SIQUEIROS: MEXICO’S MASTER MURALIST

Much is made these days of politics and art. A few painters and sculptors feel pretty set up about themselves for having the courage to make pictures that express indignation over, say, violations of human rights. It is laudable to let conscience guide one’s art but our chaps are going to have to get cracking if they hope to equal the intransigence of the hemisphere’s leading social-rebel artist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, the great Mexican muralist. His most effective work is immobile, but a rare peek at some 50 easel paintings, drawings and prints is on view at the San Diego Museum of Art to June 9.

Siqueiros spent so much time immersed in political hot water it is a wonder he ever got around to the immense, angry epic pictures that made him, along with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, undisputed master of the century’s most startlingly effective “art for the people” movement.

The artist died in 1974 at age 77. At 15, he was already involved in a student plot against the strongman Victoriano Huerta. Art study in Paris solidified his Communist views. Back home, he organized revolutionary artists as the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. In 1929, while representing Mexican unions at a South American conference, he was arrested and expelled from Argentina. The next year, Mexico jailed him for participating in violent May Day riots.

In the ‘30s, forced into exile, he agitated, organized and painted in the United States. In New York, he founded a study group that included Jackson Pollock, who was profoundly influenced by his heroic scale. In Los Angeles, Siqueiros, among other things, executed a mural on an Olvera Street building. It was immediately painted over as inflammatory. (In recent years, efforts to restore it proved unsuccessful.)

In 1937, he saw action with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. No sooner home, he was forced to flee again, accused by the government of plotting to assassinate Leon Trotsky.

Siqueiros’ homeland never quite knew what to do with this prestigious prodigal who was also a leading pain in the body politic. In 1960, he was jailed for inciting leftists to riot. He served four years, only to be pardoned and given the National Prize for Art, Mexico’s highest cultural honor.

It’s a wonder Warren Beatty hasn’t made an epic movie about Siqueiros’ life, starring himself.

Siqueiros’ art reflects passionate stubborn ideological conviction. His great murals sometimes seem to threaten to burst from the walls engulfing us in a hot ooze of gigantic Aztec heroes breaking chains, brutal cavalrymen trampling peasants and books, all acted amid hell’s own fire and nude torsos of Amazon earth mothers with breasts like gurgling volcanoes.

The selection on view proves that Siqueiros needed acres of walls to match his vision but that he was by no means a wash-out easel painter. “Female Torso” from 1945 captures the mural’s power. Siqueiros had a way of painting big-volume form while using a looping pattern of paint strokes to create a dynamic two-dimensional surface. His 1942 “Portrait of Carlos Chavez” is a wonderfully convincing act of heroic myth-making. The monumental 1947 “Portrait of Angelica” uses a trademark device of symmetry and single-point perspective to create a space that is as sensational as falling into a vortex.

As not uncommonly happens, however, Siqueiros embodied his strengths and weaknesses in the same characteristics. The ideological self-righteousness that lends the work dramatic clout also makes it prey to bombast and easy generalization. A couple of studies of horses appear, at a distance, as solid as Uccello’s but are scarcely more than chunky illustrations at normal distance.

The pile-driver ego and visceral self-assurance that makes him so impressive can turn as flaccid and repulsive as limp intestines when it loses energy. The plodding, boorish “Three Gourds” is just exhibit A. Evidence abounds.

It points to a great man with tunnel vision that tempts him into wincing errors of taste, lapses into unintentional humor and a childish conviction that he can do anything.

Siqueiros was evidently trying to show Salvador Dali his place in 1947 when he painted “Cain’s Death and Funeral.” It depicts Cain as an enormous plucked chicken carcass surrounded by a multitude of tiny people. It makes Siqueiros look either a naive, a crackpot or both. You want to be embarrassed for him but you’re afraid his ghost will emerge and start to “explain” the picture’s symbolism at frightening length. For all its monosyllabic power, there is something obsessive and garrulous about this art.

Siqueiros’ ego seems so grandiose you don’t know whether to find it lovable and quixotic or oppressive and pathological. He was a relentless experimenter both in materials like pyroxylin and styles (like whatever came along). Occasionally he was an innovator. More often he seemed to be annexing others’ discoveries. In 1934, he decided to give those effete intellectual abstractionists a good lesson with the grid abstraction “Optical Army.” You can almost hear him “explaining” that it has that title because the work makes “an assault on the eyes,” har-har.

Nothing detered the aging Siqueiros from knocking off perfectly awful Abstract Expressionist experiments or overblown, exhausted versions of his own best work.

But it is that best work that forms the bottom line. It leaves Siqueiros standing untouched as a man and an artist, a giant of his generation and an inspiration to artists from action painters to guerrilla muralists in the barrio.

Somehow it only adds to his stature that part of his legacy is the suspicion that becoming larger than life may require Promethean sincerity spiced with the skills of a mountebank.

We all liked the Wizard of Oz better when we found out he was 5-feet-2 in his stocking feet.