The 50th anniversary of the death of David Alfaro Siqueiros one of the triumvirate of great 20th-century Mexican muralists, was marked January 6 in Mexico, and also the United States, where he lived and worked for a brief but formative part of his career.
In the early 1920s, Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco were among artists hired to carry out the vision of Public Education Secretary José Vasconcelos, who sought to create nationalistic art that embodied the ideals of the 1910-20 Revolution, while also promoting education for the lower classes by encouraging popular exposure to art.
The triumvirate were commissioned to craft massive murals on the walls of public buildings featuring unique iconography from their nation’s past and present: Aztec warriors battling the Spanish, humble peasants fighting in the Revolution and workers pursuing their rights.
Of the three, Siqueiros was by far the most radical, a fiercely committed communist from his early teens. During the 1910-20 Revolution he had been part of the Constitutionalist Army led by Venustiano Carranza and experienced the everyday struggles of the working classes and rural poor. Many of his works therefore focused on the plight of Mexicans impacted by authoritarianism and capitalism.
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