Work by Famed Mexican Muralist to Be Preserved

A little-known Los Angeles art treasure--a monumental mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of Mexico’s most renowned and controversial artists--has been donated to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

“Portrait of Present Day Mexico,” painted nearly seven decades ago across four walls enclosing the patio of a Pacific Palisades estate, is scheduled to go on display at the Santa Barbara museum in December.

Siqueiros belonged to the triumvirate of 20th century Mexican muralists known as Los Tres Grandes (the Big Three)--including Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. The mural, a gift from Siqueiros to movie director Dudley Murphy, is one of three the artist completed in Los Angeles during a six-month sojourn here in 1932. They are the only murals that Siqueiros executed in the United States.

Fleeing house arrest in Mexico, Siqueiros, an avowed Communist then in his 30s, finished “Portrait of Present Day Mexico” shortly before U.S. authorities deported him. The artwork, which depicts martyred workers and a corrupt Mexican government, is arguably the most important of his Los Angeles murals and the only one to survive relatively intact.

“The mural is a wonderful gift,” said Robert Frankel, executive director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. “It’s an astounding object in wonderful condition.”

“To have [a] mural of such importance that has never been seen before put before the public is amazing,” said Luis Garza, who studied the work from 1993 to 1996 when he was the Getty Conservation Institute’s community liaison in the restoration of a Siqueiros mural at Olvera Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. “That mural was the front-runner of his work that followed, a turning point. When I saw it, the pigmentation was very strong. The colors were vibrantly coming through.”

Frankel said the mural’s donors wish to remain anonymous. However, according to the Los Angeles County tax assessor’s office, the property on Amalfi Drive has belonged to Robert and Justine Bloomingdale, son and daughter-in-law of Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale, since 1986. (Alfred was heir to the department store fortune, a founder of Diners Club and a member of President Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet.”) The Bloomingdales have declined to comment about the mural or their gift to the museum.

Moving It Will Take 4 Months

The museum must remove the mural from the estate and transport it to Santa Barbara. Each wall is 8 feet tall, the longest measuring more than 30 feet. The process, which involves a team of conservators working with construction and transportation firms, began the second week of August and is expected to take four months. The work will be moved as a unit and installed at the museum just as it was at the estate.

Museum officials would not reveal the cost of moving the mural, nor would they disclose its current value. However, Frankel acknowledged that it is roughly in line with an appraisal conducted by Christie’s in 1991, when the Bloomingdales attempted to sell the mural through the auction house.

According to Christie’s public relations manager Margaret Doyle, “Portrait of Present Day Mexico,” considered to be in mint condition, was valued between $1.5 million and $2 million. Bidding for the work topped out at $750,000 and it wasn’t sold. At the time, Christie’s said careful studies had been done to ensure that the mural could be removed without harm.

Frankel declined to comment on how the Santa Barbara Museum of Art won the donation. The museum has a nationally recognized collection of Latin American art, and in 1997 it presented “Portrait of a Decade,” an exhibition of Siqueiros’ work organized by the National Museum of Art in Mexico City. Frankel said he learned that the mural might be available 2 1/2 years ago. “That’s when we began a conversation and the donors chose to work with us,” he said.

According to Los Angeles County Museum of Art spokesperson Thea Makow, LACMA officials are “delighted that the mural is going to a public facility, especially one in Southern California,” but did not attempt to acquire the mural for its own collection.

Wellesley College art history professor James Oles, who lives part time in Mexico City and co-curated “Portrait of a Decade,” said the cost of moving the mural may have dissuaded collectors and other museums.

“My understanding is that Christie’s could not sell it because people were reticent about [moving] it,” he said. “It’s good that people will be able to see it, but it’s sad that it’s leaving its original place and leaving Los Angeles. But this mural will fit Santa Barbara’s existing collection [of Latin American art].”

Siqueiros (1896-1974), came to Los Angeles in May 1932. Opting for exile over continued house arrest because of his political activities, Siqueiros--a union organizer, orthodox Marxist and member of the Executive Committee of the Mexican Communist Party--fled his confinement in the Mexican town of Taxco at the invitation of Mrs. Nelbert M. Chouinard, founder of the Chouinard School of Arts (the forerunner of CalArts).

Siqueiros chose Los Angeles because relatives on his mother’s side of the family lived here. Additionally, Rivera and Orozco--Siqueiros’ rivals--had already staked claims in other parts of the United States. Orozco had been working in New York while Rivera spent time in San Francisco and then moved to fulfill a commission in Detroit.

While teaching a mural course at Chouinard, Siqueiros and his students painted “Workers’ Meeting” on a courtyard wall at the school. A 20-by-25-foot rendition of construction workers captivated by a labor agitator’s speech, it was unveiled in July 1932 to favorable reviews.

Olvera Street Art Was Quickly Covered

Riding the publicity, Siqueiros was commissioned to paint “Tropical America” on an exterior second-story wall of the Plaza Art Center facing Olvera Street. Late into the night before its unveiling on Oct. 9, 1932, Siqueiros labored privately on the 18-by-80-foot mural’s central composition: an imperialist eagle perched on a double cross draped with a crucified American native. Again, Siqueiros’ work impressed critics, but many saw the piece as Communist propaganda, and it was quickly whitewashed.

About that time, Dudley Murphy--who had collaborated with Dadaist artist Man Ray and would later direct the film version of the Eugene O’Neill play “Emperor Jones”--befriended Siqueiros and invited the artist to his Amalfi Drive estate to set up an informal, three-day exhibition of his easel paintings.

According to an account by Murphy, published in the Christie’s auction catalog, Siqueiros sold about 10 paintings to a “very distinguished clientele” that included actor-director Charles Laughton and director Josef von Sternberg. Siqueiros was so grateful that he offered to paint a mural for Murphy, who wrote that the muralist, “his wife Blanquita and her 8-year-old boy, whom we called ‘Dinamito,’ moved in with us.”

“Portrait of Present Day Mexico” took shape over the ensuing weeks, with the painter and a few assistants often working between midnight and 3 or 4 a.m. Painted directly onto wet plaster in the traditional fresco technique, the mural covers the rectangular patio’s interior walls. It was his third and final Los Angeles mural before his deportation that November.

“Workers’ Meeting” was the most fragile of the three works. In painting it, Siqueiros experimented with spray-painting pigments mixed with wet concrete; the murals’ colors washed away quickly. “Tropical America,” painted over for political reasons, hasn’t been readily viewable almost since it was created. It has been undergoing on-again, off-again restoration on Olvera Street since the 1980s, a project that is now scheduled to be completed by the spring of 2003. The Palisades mural remains Siqueiros’ best preserved and most important Los Angeles mural.

“ ‘Portrait of Present Day Mexico’ is a major work in Siqueiros’ artistic development,” wrote art scholar Laurance P. Hurlburt in the auction catalog essay. “It is of foremost importance as the artist’s first use of specific contemporary political imagery.”

The largest panel of the mural shows onetime Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles, masked and armed with a rifle, hunkered down amid bags of money. On a short wall opposite Calles, Siqueiros painted New York banker J.P. Morgan, whose employee, Dwight Morrow, served as the U.S. ambassador to Mexico during the late 1920s and early ‘30s.

Between these renditions of corruption and U.S. business interests lie martyred workers and progressives, and opposite them on the fourth wall of the patio, a revolutionary guard. Next to Calles on the main wall are two impoverished women and a child--representing the living victims of Calles’ politics--in front of a pyramid.

“Siqueiros was documenting that Mexico’s politics didn’t address the needs of the indigenous and the poor,” said Patrick Davis, executive director of the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission, which oversees the installation of public artworks in the city. “These themes are still an issue today. I’m assuming that this mural will stir up some controversy [when it is displayed].”

“The important thing about any piece of art,” Frankel said, “is not whether people like it or not; it’s that they respond to it. And what [this mural] means for Santa Barbara is exciting . . . to see a Siqueiros mural that hasn’t been damaged or deteriorated. The issue now is if it can be moved safely. And it can be.”

Keith David Hamm is a freelance writer in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara; Susan Brenneman is the Times arts editor.