Mexican muralist, international Marxist

This book interprets the later murals of the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros in light of his Marxist internationalism. David Alfaro Siqueiros was perhaps the most important communist painter of the twentieth century. This book offers the first sustained engagement with Siqueiros’s work in the English language, focusing on his late murals, which are both aesthetically innovative and politically provocative. Siqueiros’s works were intended to foster analysis, articulate political strategy, and provoke emotions. They were attuned to the tactical needs of the working-class movement and to the international communist art of wartime and the postwar period. That art, from Mexico to Britain to France to Italy to the Soviet Union, remained committed to the representation of the human figure, yet used abstraction to render the movements of history in a Marxist form and to heighten the emotional effect of scenes depicting the struggles of indigenous freedom fighters, the travails of striking workers, and the suffering of the global proletariat. Placing Siqueiros in an international context, Mexican muralist, international Marxist reveals that the dogmatism he has been charged with was in reality a complex phenomenon. It provided a foundation for his efforts to create an art embedded in the day-to-day concerns and theoretical debates of the worldwide mass movement he saw himself as a part of. David Alfaro Siqueiros was perhaps the most important communist painter of the twentieth century. This book, the first sustained engagement with Siqueiros’s work in the English language, focuses on the artist’s late murals, which are both aesthetically innovative and politically provocative. It places Siqueiros in an international context, revealing that the dogmatism he has been charged with was in reality a complex phenomenon. It provided a foundation for – rather than an obstacle to – his efforts to create an art embedded in the day-to-day concerns and theoretical debates of the world-wide mass movement he saw himself as a part of.

Pages: 344, Paperback, Manchester University Press