David Alfaro Siqueiros

David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the three great muralists – together with José Clemente Orozco and Diego Ma. Rivera – distinguished himself particularly through the use of innovative techniques and materials. He was known for his characteristic planning approach and for the solutions, with which he mastered the practical problems of each individual wall painting.

From the very beginning of his artistic career Siqueiros showed an interest in using materials in painting that were originally meant for industrial use. The use of those materials, which meant a great technical challenge for him, revolutionised the art of wall painting.

Various factors influenced his theoretical approach at the beginning of his career as a wall painter. He maintained, for instance, regular contacts to the European art movements of the early 20th century. He was, above all, in touch with futurism, which had raised the dynamics of motion sequences to a premiss, while at the same time continuing to study the works of Masaccio.

Another decisive factor in his efforts to transform the dynamics of motion sequences into practice can be seen in his contacts with North American industry while visiting Los Angeles (California) and New York. In this context, he completed three wall paintings in Los Angeles: Mítin obrero (Workers' Meeting), América Tropical (Tropical America) and Retrato actual de México (Portrait of present-day Mexico), which triggered off the North American muralist movement. In New York he founded the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop, a Laboratory of Modern Techniques in Art, a decisive step in his career as a painter, as he was the first artist to work with Pyroxilin paint and with the airbrush.

All his colleagues on these projects were North Americans, who were eager to learn the experimental wall painting technique from him. At this time he was regarded not only as one of the greatest names in the muralists' movement in Mexico, but also one of the greatest innovators of this painting technique in general.

His political convictions, which were inseparably connected with his creative work should not be forgotten. As a great advocate of socialism (and based on the objective of utopian communism) he always used his art to illustrate the problems of the people in the society of the day, putting special emphasis on the conflict between the human being and capitalism.

Siqueiros attributed much greater significance to his wall paintings than to his other pictures. The latter he regarded as a kind of "inferior art". In his opinion, the mural was the best and highest form of artistic expression that a painter could achieve in his lifetime. Paradoxically, this "inferior art" endowed him with a much higher income that the murals, which he frequently had to subsidize out of his own pocket in order to ensure the completion of a project. His paintings also brought him international fame as an artist and increased his existing prestigious reputation as one of the great masters of Mexican muralism.

In his easel paintings too, we find the characteristic expressiveness that is common to all of his pictures, be they simple drawings, spontaneous sketches or large-scale paintings.

We can admire the strong, classic line in Siqueiros' ink drawings and recognise the distinctive style, the simple and, at the same time, elaborate structure of the picture. His so-called notas para paisaje (landscape notes) are a clear example of his masterful skill, bearing testimony once more to his inexhaustible imagination in dealing with this subject; his almost abstract landscapes never cease to be figurative.

In a series of pictures which the artist painted in a very skillful colour combination with acrylic paint on cardboard and the strokes of which reveal the use of the airbrush technique, he depicted trees, swirls and abstract figures, which, due to the energetic brush strokes combined with the spray technique, convey a decidedly expressionist effect. A number of these pictures were notas temáticas (thematic notes) for the huge wall-painting project of the Poliforum Cultural Siqueiros in Mexico City the last and immensely large work of the muralist. Even though the pictures are small, we can see that the artist has a monumental graphic in view, which is craving for the wall, on which it will be allowed to develop to its full magnificence.