Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

Other than the intimate details of the communication between Siqueiros and Brum, this letter provides extremely interesting insights into Siqueiros’s public relations in Buenos Aires, as well as his opinions and intentions concerning the local [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros sent a letter to the Minister of Public Education, José Manuel Puig Cassauranc, when he was dismissed from his ministry job as professor of drawing and manual works, for which he was paid three pesos a day. His dismissal was [...]

In this letter, David Alfaro Siqueiros tells Blanca Luz Brum that the Troubadour—the ship on which he sailed from Buenos Aires in December 1933—had arrived in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Siqueiros talks about the book he wrote on the trip [...]

In this brief letter, David Alfaro Siqueiros advises Jackson Pollock and his team that the studio in New York will be closed during the day while he prepares for his forthcoming exhibition in Manhattan. Siqueiros explains that he needs to be alone to [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros writes a letter to Teresa León from a military command post in Spain during the Civil War, telling her of his combat experiences at the front and comparing procedures there with artistic work. He sees that in both there are [...]

In 1964, journalist Julio Scherer García received the manuscript of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s autobiography. Three years earlier, in 1961, Scherer García had gone to Lecumberri Prison and managed to obtain some 387 pages. Siqueiros asked him to [...]

While stating his unflinching loyalty to the communist cause, David Alfaro Siqueiros also provides some important autobiographical information in this letter to the Uruguayan Communist Party Central Committee. He talks about being under house arrest [...]

With his manifesto, David Alfaro Siqueiros sought to position the avant-garde project anew, doing away with belated modernism and impressionism, in favor of Cubo-Futurist expressions and the incipient eruption of Dadaism. This eagerness for [...]

Following the prologue to the farce “The Fall of the Rich and the Construction of a New Social Order,” is a scene in the first act entitled, “The Army of the Soldiers, Workers and Peasants.” In a triumphal panorama of the socialist revolution [...]

After spending four years in prison in Mexico for an obscure “crime of social dissolution,” Siqueiros was released in July 1964. He then wrote this letter to all the friends in various parts of the world who had demanded his freedom. In [...]

This printed poster is divided into two parts. In the upper left-hand corner, a black-and-white photograph shows a close-up of a man behind bars looking straight ahead. In the background there is a two-story structure with white walls. To the right [...]

The Comité de Defensa Proletaria [Committee for the Defense of the Proletariat] wrote to the editorial board of El Machete magazine regarding the reports published in the press about the events organized by the Bloque Obrero [Workers’ Block] in [...]

This document analyzes the national repercussions that the Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos, Pintores y Escultores [SOTPE, Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors] had on an art scene that was then dominated by individualism. Siqueiros [...]

In a letter to Jorge Enciso, addressed to the Dirección de Monumentos Nacionales [National Monuments Administration], Siqueiros announces that Javier Rojo Gómez has commissioned him to paint murals in the tower of what was known as the former [...]

In 1944, David Alfaro Siqueiros wrote an open letter to José Clemente Orozco in which he admitted that he could identify the different stages of his work. Siqueiros begins by saying that an artist’s work is not an individual creation but the [...]

This is an open letter written by David Alfaro Siqueiros to the Minister of Education Jaime Torres Bodet that explains the discrepancy between his humanistic, revolutionary discourse on the one hand, and the function of the Dirección de Educación [...]

In this interview, David Alfaro Siqueiros states that in the exhibition Arte mexicano: desde tiempos precolombinos hasta nuestros días [Mexican Art: From Pre-Colombian Times to Our Days], contemporary Mexican painting had generated both supportive [...]

This cover of the “Revista multicolor de los sábados” [full-color Saturday Magazine], a supplement of the daily newspaper, Crítica, features a print of the work Contra la Corriente [Against the Current] by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974 [...]

The Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS) [Mexican Institute of Social Security] was created at the beginning of the hospital construction project; it was a decentralized entity with legal status located in the nation’s capital. Although [...]

In his long essay, Siqueiros defends Diego Rivera’s work in response to Margarita Nelken’s article on the latter’s retrospective exhibition at Bellas Artes published in the latest issue of Cuadernos Americanos. He accuses Nelken of being “ [...]

In an open letter to the newspaper, David Alfaro Siqueiros makes a number of statements about the article published in the same paper defending students’ rights in terms of the paintings at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (ENP). Siqueiros [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros begins his article by saying that for all the moving cosmopolitanism of this modern painter’s creations, Diego Rivera’s œuvre is essentially Mexican. Siqueiros claims that it is a huge mistake to classify true Mexican [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros attacks the implacable enemy of the Liga de Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios (LEAR) [League of Revolutionary Writers and Artists], the Trotskyite Diego Rivera, “leader and supporter of the Fourth International in Mexico [...]

The author condemns the double standard with which two property rights cases were adjudicated. Siqueiros compares the destruction of the offices of La revista de Yucatán [Yucatan Magazine] by an angry crowd to the attack by a group of dentistry [...]

Indeed, by way of a manifesto, this document is signed by the Equipo Poligráfico Ejecutor [Polygraphic Work Team], made up of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Enrique Lázaro, Juan C. Castagnino, and Antonio Berni. The article [...]

Given the circumstances of the time, David Alfaro Siqueiros advocated that art should be transparent and dedicated to the struggle; it should be a tool for propaganda that was also open to technical innovation. In his opinion, pure art should wait [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros attempts to answer the question: “If you were nominated by the El Colegio Nacional to replace José Clemente Orozco, what would you say?” He replies in a long, complex, four-page essay. He eschews a yes or a no answer and [...]

In this 1933 article published in the Argentinian literary magazine, Crítica: Revista Multicolor de los Sábados,edited by Jorge Luis Borges and Ulyses Petit de Murat, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros narrates a story of his time as a [...]

Act one, scene two of this farce is entitled “A jury [to try] the reactionary intellectuals and capricious intellectual revolutionaries.” The figures to be judged and the extras, as well as the wailing chorus, have the actual names of numerous [...]

This is the first of a four-part article on the technical nature of the Mexican painting movement. Violent aesthetic transformations had occurred in the last few years while art criticism against painters oscillated between grand praise and fury. [...]

This is the second of four articles on the nature of the current Mexican painting movement. The article concerns the celebrated individuality that incites our painters, given the supposition that originality is a painter’s greatest asset. The [...]

This is the third of four articles on the nature of the current painting movement in Mexico. It classifies those painters and writers as retrogressive, who continue to paint under outdated and foreign influences without contributing to the local [...]

In this brief article, Siqueiros, the secretary of the Sindicato de Pintores y Escultores [SOTPE, Painters and Sculptors Union], reports that the painters laid off from their work on public buildings due to the machinations of “reactionary” [...]

In this document David Alfaro Siqueiros reflects upon the nexus between society and its aesthetic production, particularly with regard to the status of architecture under the bourgeois order. The article is directed toward the officials in charge of [...]

This profound essay by the muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros was prompted by what critics had said about Manuel Álvarez Bravo’s exhibition at the Sociedad de Arte Moderno. Siqueiros describes the critiques as a useless form of photo-literature [...]

In this article David Alfaro Siqueiros denounces and criticizes the Colegio Nacional. The charter and rules were written by Octavio Vejar Vázquez who was Minister of Education at the time, and whom the painter considers to be mediocre. Siqueiros [...]

In this article, Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros explains his vision of art history which, in his view, wavers between moments of socialization (or social integration) and moments of individualism (or decadence). It is on those grounds that [...]

This article by David Alfaro Siqueiros is a theoretical analysis of the Mexican muralist movement, whose principal characteristic (and what differentiated it from the rest of the international trends) was its “functional political purpose.” [...]

In forty paragraphs, David Alfaro Siqueiros outlines the process of artistic integration of Mexican architecture and painting that produced the Ciudad Universitaria, the Presidente Juárez Apartment Blocks and the Museo Experimental El Eco. For [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros describes and simultaneously defines the four positions or trends in the visual arts existing in the world. He wonders if the theoretical proposals coincide with the work of art, and chooses to explain only two: the non-realism [...]

In this lucid text, Mexican mural artist David Alfaro Siqueiros describes Colombian sculptor Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, a young man at the time, as a talented artist and pioneer of sculpture in Mexico. Siqueiros explains that Betancourt Arenas’s [...]

The article reproduces a letter from David Alfaro Siqueiros to José Manuel Puig Casauranc, the Minister of Public Education (SEP) regarding the painter’s dismissal from his position as professor of drawing and manual crafts on June 10, 1925. [...]

This farce was written in verse and consists of a prologue and four parts. The action takes place in Mexico City. On a throne of clouds rests a trinity: a Mexican politician, “the father devil;” a European capitalist, “the grateful son;” and [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Xavier Guerrero signed this article in which they refute the assertions published by the Federación de Estudiantes Preparatorianos [Federation of Preparatory Students] and they list, one after [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros, writing in El Machete, invites the proletariat to discuss their problems. His goal is to counter the middle-class press, where the disenfranchised are unrepresented. The article explains that the walls of public buildings have [...]

Act two, scene one of this farce is entitled “The mummies and the bats give their opinion on revolutionary paintings.” Some of the names of the figures from the prior scene are repeated, although this time, they are divided: fresh and dried [...]

This is a typewritten copy of the lecture given by David Alfaro Siqueiros at the John Reed Club in Hollywood on September 2, 1932. Siqueiros talks about the creation of what he called the Los Angeles “Mural Painters’ Block” [BPM: Bloque de [...]

The Manifesto of the Sindicato de Obreros Técnicos Pintores y Escultores (SOTPE) [Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors Union] was published in El Machete toward the end of June 1924. It was an attempt to warn the proletariat and the indigenous [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros sends the architect Carlos Lazo, project manager at Ciudad Universitaria (UNAM) in Mexico City, three documents about the scaffolding he has erected and the mural he is executing at the university’s Rectoría [President’s [...]

The art critic Antonio Rodríguez asks David Alfaro Siqueiros to respond to the question: does a contradiction exist between the theory and practice of the painter Siqueiros? Rodríguez elaborates with six follow-up questions. First, the author [...]