The article “Hacia la plástica integral por medio de la Revolución” by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974) discusses the impact of its author’s trip to Montevideo, which began in February 1933. The artist arrived in the Uruguayan capital from Los Angeles, California, where he spent 1932 after having been under house arrest in Taxco during 1931. In April, he left Montevideo for Buenos Aires, but he left his companion, Blanca Luz Brum (1905–85), behind in order to found, along with a group of Uruguayan intellectuals, the Confederación de Trabajadores Intelectuales de Uruguay (C.T.I.U.) and to create the conditions for the publication of its organ, Aportación, later called Movimiento. In this article, Siqueiros lays out the phases of a linear art history—Antiquity, Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Bourgeois Era, and the Future—and finds moments of greatness (art as ritual for the entire social collective) and of decadence (introverted or individualist art) throughout. Siqueiros mocks easel painting and sculpture “for rotating platform,” asserting that art’s “integral function” lies in its ability to capture the masses for the sake of building socialism. Siqueiros argues that one of the greatest fruits of the proletarian revolution will be return to an art of the people, an art that is “functionally integrated” as architecture, painting, and sculpture. In his view, new technologies would play a crucial role in ushering in that monumental convergence already underway thanks to the work of the “block of painters in Los Angeles”—a collective initiative that the artist cofounded in which painting and sculpture were brought together for América Tropical (1932), a mural on Olvera Street.
