Art for the Active

Mexico's famed muralist and longtime Communist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, had just finished painting a gun on the walls of Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle* when the police seized him and marched him off to prison for inciting leftists to riot. That was more than six years ago. Released in 1964, he was soon back at work, and for the past two months, with the aid of six assistants, he has been putting in twelve and 14 hours a day to complete his 3,660-sq.-ft. mural entitled Del Porfirismo a la Revolution.

All night before last week's inauguration, Siqueiros was at work, sporting his jaunty, battered fedora and wielding special long-handled brushes. He was putting the finishing touches on a final white steed. By midmorning, he turned up, well spruced, at the entrance to the gallery containing the mural to help cut the ribbon with Mexico's President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz--the honored guest of the regime that jailed him.

Heroes & Courtesans. Such turns of fortune are nothing new to Siqueiros, and no one seems less bothered about his politics than his fellow Mexicans. They hail him as the grand old man of the triumvirate (with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco) that launched the Mexican mural renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout Mexico, he is today known as "El Maestro," and no sooner had the ribbon been cut than hundreds of Mexicans, from art students to aging revolutionary veterans,, swarmed through Chapultepec Castle's drafty corridors to get an early view of his handiwork.

Crowding nine wall sections in two adjoining rooms are a series of huge tableaux depicting the tumultuous five years leading up to the ouster of Mexico's last dictator, Porfirio Diaz, in 1911. Arranged in kaleidoscopic profusion are the principal figures, from the greedy courtesans and grasping businessmen who fattened under the Diaz regime to the labor leaders of the 1906 Rio Branco strike and the by-now mythological heroes of the revolution, Zapata, Carranza and Madero.

Visual Logic. Siqueiros worked from photographs, but the effects he created are anything but photographic. Faces are distorted, sometimes to the point of caricature, bodies grotesquely contorted to match the mood of the scene.

Mural painting, Siqueiros believes, is a special art that demands a totally different kind of visual logic than portraiture. For him, it is "architectural art, active painting for the active spectator." Since the viewer moves as he looks at the mural, the traditional fixed Renaissance perspective will not do. Instead, Siqueiros emphasizes a multiplicity of vantage points.

Having mastered the secrets of mural painting to his satisfaction, he does not mean to rest. Among his unfinished projects is a 54-panel March of Humanity to be installed in the Olimpico Hotel, scheduled for completion at the time of the 1968 Summer Olympics. Since the March covers 48,000 sq. ft., it will be the world's largest mural. To Siqueiros, that is only as it should be. Says he proudly: "Mexican muralism is being reconsidered and recognized all over the world. It is not a nationalist movement, but a transcendental one."

*Built originally as a Spanish fort, it was long the official residence of Mexico's Emperor Maximilian and later of the Republic's Presidents before being converted, in 1944, into a historical museum.

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