Paint & Pistols

Last week David Alfaro Siqueiros was the most important man in Mexico City. When his first big exhibition of paintings since 1931 opened in the Bellas Artes gallery, crowds blocked the streets waiting to get in. Thirty minutes after the doors opened, they were closed again, to save those inside from being trampled in the rush. The critics' reaction to the show was unanimous--a prolonged huzza-hosannah. "Only those bound up in iron prejudices," said the newspaper Excelsior, "could fail to appreciate the work of this genius."

Eggs for the Teacher. Whether or not more distant critics would agree that Siqueiros was really a genius, they would have to admit that he played the part with dash and style. As a boy, he liked to lie in bed and outline hovering nudes on the ceiling with pistol shots. At 15, he was arrested for throwing eggs at his teacher during an art student strike; the teacher wouldn't let them paint outdoors. "Since then," he murmurs, lowering his bright green eyes, "I've been taken to jail nearly 70 times."

He was jailed because of his politics, not his art. Along with about a thousand other schoolboys, Siqueiros made his way northward in 1913 to join General Obregon's revolutionary forces in Sonora. The children were organized into a grim "Mama's Brigade" and grew up during six years of bloody campaigning. Siqueiros was wounded, and promoted to the rank of captain. When the war was over, and his side victorious, he was sent to Paris as Mexican military attache.

On his way to Paris the fierce young captain stopped off in Manhattan and met Jose Clemente Orozco, who was painting toys in a factory. Siqueiros told Orozco he thought the subway was one of the loveliest things he had ever seen. Riding a hurtling Bronx express, they quarreled violently about it. When the train stopped, Orozco dashed out and disappeared into a blinding snowstorm. Siqueiros waited all night in the subway entrance, making occasional forays into the night, fearful that a great Mexican talent was freezing to death somewhere under the alien snow. Two days later Siqueiros learned that his angry friend had simply ended up at a party.

In Paris Siqueiros became convinced that French-style art was bad, and that Mexicans like Diego Rivera were blind to follow it. Shouting over the wine in Montmartre cafes, Siqueiros gradually formulated a theory to support his furious conviction. He found backers for a short-lived magazine, Vida Americana, in which he fired the opening gun of a fight to make art as useful, well-engineered and open to the public as an up-to-date subway system. "Now," wrote Siqueiros disgustedly, looking at the art around him, "we draw silhouettes with pretty colors. . . ."

Back in Mexico, in 1922, Siqueiros followed through with a manifesto which Orozco and Diego Rivera both signed, and which started the eruption of modern Mexican art. Its thesis: art is for social welfare, not private pleasure, and should therefore be large-scale and easy to understand. The three men formed the nucleus of a union--the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors--and negotiated contracts with an extraordinarily sympathetic and discerning government to paint murals at so much per square meter.

Trouble for a Career. "Everyone was either for us or against us," Siqueiros remembers. The painters had to carry guns to protect themselves and their work. They all lived in tenements in the center of town, partying, painting and loving violently. Siqueiros' love-life was characteristically impetuous; he had a long succession of lady friends.

When they found time, the painters published a magazine--El Machete--to express their violent view of the world, and to print their drawings. "Orozco used to eat a priest for breakfast every morning," says Siqueiros. "He drew some very powerful anti-church cartoons for us. . . . Once I met a tough old lady warrior who had been a colonel in Zapata's army. She was also anticlerical so I brought her around to meet Orozco. Foolishly, I left them alone for a couple of minutes. When I came back she had Orozco by the hair and he was kicking her in the shins. Seems the woman believed all whites should be thrown out and the country returned to the Indians. Orozco was very much opposed to this theory."

In 1924 El Machete's editors entered the Communist Party. "I was identified as the spokesman," says Siqueiros with a hard grin. "Let Orozco draw a strong cartoon; Siqueiros was arrested. Let Rivera wave a red flag in the streets; Siqueiros was arrested."

Rivera and Siqueiros once went to Moscow to attend a Comintern session. On the German ship coming home they began arguing: Siqueiros was for Stalin, Rivera was for Trotsky. No one else on the boat understood Spanish, but they all stared fascinated at the table where the two men sat, meal after meal, fighting it out with high words and bitter tears. Finally the two asked for separate tables and Rivera, shaken by the fury of the quarrel, took to his bunk. Says Siqueiros, "When we reached Veracruz there were two delegations at the pier. One was composed of Rivera's friends, and they took him to Mexico City in style. The other was a delegation of police, and they took me to jail."

Siqueiros was a hell-for-leather Communist of the old-fashioned sort, and could never keep his eagle beak out of trouble: jail was always interrupting his painting. He is still a devoted party liner, though the Communists expelled him in 1930 for visiting his girl friend when he was under orders to hide out. They thought that the girl friend was being watched by the police. The police were on his trail anyway, replied Siqueiros: he was being tailed by a detective all the time, and 20 feet behind the detective lurked a party comrade. Usually, when he was arrested, he was treated as Mr. Siqueiros, a prominent artist who just happened to have some silly political quirks. But after leading a forbidden May Day parade he was beaten by cops until his body was covered with welts, thrown into solitary, and fed on what slops he could catch in his hands when the guard upturned the bucket. He spent a year in jail that time, and another on parole.

Back into Uniform. Siqueiros next turned up in Los Angeles, where he painted a mural showing a Mexican peon bound to a cross surmounted by an American eagle. He was promptly deported. Then the Spanish civil war broke out, and Siqueiros got back into uniform with something like relief. Fighting still came naturally; he commanded a motorized brigade in the battles of Caballon, Guadalupe and La Granja, and rose to be a division commander just before the end. Back home, he was welcomed at first, then thrown in jail for eight months on suspicion of taking part in the first--and unsuccessful--attempt on Trotsky's life.

Now, at 51, Siqueiros figures that he has spent 15 years in growing up, 21 years in politics, wars and revolutions, and only about 15 years at art--during which he completed eleven major murals. There were three six-year periods when he didn't paint at all. Russia's famed Film Director Sergei Eisenstein, speaking more frankly then than he could now, once advised Siqueiros to quit his politicking and concentrate on painting. Had he done so, Siqueiros might already have surpassed the reputations of his fellow triumvirs of Mexican art, Rivera and Orozco. There was no denying that his latest exhibition made their work look placid.

One reason was Siqueiros' bold use of bold materials. Industrial enamels like Peroxylin and Vinylite he applied, sometimes with a spray gun, to Masonite and Bakelite. They made his paintings loom bright and powerful as new trucks. But there was a deeper reason: Siqueiros had at last taken Eisenstein's advice and ditched the propaganda art of his own manifesto. Illustrative documentary painting of social injustice might be fine for educating the masses, but by now it bored Siqueiros.

Reality for Projection. A third of the 60 paintings in last week's show were abstractions which reflected his growing interest in geometry (he used a ruler and divider in planning them). "Abstractions for abstraction's sake," he still insisted, "are a sterile business. When the artist permits the mood of the spectator to take full control he abdicates his function. But my abstractions are projections of reality." Among the more obvious "projections": a Mutilated House which looked like a cement block oozing blood, and The Face of Treason, a successfully nauseating tapioca of eyes in space.

The recognizable pictures were, if anything, harder to interpret. Siqueiros had painted his old friend Orozco sitting cross-legged in the heart of an electrical storm. "After all," he explained, "you can't take a man like Orozco, put him in a chair and paint a likeness. You have to paint him as he is." A plucked rooster, obscenely huge, lying dead and surrounded by columns of a Lilliputian army, symbolized the Death and Funeral of Cain. Our Image, a forceful study of a giant with its hands outstretched, sported a brachycephalic boulder for a head.

Many of the paintings in Siqueiros' Bellas Artes exhibition have already been sold. When the show is dismantled and dispersed to private collectors, the toast of Mexico City will return to the rickety platform, high up under the vaulted ceiling of the Treasury Building, where he is painting a mural for the Government. His way of painting is as violent as his finished pictures; glaring angrily about him, he splashes paint all over his clothes, gums up his great shock of greying black hair, uses his thighs as a palette. His mural in the Treasury Building represents Siqueiros' own emphatic last judgment on Mexican history, in the form of a huge baroque wheel of horses and men. Mexico's liberators and heroes are seen speeding upwards into the vault; Mexico's tyrants, traitors and collaborationists hurtle tangled toward the floor.

"From now on," said David Siqueiros last week, "I paint. Politics? Well, a man can't be unpolitical; politics is life. But my business will be painting. I shall paint and paint. I need to."

Some of Siqueiros' friends--among them Diego Rivera--wonder how long he can stick to his resolution. It was Rivera who first called Siqueiros the modern Benvenuto Cellini. "When there was a revolution in Mexico," says Rivera, "Siqueiros was in tune with the times. But now the times are soft, and he has been slow in growing soft with them. He has not been able to change with the moods of his countrymen."

Siqueiros has a characteristically hard answer to that objection. Says he: "Art is not created by the soft."

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