(4 of 4)
Many of the paintings in Siqueiros' Bellas Artes exhibition have already been sold. When the show is dismantled and dispersed to private collectors, the toast of Mexico City will return to the rickety platform, high up under the vaulted ceiling of the Treasury Building, where he is painting a mural for the Government. His way of painting is as violent as his finished pictures; glaring angrily about him, he splashes paint all over his clothes, gums up his great shock of greying black hair, uses his thighs as a palette. His mural in the Treasury Building represents Siqueiros' own emphatic last judgment on Mexican history, in the form of a huge baroque wheel of horses and men. Mexico's liberators and heroes are seen speeding upwards into the vault; Mexico's tyrants, traitors and collaborationists hurtle tangled toward the floor.
"From now on," said David Siqueiros last week, "I paint. Politics? Well, a man can't be unpolitical; politics is life. But my business will be painting. I shall paint and paint. I need to."
Some of Siqueiros' friends—among them Diego Rivera—wonder how long he can stick to his resolution. It was Rivera who first called Siqueiros the modern Benvenuto Cellini. "When there was a revolution in Mexico," says Rivera, "Siqueiros was in tune with the times. But now the times are soft, and he has been slow in growing soft with them. He has not been able to change with the moods of his countrymen."
Siqueiros has a characteristically hard answer to that objection. Says he: "Art is not created by the soft."