Paintings from Prison

Mexico's patriarchal painter, David Alfaro Siqueiros, found guilty of Communist rabble rousing during some 1960 riots, is serving his fourth year in prison, with at least two to go. But locking up Siqueiros in a cell in Mexico City's Black Palace prison does not mean locking up his energy. Carrying out an old ambition, he has organized a baseball team, with himself at first base, which plays in the prison yard. And he steadily paints little pictures that sell at $1,500 apiece. This month Manhattan's New Art Center Gallery is showing 16 Siqueiros paintings, ten of them done in his 15-ft. by 7-ft. home.

Though he says that his eyesight is growing weaker in his dim cell, Siqueiros still wields a dancing brush that creates images somersaulting and swirling far from a prison courtyard. His jail-made Dancer wishfully wraps a cape of anatomy around a vaulter's pole. His forceful, lavender-colored Mother and Child casts the swaying shadow of a madonna into a posture of freedom. In keeping with the size of his studio, the paintings are small; their message is that the great talent, having been put in the cooler, is frozen.

Nonetheless, the work serves Siqueiros' purpose. "My painting has always been that of a free man," he says. "Even though my painting is that of a man in jail, I break my prison bars by painting landscapes and beautiful days."

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