| Siqueiros always mentioned he was born in Santa Rosalía, Chihuahua on December 29, 1896. However, in 2004 the art investigator Raquel Tibol found Siqueiros' birth certificate which states he was born in Mexico City. He belongs to a family famous for its vitality and longevity. His great-grandfather lived to be 115 years old, his grandfather was 101. His father, a celebrated lawyer, enjoyed a national reputation as a wit and a Don Juan. Siqueiros early began to take after his father. While he was still in the Preparatory School, at the age of thirteen, he began his profesional career by attending night classes in the Academy. Within a month he had discovered the scope of his permanent interests: he became one of the leading spirits in a student strike and vindicated his generalship by sharing the humiliation of his comrades in jail. and at Escuela al Aire Libre, Santa Anita, from 1911 to 1913, where he was soon in the thick of a conspirancy against the rich Yucatecan, Victoriano Huerta. Contributor to Carrancista paper in 1913, Siqueiros served with Constitutionalist forces, 1914. In 1919 went to Europe on a government grant and met Diego Rivera in Paris. In 1921 in Barcelona he published his 'Manifiesto to the Artists in America' in Vida Americana. In Mexico (1922) he worked on murals for Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and with Rivera and others organized the Sindicato de Trabajadores Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores de México, and edited its publication El Machete. Although Siqueiros and his followers produced little, they referred contemptuously to the Rivera group as Romantics and set themselves up as the only faithful exponents of revolutionary art for the masses. Siqueiros did much of his editorial work in his cell; and when he was released (in 1931) he was obliged to leave the country. He was confined in Taxco and most of his oils produced there have turned black because Siqueiros used paints of cheap and inferior quality, generally on his own unskilled manufacture. Only the wood engravings and the lithographs, for which the collector William Spratling had supplied the stones, survived in their original strenght and clarity. Exiled form Mexico, he went to Los Angeles in 1932, where he painted murals on public and private buildings; became interested in use of industrial materials. He discovered for himself the use of nitrocellulose (Duco), bakelite and the synthetic resins. He practiced with new tools which had been developed for the use of commercial and industrial painters, notable the spray gun. He innovated the study of mural composition from the point of view of the spectator, and planned murals in which the beholder could see something from every angle, without distortion: an idea which Orozco later taken up. Deported from USA, travelled to Argentina where he published another manifesto and painting with spray guns on a colored cement wall, he produced his famous "Plastic Study". He went also to Uruguay in 1933. In Spain in 1937 he served as officer in Republican Army until 1939. In 1964 began work on largest mural, La marcha de la humanidad. modified before installation in Polyforum Cultural Siqueiros, Mexico City. Writings include his autobiography Me llamaban el Coronelazo (1977), Cómo se pinta un mural (published Havana 1985), and anthology Art and Revolution. Received National Prize for art from Mexican government in 1996 and Lenin Peace Prize from Soviet Union in 1967. He died on January 6, 1974 in Cuernavaca, Morelos. Buried in Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres in Mexico City. |
|
|
David Alfaro Siqueiros
, 1896 - 1974
