The Two Sides of a Revolutionary

“We keep seeing Siqueiros in the same 10 pictures,” said Diana C. du Pont, curator of 20th century art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She has a point. The mere mention of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ name produces fiery images of Mexico’s revolution, seared into memory by a few of his best-known murals in Mexico City and paintings in the collections of major American museums.

The familiar passion and drama are on view once again in “Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930-40,” which recently opened at the Santa Barbara museum. But the show has more to offer than signature paintings, compelling as they are. The assembly of 77 paintings, watercolors, lithographs and woodcuts--one of the largest and most significant exhibitions of Siqueiros’ work ever held in the United States--provides an unusually broad view of an artist who did not spend all his time trumpeting the evils of his native land and the United States, as his trademark pieces might imply.

Along with gripping portrayals of revolutionary heroes and victims, he painted artists and intellectuals, family members and friends, and he wasn’t above accepting commissions from figures in high society, Du Pont said. Siqueiros also created apocalyptic landscapes and sympathetic images of motherhood. In matters of politics and power, he raged against oppression all around the world. “Proletarian Victim,” a 1933 painting depicting a nude woman bound with rope and shot in the head, is based on a power struggle in Manchuria.

With Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, Siqueiros is known as a founder of Mexico’s mural movement. Born in 1896 in Chihuahua, he became involved in student strikes against Mexico’s dictatorial government and joined the Constitutionalist army at the age of 15. Imprisoned in 1930 in Mexico City for his work as a union organizer, he was later placed under house arrest in Taxco.

Siqueiros put an indelible stamp on Los Angeles during his six-month stay in 1932, when he became a highly visible artist--painting three murals and many smaller works--and established connections with the film community.

One mural, “Street Meeting,” at Chouinard Art School, was either destroyed or disintegrated. Another, “Portrait of Present Day Mexico,” was commissioned for the Santa Monica home of film director Dudley Murphy and is still intact.

The third and most important mural, “America Tropical,” on the second-story wall of Olvera Street’s Italian Hall, will be a destination for art and history buffs once restoration on it is complete. The 80-foot-long painting was whitewashed because of its political content--the centerpiece is an American Indian crucified on a double cross, topped by an American eagle--but the painting is currently being restored by the Getty Conservation Institute, to be shown in a protective setting with an educational exhibition.

Siqueiros also had an exhibition of his work during his L.A. sojourn, displaying 36 paintings at the Stendhal Ambassador Galleries. Half of them have been reassembled for the Santa Barbara show, along with portraits of film director Josef von Sternberg and local artists Ione Robinson, Zohmah Day and Marguerite Brunswig, painted during this period of exile.

Siqueiros’ six-month visa was not renewed in Los Angeles, so he went to South America, but traveled to New York in 1934 and worked there in 1936. He abandoned painting in 1937-38, while serving in the Spanish Civil War, then returned to Mexico where he worked as a political activist but also created major paintings and murals.

Now considered a national treasure in Mexico, Siqueiros is being remembered and studied in “Portrait of a Decade.” Organized for the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City by a team of curators--Olivier Debroise, James D. Oles and Mari Carmen Ramirez--the exhibition opened there last November as a celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth.

Although not intended to travel, the artist’s historic Southern California connection, coupled with his influence on Chicano art, provided a powerful argument for bringing the show to Santa Barbara, Du Pont said. But making that happen required considerable tenacity and diplomacy. It isn’t easy to export the work of major Mexican artists, even for temporary exhibitions.

This one began with a letter asking to borrow the Santa Barbara museum’s Siqueiros painting, “Two Indian Women,” for the show. The request was granted, but Du Pont attached an inquiry about bringing the show to Santa Barbara. Five months later, she got a tentatively encouraging response. With enthusiastic support from the museum’s trustees and administrators, she went to work--inevitably losing a few pieces from the original checklist but gaining others from American collectors who had declined sending their paintings to Mexico.

“I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to have all 77 of the works here in our galleries,” Du Pont said. For the Santa Barbara engagement, they are arranged in six sections: “Penitentiary, 1930,” featuring works done during the artist’s incarceration; “Mexico Today, 1930-1932,” portraying farmers, miners and other workers; “Portrait Gallery, 1931-1936”; “Revolutionary Struggle, 1930-1935”; “Towards War, 1936”; and “Down but Not Defeated, 1939,” reflecting Siqueiros’ indomitable spirit when he returned to painting after serving in Spain’s Republican Army.

Seeing the exhibition come to fruition is an enormous relief, but “it was worth the effort,” Du Pont said. Providing a revisionist view of art history, the show not only places Siqueiros’ best-known works in the context of his oeuvre from the 1930s, it also clarifies his position as an influential modernist, she said.

Abstract aspects of his work can be tied to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. Filmic qualities also can be seen, as well as correspondences between Siqueiros’ portraits and those of Edward Weston.

As it turns out, Du Pont wasn’t the only non-Mexican curator to pursue “Portrait of a Decade.” While she was struggling to organize the Santa Barbara presentation, the show “got legs,” she said. It is now scheduled to make two additional appearances, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London.

But the show has particular resonance here, she said. “This was absolutely the right thing to do for Southern California because his work is such an important part of Los Angeles history.”

* “Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930-1940,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara, (805) 963-4364. Ends May 11. Hours: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sundays, noon-5 p.m. Admission: adults, $4; seniors, $3; students and children 6-17, $1.50.