dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
akteur: (Alfaro) Siqueiros (Hernández Araujo), David (José de Jesús / Juan)
biografische angaben: * December 29, 1896, Chihuahua, Mexico, † January 6, 1974, Cuernavaca. Mexican painter and muralist whose art reflected his Marxist political ideology. He was one of the three founders of the modern school of Mexican mural painting (along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco).
A political activist since his youth, Siqueiros studied at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, Mexico City, before leaving in 1913 to fight in the army of Venustiano Carranza during the Mexican Revolution. Later he continued his art studies in Europe.
In 1922, after returning to Mexico, Siqueiros helped paint the frescoes on the walls of the National Preparatory School and also began organizing and leading unions of artists and workingmen. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he commanded several brigades for the Republicans. Over four decades, his labour-union work and his communist political activities led to numerous jailings and periods of exile. He visited the United States, the Soviet Union, and many Latin American countries as a lecturer and guest artist.
Most of Siqueiros’s large murals are in government buildings in Mexico. His murals are distinguished by great dynamism and compositional movement, monumental size and vigour, sculptural treatment of forms, and a limited colour range that is subordinated to dramatic effects of light and shadow. Siqueiros and his followers produced thousands of square metres of vivid wall paintings in which numerous social, political, and industrial changes were portrayed from a left-wing perspective. He commonly used synthetic lacquer colours sprayed from paint guns in order to speed up the process of decorating large public buildings. He also did many easel paintings, the best-known of which is perhaps Echo of a Cry (1937).
Séqueiros [sic], who was one of the founders to the Painters' Syndicate, returned the other day from Buenos Aires, where the spent some time in prison because he is a Communist. It seems that everyone [of the friends of Tina Modotti] has been in jail; I feel that I have missed something! He brought a new wife back with him, a poetess named Blanca Luz, which means white light, but she looks awfully dirty to me and has a horrid child who got into my paint box and squeezed most of the tubes dry. I met them at a small party Tina gave to celebrate his return, and when I came in he was sitting in the middle of the room like a prophet, talking with an energy that had everyone spellbound. He, too, is a green-eyed Mexican, very handsome with white skin and black, curly hair.