Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This article quotes comments made by David Alfaro Siqueiros about contemporary art (in 1940) that appeared in the Mexican magazine Romance (a popular magazine in Latin America). Seven years after his visit to the Río de la Plata region, 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 [...]

In "Rectificaciones sobre las artes plásticas en México," Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros states his opinions on a variety of polemical issues in Mexican and Latin American artistic practice. He proposes a reform of the system of arts [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero and José Chávez Morado led the call for Mexican artists to orient their artistic production to the guidelines of social realism. They responded “. . .  by rejecting the theories and formalist [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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. [...]

The newspaper Excélsior reproduces an open letter to Nabor Carrillo, rector of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, signed by both Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, putting into question UNAM’s choice of Mathí [...]

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 [...]

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.” [...]

The initial title that David Alfaro Siqueiros proposed for the mural he painted at Centro Medico Nacional [the National Medical Center] was Apología de la futura victoria de la ciencia médica sobre el cáncer. Paralelismo Histórico entre la [...]

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 [...]

Based in a progressive perspective, in a future with an “increasingly superior” art, the declaration that David Alfaro Siqueiros wrote in Barcelona sought to facilitate the incorporation of certain elements of the American continent into avant- [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros expresses harsh opinions about the works exhibited at the XXIII Salón de Bellas Artes [23rd Salon of Fine Arts], in Buenos Aires, taking into account its social background. The first prize was awarded to Lino Enea Spilimbergo [...]

Siqueiros calls for the organization of a movement of monumental visual arts in order to bring to the fore social reality. By means of it, he promotes the unionization of artists [...]

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 has no intention of providing a monographic analysis of Diego Rivera’s mural, Retrato de América [Portrait of America], or an academic assessment of Rivera’s faults or opportunism. According to Siqueiros, a critique should [...]

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 [...]

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 mural being painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros at the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes in San Miguel Allende would be interrupted by disagreements with the school’s director, Alfredo Campanella. The director offers Siqueiros a change in his [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros explains that he is working with other painters and sculptors in Argentina and Uruguay to create a monumental visual arts movement for the masses. His goal is to remove works of art from museums, cemeteries, and private [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 “ [...]

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 [...]

This is a collection of articles by David Alfaro Siqueiros in which he restates the principles of an art about war, linking it to the great artistic traditions expressed in the work of artists such as Dr. Atl, José Clemente Orozco, and Diego Rivera [...]

HOY magazine thought that the long-running controversy between mural painters and abstract painters was old news. The simmering dispute had, however, recently boiled over into an open argument between Tamayo and Siqueiros, so the magazine asked both [...]

Romance magazine invited the Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to discuss his theoretical ideas about painting’s essential problems. At the time, he was finishing the mural at the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas de la Ciudad de México [ [...]

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. [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The author appeals to workers and peasants so that they may learn to carefully elect their representatives to the Lower House, and eliminate the thieves and lawmakers bon vivants who squander for their own benefit six and a half million pesos of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 critiques the paintings of the 23rd Fine Arts Salon (Buenos Aires) as works imitative of past European painting. The artist defines the event as a colonial art show, with gullible themes and devoid of technique, as well as with [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]