Last week David Alfaro Siqueiros was the most important man in Mexico City. When his first big exhibition of paintings since 1931 opened in the Bellas Artes gallery, crowds blocked the streets waiting to get in. Thirty minutes after the doors opened, they were closed again, to save those inside from being trampled in the rush. The critics' reaction to the show was unanimous—a prolonged huzza-hosannah. "Only those bound up in iron prejudices," said the newspaper Excelsior, "could fail to appreciate the work of this genius."
Eggs for the Teacher. Whether or not more distant critics would agree that Siqueiros was really a genius, they would have to admit that he played the part with dash and style. As a boy, he liked to lie in bed and outline hovering nudes on the ceiling with pistol shots. At 15, he was arrested for throwing eggs at his teacher during an art student strike; the teacher wouldn't let them paint outdoors. "Since then," he murmurs, lowering his bright green eyes, "I've been taken to jail nearly 70 times."
He was jailed because of his politics, not his art. Along with about a thousand other schoolboys, Siqueiros made his way northward in 1913 to join General Obregón's revolutionary forces in Sonora. The children were organized into a grim "Mama's Brigade" and grew up during six years of bloody campaigning. Siqueiros was wounded, and promoted to the rank of captain. When the war was over, and his side victorious, he was sent to Paris as Mexican military attaché.
On his way to Paris the fierce young captain stopped off in Manhattan and met José Clemente Orozco, who was painting toys in a factory. Siqueiros told Orozco he thought the subway was one of the loveliest things he had ever seen. Riding a hurtling Bronx express, they quarreled violently about it. When the train stopped, Orozco dashed out and disappeared into a blinding snowstorm. Siqueiros waited all night in the subway entrance, making occasional forays into the night, fearful that a great Mexican talent was freezing to death somewhere under the alien snow. Two days later Siqueiros learned that his angry friend had simply ended up at a party.
In Paris Siqueiros became convinced that French-style art was bad, and that Mexicans like Diego Rivera were blind to follow it. Shouting over the wine in Montmartre cafés, Siqueiros gradually formulated a theory to support his furious conviction. He found backers for a short-lived magazine, Vida Americana, in which he fired the opening gun of a fight to make art as useful, well-engineered and open to the public as an up-to-date subway system. "Now," wrote Siqueiros disgustedly, looking at the art around him, "we draw silhouettes with pretty colors. . . ."
Back in Mexico, in 1922, Siqueiros followed through with a manifesto which Orozco and Diego Rivera both signed, and which started the eruption of modern Mexican art. Its thesis: art is for social welfare, not private pleasure, and should therefore be large-scale and easy to understand. The three men formed the nucleus of a union—the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors—and negotiated contracts with an extraordinarily sympathetic and discerning government to paint murals at so much per square meter.