(3 of 4)
Back into Uniform. Siqueiros next turned up in Los Angeles, where he painted a mural showing a Mexican peon bound to a cross surmounted by an American eagle. He was promptly deported. Then the Spanish civil war broke out, and Siqueiros got back into uniform with something like relief. Fighting still came naturally; he commanded a motorized brigade in the battles of Caballon, Guadalupe and La Granja, and rose to be a division commander just before the end. Back home, he was welcomed at first, then thrown in jail for eight months on suspicion of taking part in the first—and unsuccessful—attempt on Trotsky's life.
Now, at 51, Siqueiros figures that he has spent 15 years in growing up, 21 years in politics, wars and revolutions, and only about 15 years at art—during which he completed eleven major murals. There were three six-year periods when he didn't paint at all. Russia's famed Film Director Sergei Eisenstein, speaking more frankly then than he could now, once advised Siqueiros to quit his politicking and concentrate on painting. Had he done so, Siqueiros might already have surpassed the reputations of his fellow triumvirs of Mexican art, Rivera and Orozco. There was no denying that his latest exhibition made their work look placid.
One reason was Siqueiros' bold use of bold materials. Industrial enamels like Peroxylin and Vinylite he applied, sometimes with a spray gun, to Masonite and Bakelite. They made his paintings loom bright and powerful as new trucks. But there was a deeper reason: Siqueiros had at last taken Eisenstein's advice and ditched the propaganda art of his own manifesto. Illustrative documentary painting of social injustice might be fine for educating the masses, but by now it bored Siqueiros.
Reality for Projection. A third of the 60 paintings in last week's show were abstractions which reflected his growing interest in geometry (he used a ruler and divider in planning them). "Abstractions for abstraction's sake," he still insisted, "are a sterile business. When the artist permits the mood of the spectator to take full control he abdicates his function. But my abstractions are projections of reality." Among the more obvious "projections": a Mutilated House which looked like a cement block oozing blood, and The Face of Treason, a successfully nauseating tapioca of eyes in space.
The recognizable pictures were, if anything, harder to interpret. Siqueiros had painted his old friend Orozco sitting cross-legged in the heart of an electrical storm. "After all," he explained, "you can't take a man like Orozco, put him in a chair and paint a likeness. You have to paint him as he is." A plucked rooster, obscenely huge, lying dead and surrounded by columns of a Lilliputian army, symbolized the Death and Funeral of Cain. Our Image, a forceful study of a giant with its hands outstretched, sported a brachycephalic boulder for a head.