[01;00;00;00] Music Cue Teaser_Siquieros (Theme)

[01:00:00.16] SIQUEIROS

Nosotros queremos hacer un arte para todos los hombres

Arte difícil.

Arte como los grandes periodos de la historia.

“Arte publico,” dijimos.

“Arte publico!”

Este es un arte para las multitudes.

[01:00:21.11] CHRIS FULTON

Siqueiros was a major figure in what's known as the Mexican mural movement. He became a symbol of an artist who fights always for the cause of social justice.

[01:00:38.03] GREGORIO LUKE

For many years the figure of Siqueiros has been practically banished from art books, perhaps because of his politics.

[01:00:49.18] CHRIS FULTON

Siqueiros had a very enduring effect in Los Angeles. His mural activity here inspired the Chicano mural movement.

[01:01:00.23] JUDY BACA

Many of us muralists began to look at this work. It began to say to us, “Paint the streets. This is the way we can tell our story.”

[01:01:23.07] LUIS GARZA

His politics and art were one. He depicted the human condition, and sometimes that offends people.

[01:01:51.00] Music Cue Aristocratic Birth (Lalo)

[01:02:04.16] SIQUEIROS:

My family was distinguished, professional. We were 3 children, growing up in Mexico City.

[01:02:18.05] SIQUEIROS:

My father was Cipriano Alfaro, a fervent Catholic who left his family ranch at a young age to study law and then became a respected attorney. He always dressed like a gentleman and loved all things French.

[01:02:41.15] SIQUEIROS:

My mother died when I was a toddler, so for a time, my brother, my sister, and I moved to live with my father’s parents, in the northern state of Chihuahua.

[01:02:46.00] Music Cue Childhood

[01:02:59.12] SIQUEIROS:

My grandfather was rough, terrifying. He claimed that children must be educated with a tight fist, that there was nothing worse than having a sissy in the family.

[01:03:11.19] CHRIS FULTON

Siqueiros’s grandfather had been a heroic guerilla fighter in the 1860s, when Mexico was fighting off the French invasion, and gave Siqueiros a spirit of rebellion and independence that Siqueiros retained for the rest of his life.

[01:03:32.07] SIQUEIROS:

When I was 9 or 10, a painter came to decorate the walls of our house. He was very Bohemian and wore a cape. I was fascinated by him and could spend hours watching him paint.

[01:03:47.11] GREGORIO LUKE

Siqueiros starts to paint, inspired by him, and he imitates not just the art he does but also the way that he dresses and he acts.

[01:03:57.00] Music Cue Awakening

[01:04:03.16] SIQUEIROS:

Every day, as soon as my father left for work and the painters arrived, I would sit by their side, watching their every move, practicing their fine brushstrokes. For my first oil painting, I took a card with an illustration of The Virgin of the Chair by Raphael, and I copied it.

[01:04:30.17] SIQUEIROS:

My father disapproved of the unconventional ways my grandfather was raising us, so he took us to live with him again in Mexico City. And when I turned 14, I became a student at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and attended the Art Academy in the evenings. This was just as winds of the Revolution were beginning to blow.

[01:04:53.00] Music Cue Winds of Revolution

[01:04:56.21] SIQUEIROS:

I found myself joining a student protest—you can imagine how this irritated my father—and then I became caught up in the strikes, alongside my fellow art students. I was there as the Revolution was born. Over 200 of my fellow students at the Art Academy were thrown in jail, me included. Many were also killed.

[01:05:26.21] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Y esto definitivamente lo lleva a la inquietud de enrolarse en las filas revolucionarias.

[01:05:34.18] SIQUEIROS:

I was 17 when I joined the Constitutional Army. As soldiers, we travelled all around our country, and I met many different Mexicans. I learned who we were really fighting for.

[01:05:40.00] Music Cue Mexican Revolution

[01:06:00.11] SIQUEIROS:

It was then that I became a “citizen artist.” I realized art had to capture the struggle of our people. And I saw our people die—peasants, workers, artisans—right before my eyes. It’s for them that we became revolutionaries.

[01:06:34.21] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Tiene toda una experiencia de vida que va a marcar también toda su historia plástica.

Y el siempre lo dice… todo esto siempre será plasmado en mi pintura.

[01:06:55.19] GACHITA

I met David just as the fighting ended in Mexico.

[01:06:59.00] Music Cue Gachita

[01:07:02.19] GACHITA

Instantly, we fell madly in love and rushed to be married at the Justice of the Peace. I was shy and soft-spoken, while David was outgoing and boastful. He would embarrass me, kissing me in public and flying into a jealous rage if anyone so much as looked at me.

[01:07:26.01] SIQUEIROS:

I was finally able to start painting again. Then I realized that in order for me to grow as a painter, I had to continue my artistic studies in Europe.

[01:07:40.05] SIQUEIROS:

I knew our government had no special budget for art students, but my friends in the army had all received some cash compensation for their service, so I asked, too.

[01:07:59.14] GACHITA:

After knocking on many doors, he arrived home with a sack of gold and an appointment to Paris as an aide to military attachés.

[01:08:11.22] RAQUEL TIBOL

Siqueiros hace la vida a su antojo y a los 19 años ya se casa con Gachita, ya se van a Europa ya se pone en contacto con Diego, Diego le contagia, Diego ya era un hombre de izquierda ligado a todos los expatriados Rusos en Paris.

[01:08:30.00] Music Cue Paris

[01:08:41.15] SIQUEIROS:

I knew all about Diego Rivera before we arrived in France. He was our most famous Mexican painter. We called him “Don Diego.” He had been working in Paris throughout our Revolutionary period. We spent hours together, talking about Mexico and the war.

[01:09:01.03] SIQUEIROS:

I was around him a great deal, so I studied his work and heard all about his ideas. Most important to me was his full theory of modern art.

[01:09:10.00] GREGORIO LUKE:

Diego Rivera introduces him to the avant-garde art, to the world of Picasso, to the idea of the futurists, and also to the great Masters of the Renaissance.

[01:09:22.00] Music Cue Requiem

[01:09:30.14] SIQUEIROS:

As I travelled for work all around Europe, I began to see how these great religious masterpieces were actually public art in their own time—created to educate and speak directly to the people. Diego and I both loved these monumental works, and soon our interest in easel painting faded away.

[01:09:53.11] SIQUEIROS:

At the center of our vision was the idea of public art. Art made about the people and for the people. We believed art could be “greater” than it had ever been.

[01:10:07.07] GREGORIO LUKE

Siqueiros writes a manifesto, in which he talks about public art, about rejecting an art that is for the wealthy, of pursuing an Art that is for everybody. So, we can see that almost from the very beginning, Siqueiros has this idea that Art should reach the people, it should have a social mission, in addition to an aesthetic one.

[01:10:28.00] Music Cue Telegrama

[01:10:36.11] GACHITA:

We received a cable from Presidente Obregón’s new Minister of Education inviting David to return to Mexico City and paint murals to celebrate our new post-Revolutionary society. We were both so excited to go home!

[01:10:52.00] Music Cue Polkita (Theme)

[01:11:05.06] SIQUEIROS:

Of course, I shared the government’s vision for a big, public art project that was made available for everyone to see and enjoy. A group of us painters were assigned to the mural project at a preparatory school.

[01:11:22.00] Music Cue Birth of Muralism

[01:11:29.14] SIQUEIROS:

We divided the walls among us, as if dividing a piece of bread. Diego Rivera painted a symbol of poetry of dance.

José Clemente Orozco painted a religious matron inspired by Botticelli. The symbols I focused on at first were water, wind, and fire—very elemental, but also broadly spiritual to our people.

[01:11:59.09] GREGORIO LUKE

Suddenly, the public walls of Mexico are canvases for these young artists to paint, and to paint what the country had just lived, which is the revolution.

[01:12:09.00] Music Cue Talking Walls

[01:12:26.05] MIGUEL ANGEL CORZO

It was a wonderful way of educating people about their history in a very easy and accessible manner.

You didn't have to go to a museum to see a piece of art. You’d have to go into a government office and you were faced with a piece of art that was staring at you, and that was telling you a story.

[01:12:48.04] SIQUEIROS:

While our public art project was received very well, the government itself was not so progressive. It soon fell behind in its revolutionary promises. Our government was being pressured by powerful American businesses and investors, who had a lot more influence on how Mexican workers were treated or how policies were changed than we did, as a bunch of radical artists. In response, we began to organize protests, like we did during our student days.

[01:13:14.00] Music Cue El Machete

[01:13:20.16] CHRIS FULTON

They established a union called “The Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors.” Siqueiros was appointed general secretary. They also founded El Machete. And this journal, as well as the activities of the union were radical and very critical of the existing political regime.

[01:13:45.18] SIQUEIROS:

The majority of the rural poor and manual workers in Mexico were illiterate. So, the mission of our Syndicate was to educate people through images. We made it graphic, in vibrant colors of red and black, and hung it on public walls in workers’ neighborhoods, like posters.

[01:13:58.00] Music Cue The Winds are We (Theme)

[01:14:07.00] CHRIS FULTON

In 1923, the Mexican mural movement transformed, as the principal members became radicalized and affiliated with the Communist party.

[01:14:17.12] SIQUEIROS:

We wanted the agrarian reform we’d been promised. We wanted a nationalized oil industry, with all profits given to the people instead of the imperialists. But the military resisted. They bashed the labor unions, so we used El Machete to organize the resistance.

[01:14:41.19] SIQUEIROS:

Soon, the Minister of Public Education warned us to stop publishing El Machete or we’d lose our commissions. As artists, we did not all agree on what to do next. Diego said, “Even if we have to sell our souls to the devil, we will continue painting the murals.”

[01:15:05.16] SIQUEIROS:

Orozco said: “If politics prevents us from continuing to paint our murals, to hell with politics. I’ll move to the U.S.”

I understood the politics—we weren’t going to continue our contracts and criticize the establishment on public walls. But we could use El Machete as mobile walls. We could transfer our message into our journal, instead.

[01:15:35.08] CHRIS FULTON

He gave up painting entirely and became a public speaker and an agitator for various leftist causes, including union organizing.

[01:15:43.00] Music Cue Repression 1

[01:15:47.08] SIQUEIROS:

In the late 1920s, Presidente Calles—after he became Mexico’s Jefe Máximo—feared that our labor unions were getting out of hand. He outlawed the Communist Party, and we began to experience widespread repression against any voices that opposed the government.

[01:16:14.11] SIQUEIROS:

While in Uruguay, I met the exceptionally talented poet, Blanca Luz Brum. She was a widow with a young son, and she was extraordinarily beautiful.

We fell madly in love, and I had to leave Graciela.

[01:16:30.02] RAQUEL TIBOL

Blanca Luz Brum fue el gran amor de David.

[01:16:34.00] Music Cue Blanca Luz (Theme)

[01:16:41.15] BLANCA:

It was like we were ignited by a deep, rapturous fire. It was alchemical, profound.

[01:16:52.06] SIQUEIROS:

I brought Blanca Luz and her little boy back to Mexico City with me, and immediately there was trouble. My fellow Communists had gone underground—that is, anyone Presidente Calles hadn’t jailed already, and on no real charges, just his orders.

[01:17:03.00] Music Cue Repression 2

[01:17:09.00] SIQUEIROS:

So, we hid out in the Uruguayan consulate. But on the one day I took a few steps outside, Calles’s police captured me. I was sent to the national penitentiary for fourteen months.

[01:17:24.14] BLANCA:

While locked up in prison, David again became driven. He painted with energy and passion, the same intensity he’d brought to the struggles of workers and to fighting government repression.

[01:17:30.00] Music Cue Lecumberri

[01:18:02.21] SIQUEIROS:

When I was finally released from prison, I was sentenced to house arrest in the beautiful town of Taxco. In many ways, this was welcome freedom. But our little family was desperately poor, and there was no market there for my paintings.

[01:18:28.21] CHRIS FULTON

He had to improvise. And this was the first time that Siqueiros began his experimental research. He made his own canvas out of simple burlap. He produced his own colors from vegetable dyes.

[01:18:34.00] Music Cue Taxco

[01:18:58.19] SIQUEIROS:

Our picturesque little silver-mining town was very attractive to tourists, so we met many distinguished artists and interesting visitors during my detention there. Perhaps most fascinating to me was Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker. We spent many hours discussing his new movies, and he opened my eyes to the remarkable creative power of cinema and the messaging impact of montage.

Music from “Battleship Potemkin”

[01:19:36.07] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Eisenstein le pasa a Siqueiros la maravilla que es el cine, y Siqueiros le pasa a Eisenstein la maravilla que es en ese momento, el muralismo mexicano.

[01:19:51.16] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Eisenstein se interesa tanto en los murales de Siqueiros que el traslada el mural de Siqueiros a la película Que Viva México! En el tema del entierro del obrero.

[01:20:04.00] Music Cue Que Viva el Lens!

[01:20:19.07] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Y esa semilla que deja Eisenstein se va a ver reflejada en muchísimas obras posteriores de Siqueiros.

[01:20:43.17] JUDY BACA

Siqueiros was a modernist much different than the other great maestros, Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. He went much further in terms of looking at modernist techniques and photographic usage.

[01:21:02.05] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

El es el primero que une a toda la tecnificación y a todo el avance científico que se esta dando en el siglo XX con materiales plásticos, con la cámara, con la cinematografía.

[01:21:16.00] Music Cue Photography

[01:21:25.13] SIQUEIROS:

Without photography, artists would remain in some static, mystical state, parasites to beauty. Our artwork has no value if we fail to understand real life.

[01:22:04.03] CHRIS FULTON:

Siqueiros came to Los Angeles in April of 1932, at the invitation of the Chouinard Art School, to demonstrate the new methods of mural painting for American artists.

[01:22:13.00] Music Cue Street Meeting

[01:22:17.16] SIQUEIROS:

The Mexican government finally released me and granted me permission to travel to the United States to teach.

[01:22:25.12] CHRIS FULTON

Before he knew it, he had 17 artists enrolled in his demonstration piece.

[01:22:32.11] SIQUEIROS:

My first American mural was called Street Meeting.

[01:22:37.20] ANTHONY WHITE

That mural is very significant in the sense that it is the first attempt by any sort of contemporary artist to paint a mural outdoors. So, an exterior mural on an exterior wall of a building facing a street.

[01:22:51.21] CHRIS FULTON

The work he executed in the courtyard of the Chouinard school represented a worker’s strike, and it portrayed a mixed-race population gathered around a thundering orator who is attempting to incite their rebellion.

[01:23:08.15] SIQUEIROS:

The mural generated quite an uproar, perhaps because I dared to mix Blacks and Whites in a public work.

[01:23:15.09] CHRIS FULTON

Not long after the mural was completed, it was covered over by whitewash.

[01:23:27.05] CHRIS FULTON

Siqueiros executed a second mural in Los Angeles after the Worker’s Strike. This second mural was set in the Plaza Art Center on Olvera Street.

[01:23:37.08] NARRATOR:

Olvera Street, populated with people in Mexican and Spanish costumes. Their shops adorned with gay awnings. Olvera Street throbs with the spirit of the past. And here, one hears the soft salutations of ‘Buenos dias, Señorita,’ ‘Buenas noches, señora,’ and ‘Muchas gracias, Señor.

[01:23:57.00] Music Cue Olvera Street

[01:24:03.08] SIQUEIROS:

My patrons asked me to paint “Tropical America,” a lovely place bedecked in beautiful flowers, with women swinging in their hammocks… A paradise.

[01:24:14.21] GREGORIO LUKE

The original idea was creating a mythical Latin American village, where people could eat their tacos and buy their artisan’s works—all this kind of idea of a happy little village.

[01:24:29.00] Music Cue America Tropical

[01:24:38.23] GREGORIO LUKE

This is the time when the U.S. is in the Great Depression. Thousands of Mexican workers are being deported.

[01:25:05.19] GREGORIO LUKE:

All this unrest, all this storm underneath the surface is what América Tropical captures.

[01:25:17.15] SIQUEIROS:

To me, América Tropical was a continent where people of color suffered from exploitation and persecution, where they were harassed by their respective governments.

[01:25:29.17] LUIS GARZA

The night before the opening, Siqueiros sent everybody home and, in the middle of the night, came back and painted that central figure.

[01:25:40.12] SIQUEIROS:

I could never have painted just a simple, lovely place. I needed to reveal the truth of the lives of our people and our races.

[01:25:49.18] LUIS GARZA

The next day, when the drapes and scaffolding were all pulled away and everybody was able to see the entire mural in its totality, people gasped. They were in awe. They were in shock. They were indignant.

[01:26:15.22] LUIS GARZA

The most important reaction was, of course, the city fathers’ and la madrina of Olvera Street, Ms. Christine Sterling, who felt that it was not exactly what they asked for when they asked him to paint América Tropical. Because the actual title of América Tropical is Tropical America: Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism.

That was offensive, which is why it was whitewashed, first one third and then, within the decade, the entire mural.

[01:26:51.00] Music Cue Deported (Theme)

[01:26:58.13] SIQUEIROS:

I was very sad when they shipped me out of the country, because I felt that I had contributed to founding a new movement of outdoor murals in the United States, the foundation of public art, one that could be truly public in the fullest sense of the word.

[01:27:19.17] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Se va a toda América Latina viaja a Argentina, viaja a Chile, viaja a Cuba, viaja a Uruguay. Viaja a otros países y si no necesariamente va a pintar, si va a dar discursos.

[01:27:33.09] CHRIS FULTON

Blanca Luz later recounted that Siqueiros, at this period of life, was drinking excessively and could often be cruel to her.

[01:27:42.23] BLANCA:

David’s jealousy began to come between us. I was devoted to being his wife, his muse, his model for paintings and murals, but this primitive temperament of his, this base anger and possessiveness, began to incinerate my desire. I came to see that the only way to save myself was to leave David.

[01:28:06.00] ANTHONY WHITE

Siqueiros becomes involved again politically and is arrested and deported from Argentina. His wife, Blanca Luz Brum, deserted him.

[01:28:20.11] CHRIS FULTON

Siqueiros came to New York City in January 1936, to participate in the American Artists’ Conference.

[01:28:29.19] SIQUEIROS:

Fortunately, my U.S. deportation had been forgotten by then. I was so excited and inspired by New York City—its great bridges, soaring skyscrapers, enormous tunnels. This city was truly impressive.

[01:28:43.10] CHRIS FULTON

He formed around him a group known as the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop.

For Siqueiros, this group was intended to produce propaganda art for the Communist Party of the United States.

[01:29:06.15] CHRIS FULTON:

For May Day of 1936, they produced this fabulous allegorical float, which showed the hammer of Communism smashing a capitalist.

[01:29:24.01] CHRIS FULTON

In New York, he undertook some of his most brilliant and unorthodox experimentations in painting technique that he termed “controlled accident.”

[01:29:29.00] Music Cue Controlled Accident

[01:29:41.14] SIQUEIROS:

In my experimental workshop at 5 West Street, we made some wonderful discoveries through the mystery of creation.

When we applied simple superimpositions of color paint, combined with their unique patterns of absorption, we produced an inexplicable, marvelous web—truly a remarkable phenomenon.

[01:30:05.13] GREGORIO LUKE

Siqueiros has a deep influence on American art. He was a teacher of Jackson Pollock. This drip painting was something that Siqueiros really initiated.

[01:30:19.17] CHRIS FULTON

So, Siqueiros’s inventiveness, his experimentalism, quite literally laid the foundation for much of the work of the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s and ‘50s.

[01:30:31.00] Music Cue Spain (Theme)

[01:30:45.23] GREGORIO LUKE

Now, even though he is fairly well established in New York, Siqueiros leaves to join the struggle in Spain against Fascism. So, in the Civil War in Spain, he returns to this militant conduct.

[01:31:05.03] SIQUEIROS:

Franco had tremendous firepower—Fascist dictators from Hitler to Mussolini sent financial and military support for his efforts to fight against the workers and the farmers. Many artists and intellectuals from all over the world travelled to Spain, to help defend the democratically elected Republic. I was one of them.

[01:31:35.02] ANGELICA ARENAL

Yo quería ir a España a luchar por España también como todos los mexicanos.

Y el secretario de guerra me dijo mire Angélica, si usted se lleva una carta especial, lacrada. La tiene usted que esconder en su ropa.

Lleva todas las claves de los barcos que México envía a España, con víveres y con algo de armamento, con armamento.

Fui desde México en barco y cuidaba mucho el secreto aquel.

Debo de haber tenido como 26 años y entonces nos casamos en Almería.

Entonces tuve 40 años de vida maravillosa. Si volviera yo a volver a vivir otra vez, lo hubiera repetido otra vez.

[01:32:31.11]GREGORIO LUKE

In the Civil War of Spain, the Left is defeated by the Fascists.

Siqueiros returns to Mexico, closely affiliated to the most radical part of the Left.

[01:32:33.00] Music Cue Defeated

[01:32:50.21] GREGORIO LUKE

Siqueiros was a Stalinist. He believes that the Left had been defeated because it was divided by those who believed in Stalin and those who followed Trotsky.

[01:33:05.03] SIQUEIROS:

In 1937, our Mexican President Cárdenas granted asylum to Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had powerful, influential friends, and no one supported Trotsky more fiercely than Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo.

[01:33:18.21] GREGORIO LUKE

Siqueiros organizes a group of people and tries to assassinate Trotsky. He and his colleagues dress as policemen and come to Trotsky’s house armed with machine guns.

And he fails in this, because Trotsky had hidden under the bed with his wife.

[01:33:45.00] Music Cue Trotsky

[01:33:50.00] RAQUEL TIBOL

Después del asalto a Trotsky el se escondió con Angélica en la sierra de Jalisco. Pero la suegra que era poco cuidadosa hizo una llamada de teléfonos vigilados y bueno dieron con el lo trajeron.

[01:34:09.02] GREGORIO LUKE

And through the interventions of Pablo Neruda, who at the time was the consul of Chile in Mexico, he avoids prison but is exiled to Chile. And in Chile, Siqueiros would complete another masterpiece.

[01:34:24.00] Music Cue Muerte al Invasor (Theme)

[01:34:40.03] SIQUEIROS:

We had been in exile for over three years when I returned to Mexico—but this was not an official, public homecoming. I was still considered “dangerous” by the Mexican government and could be punished.

[01:34:52.23] JULIE ARENAL

I was four years old. I lived with David in the house my father built and my grandmother built. And when he had to go out on the street, my aunt would put us in the back seat of the car, my sister and I and he would hide to protect himself.

[01:35:17.11]  JULIE ARENAL

He did the Cuautéhmoc mural and he had a little place in the mural on the upper corner that was for me and my sister to paint. So we would come back in the afternoon from preschool and gives us paints and we paint the little corner in the mural.

[01:35:21.00] Music Cue First Prize

[01:35:38.10] SIQUEIROS:

Once I finished the Cuautéhmoc mural and it was well received, word was out that I was accepted again in the Mexican society. But the challenge was supporting my family. Very few murals were being commissioned.

[01:35:52.08] SIQUEIROS:

El retrato era para nosotros en esa epoca, la unica solucion economica que teniamos para desarrollar nuestra obra mural.

[01:36:27.00] Music Cue Golden Years

[01:36:28.00] JULIE ARENAL

I remember David walking down Reforma with me, and the taxi drivers used to stop and say, “Siqueiros, Siqueiros! Maestro, Maestro!” They would stop for him, and he’d just be walking, and they would say, “Maestro, Maestro!”

[01:36:47.09] SIQUEIROS:

Finally, Mexican art was being recognized. This inspired me immediately, and it inspired new commissions, as well.

[01:37:55.02] CHRIS FULTON

Most of Siqueiros’s murals are set in architectural spaces, where you enter in a certain door and, in effect, you are being directed through that environment by the artist's construction of that space.

And all of this could be read almost like a film as you are passing through the space.

[01:39:09.07] JUDY BACA

He would look at a room and at a corner of a space or the ceilings of a space, and he would disappear them with line and with color.

[01:39:22.06] SIQUEIROS:

Comprendimos que el espectador no es una estatua inmóvil sino que es un ser que ambula en una plataforma dada y eso nos ha obligado a llegar un sistema de composición poliangular que yo llamo es decir, no considerar la obra frontalmente, sino considerarla en marcha.

[01:39:54.20] SIQUEIROS:

I was asked to paint a mural for the new Museum of National History, where I chose to depict the Mexican Revolution.

[01:40:00.00] Music Cue Chapultepec (Theme)

[01:40:27.17] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Su vida plástica siempre está vinculada con su vida política y siempre está entrando y saliendo de la cárcel, porque es reprimido, porque el tiene que decir, porque el tiene que hablar, porque el tiene que cuestionar. Y por esa razón está siempre en el exilio, está siempre en la cárcel y también está dejando de alguna manera a veces de pintar.

[01:40:48.19] CHRIS FULTON

In the late 1950s, Siqueiros became even more adamantly opposed to the ruling party of Mexico and gave a series of inflammatory speeches against the regime.

He was arrested and incarcerated under the dubious charge of social dissolution.

[01:41:05.00] Music Cue Back to Lecumberri

[01:41:09.07] SIQUEIROS:

I was thrown in solitary confinement and subjected to debilitating interrogations, all trying to intimidate me. When they closed the door to the jail cell, I felt the unspeakable darkness. Nothing is more humiliating than taking a man’s freedom.

[01:41:31.15] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

El permanece en la cárcel alrededor de 4 años. Ya ha cumplido más de 60 años, el realmente si le afecta.

[01:41:42.07] SIQUEIROS:

I was permitted a little supply of paints and some small canvases. But I had to paint and sleep in the same jail cell, so the toxins of the pyroxylin, an industrial paint, took a toll on my health.

[01:41:59.02] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Y desarrolla ahí un gran número de oleos pero sobretodo es pintura de caballete.

[01:42:10.12] CHRIS FULTON

His style began to change quite drastically, from a very directed and disciplined style, fulfilling political goals, to a style that was much more free.

[01:42:25.00] Music Cue Winds of Change

[01:42:43.02] SIQUEIROS:

Fortunately, my friends around the world called for my liberation. Even Picasso and other international painters petitioned for my release.

[01:42:56.12] MIGUEL ANGEL CORZO

My father was a member of the Human Rights Commission of Mexico. One day, he said to me, “We're going to go to prison, and if we're lucky, you're going to be able to meet Siqueiros.”

When I went to see him, he said, “I know you have access to the president and you see him from time to time.”

[01:43:17.14] MIGUEL ANGEL CORZO

And he said, “Please, give the president this gift.” And he gave me a little Ronson lighter which had a canvas around it, and he had painted the mini-Siqueiros mural on the lighter, because the President smoked. So, when I went to go see the president, I said to the president, “Mr. President, I went to see Siqueiros.” He saw the lighter, and he shook his head. A few months later, he let him go free.

[01:43:47.00] Music Cue Freedom!

[01:43:54.22] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Al salir de la cárcel Siqueiros es recibido como un gran héroe.

Es incluso apoyado por una comunidad enorme de intelectuales artistas no solo de México sino del mundo

[01:44:16.02] ANTHONY WHITE

While he was in prison, he had a dream of painting a mural in a large space in which he covered everything—the walls, the ceiling and the floor.

[01:44:26.00] Music Cue In Bed with the Devil

[01:44:31.02] SIQUEIROS:

Its theme is the march of humanity across all of Latin America, and it represents all the oppressed people of the world.

[01:44:44.21] CHRIS FULTON

The consummation of this expressive work that Siqueiros did late in life was his last mural, a vast production. It is the largest mural ever made in the world.

[01:45:06.20] ANTHONY WHITE

His patron was a Mexican industrialist named Suarez y Suarez, who apparently supported the cause of fascism.

[01:45:15.04] LAURA GONZALEZ MATUTE

Siqueiros en este momento ya esta cansado, ya esta en otra etapa. Ya no esta siendo tan contestatario. Y mas bien es el pintor, el artista.

[01:45:29.03] CHRIS FULTON

The March of Humanity is a tremendously controversial piece. It can be seen in two very distinct ways: It can be seen as the fulfillment of a grand theme of humanity and its aspirations for social justice, a concern that Siqueiros entertained from the very beginning of his career.

[01:45:54.07] CHRIS FULTON

It can also be seen as the end of the mural tradition.

[01:46:00.00] Music Cue El Polyforum

[01:46:10.08] CHRIS FULTON

You can actually experience it through a light and sound show. An audience is brought into this large auditorium, seated on chairs on a revolving platform, and a light and sound show emerges with Siqueiros narrating the different parts of the painting.

[01:46:28.23] SIQUEIROS

La marcha de la humanidad es una marcha total impulsada por el tremendo anhelo de superación que tiene el hombre. Nuestra marcha empieza con los periodos mas crueles. Empieza con el periodo de la situación de los negros que son trasladados a America para esclavizarlos. Y para substituir una mano de obra que en gran parte era rebelde que no se quería someter al invasor.

[01:47:06.12] SIQUEIROS

Una raza indomnita.

Una raza que después participo de una manera extraordinaria y de valor inmenso en la revolución mexicana.

[01:47:09.00] Music Cue Death

[01:47:21.09] SIQUEIROS:

I began to feel sick after the completion of the March of Humanity, but I didn’t want to worry Angélica until the pain became severe. Ironically, I learned the diagnosis of my prostate cancer sitting beneath one of my own murals, the Defense of the Future Victory of Medical Science over Cancer, in the La Raza hospital.

[01:48:15.05] ANCHOR

David Siqueiros, militant communist, and one of the world great painters, died of cancer today at his home in Mexico. He was 77 years old.

[01:48:33.07] NARRATOR:

The world of art has lost one of its outstanding figures. According to many critics, David Siqueiros stands second only to Pablo Picasso in his influence on twentieth-century painting.

[01:48:55.09] GREGORIO LUKE

América Tropical is an artistic ghost. It is perhaps the most influential Latino mural in the country.

[01:49:04.16] LUIS GARZA

In the ‘60s and the ‘70s, you began to see the mural. It began to reappear.

Un espíritu that was coming through.

[01:49:05.00] Music Cue Resurection (Theme)

[01:49:12.12] JESUS TREVINO

The wind, the sun, the rain had worked on the surface of this and had begun to etch away and blow away this white covering. And the image that Siqueiros had painted originally was beginning to emerge.

I thought to myself this is a metaphor of the Chicano movement that is also emerging. After decades of being an oppressed minority in the United States, my generation, the baby boom generation was beginning to make itself heard. We were saying “Ya Basta!

[01:49:47.21] JUDY BACA

When we became aware of América Tropical and the white paint, the whitewash began to burn off in the sun. This giant aparición became a calling. It began to say to us, “Paint the streets. This is the way we can tell our story. We can put an ethnic face on the city of Los Angeles, where there is none. Remember, there were no TV programs, there were no billboards that spoke to us. There were no ways that we were really present in the public consciousness, as an empowered group of people. The murals became a really excellent strategy to address that issue.

[01:50:01.00] Music Cue Legacy

[01:50:50.16] JESUS TREVINO

Here was an indication of the direction that we might want to go, a political direction A direction of denunciation, of proclaiming, not just affirming who we were, but calling attention to the issues, and the kind of discrimination that we as Chicanos had experienced in the United States.

[01:50:56.00] Music Cue The End (Theme)

[01:51:11.21] LUIS GARZA

And it’s not just Chicanos. It is the African American, it is the Jew, it is the Catholic, it is the Protestants, it is the women. It is every community begins to go and paint and do art on a public scale that has never been seen before.

[01:51:33.20] FRANCISCO LETELIER

Siqueiros was one artist in the visual field and in mural making who was considered an important voice. It wasn't just his art. It's what he was saying.

[01:51:46.10] JUDY BACA

What Siqueiros said then is as relevant as what is happening today, and, in fact, as the years have passed, has become even more relevant, a timeless piece of work.

[01:52:02.20] JESUS TREVINO

The art that is political can be transcendent, and does not need to be pamphleteering, it can be great art and still make a statement.

[01:52:15.11] FRANCISCO LETELIER

So that’s Siqueiros’s legacy, is like a recipe now. You take grandfather's recipe and apply it to social situations. Putting those things together—an idea about making a difference affecting the physical environment and engaging others in an imaginative act—you always get gold.

[01:52:42.10] SIQUEIROS:

Nosotros queremos hacer un arte para todos los hombres

Arte para todos

Arte para las multitudes

Arte difícil

Arte como los grandes periodos de la historia

Arte publico dijimos

Arte publico!

Este es un Arte para las multitudes

[01:52:52.00] Music Cue Credits (Theme)