A Turbulent Chapter of a Storied Career

Lots of artists work hard to make their art look easy, but David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974) wasn’t one of them. Instead, he worked to make his art look hard.

A compelling new exhibition shows there was inspired method to this seeming madness. To discover what it was, go directly to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

There, “Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930-1940” focuses on one of the most politically turbulent periods in the Mexican painter’s storied life. With 53 paintings and nearly two-dozen works on paper, and accompanied by a useful catalog published in English and Spanish editions, it’s somewhat smaller than when I saw it at its debut last fall at the National Art Museum in Mexico City. Still, this fine celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth remains a concise, often revealing and sometimes even surprising display. Anyone interested in 20th century art should not miss it, especially given the relative rarity of Siqueiros shows.

During the 1930s Siqueiros spent considerable time in exile--Los Angeles, Uruguay, New York, Spain--while the decade is framed at each end by his incarceration in Mexico City’s Lecumberri Penitentiary. A communist, he was imprisoned in 1930 following participation in a banned May Day parade and again in 1940 on suspicion of assassinating exiled Soviet leader Leon Trotsky (innocent of the charge, he was released in 1941).

Painting one moment, union organizing the next, creating an uproar in L.A. when he was slandered as anti-American for images in his mural commissioned for Olvera Street, rushing off to Spain during the bloody Civil War--Siqueiros engaged his political commitments in a manner that makes most of today’s political artists look like posturing dilettantes.

How to read the complex political dimensions of Siqueiros’ art, however, can be a matter of sharp contention. Take the 1932 Olvera Street mural, called “America Tropical,” the only public mural by the artist left in the United States. The Santa Barbara show, which spans the decade but features mostly work from the early 1930s, provides a critical context for understanding this remarkable painting.

The mural is currently undergoing a necessary (if constantly delayed) process of conservation and has long been boarded up. When first unveiled, its imagery was claimed by conservative Anglo officials to be a rude slap against the United States. Today, those on the political left often argue that the slap was warranted.

Filled with generic symbols for traditional Mexican culture--glyph-covered pyramid, dense jungle, reclining Chac Mool sculpture, etc.--it focuses on an Indian peasant crucified beneath a broad-winged eagle. At right, figures of two armed revolutionaries take aim at the bird.

To describe “America Tropical” as an attack on U.S. aggression against Mexico is a mistake, however, whether you come from the political right or the left. The reason is that the bird above the peon is not an American eagle at all; it hasn’t the correct ornithological markings. The eagle is instead generic, just like every other object in the painting.

As befits a symbolic image painted by a committed Marxist like Siqueiros, the mural is actually a vigorous protest against working-class oppression by the state. The generic peasant shown in a generic environment is symbolic of Everyman. And the generic eagle symbolizes imperial rule--American, Mexican, French, German, Roman--take your pick of nation-states that have hoisted high the eagle as a triumphant sign.

This firm allegiance to the working class is central to most all Siqueiros’ art--a commitment that assumed special urgency in the 1930s, as the brutal affliction of the Great Depression ground on. In the Santa Barbara show, images of Mexican peons are abundant. Building on a popular Mexican tradition that celebrates folk culture, he endowed his pictures of agricultural and mining laborers with a sense of monumental dignity.

His palette is dominated by coarse browns, rusts and metallic hues. These rich earthen tones enhance the regard for sweat-of-the-brow toil performed by his pictures’ subjects.

There are also numerous portraits of intellectuals and artists, including a stunning 1934 portrait of an unidentified young woman that may be the most powerful painting in the show. Her face is heavily painted on a gritty piece of woven coconut fiber, like the kind used to make mats and sacks.

Siqueiros often employed burlap as a painting support, a rough material whose associations are starkly different from those of, say, fine linen. Burlap is a working-class cloth, metaphorically “of the people.”

He also experimented with painting techniques. Sometimes the paint is so dense that it seems to have been laid on with a trowel. Elsewhere (including in “America Tropical”), he employed a spray gun--perhaps the first artist to use the tool.

In “Down but Not Defeated,” painted after his 1939 return from unsuccessful battle in the Spanish Civil War, in which Franco’s fascism was victorious over republican rule, he shows a sharply foreshortened figure of a man pressed into the ground, his body resting on clenched fists. The foreground earth is a slab of heavily modeled paint, its visual tactility nearly sculptural.

Sometimes these technical experiments got out of hand, as in the small apocalyptic paintings “The End of the World” and “Cosmos and Disaster” (both 1936). Sand, wood, fabric and even small slabs of fired ceramic clay are embedded in the oil paint, in a futile effort to endow these ugly pictures with an inescapable gravity.

Yet, look at any of his paintings and you’re inescapably aware of the sheer physical effort expended on them. Successful or not, Siqueiros’ visual emphasis on unusual materials and odd techniques always comes across as purposeful. Making paintings, this striking art visually declares, is itself a form of labor.

The exhibition is a revelation because it demonstrates the artist’s invention of a surprising visual language in the midst of a devastating and traumatic era. By making his paintings look hard, not easy, Siqueiros asserted his solidarity with the farmer in the fields, woman grinding corn, mother raising children, driller in a mine or crucified peon, all of whom are pictured in his art. His portraits of fellow artists and intellectuals thus correspond with his pictures of laborers, as the artist in his studio is unambiguously put forward as another honorable worker.

Having denounced easel painting in the 1920s in favor of a revolutionary form of public mural art, with roots in pre-Columbian painting, Siqueiros went on to reinvent the easel genre for himself in a manner that upheld his communist ideals. “Portrait of a Decade” helps clarify a highly charged moment in the artist’s complex career.

*

* Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St. Closed Mondays. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sundays, noon-5 p.m. Through May 11. (805) 963-4364.