve the
struggle of the masses and develop an independent popular market.
To achieve revolutionary ends and further develop a new realism,
Siqueiros hoped to raise the Party's consciousness and draw from
it a better understanding of the political role of the arts, and
thus its greater cooperation. However, in the end his challenge
was not fully comprehended, so alone, in his own work, he
continued to pioneer and solve the problems he raised.
Excerpted from Phil Stein's forthcoming book, Siqueiros: His Life
and Works.
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