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 [...]

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 this text, the painter José Clemente Orozco states that the “Manifiesto del Sindicato” [the Painters and Sculptors Manifesto] is “extraordinarily important; its influence has been felt for two decades and younger painters [...]

This is an autobiographical account by the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco that reveals the extraordinary influence exerted on his life and work by Dr. Atl. When Dr. Atl returned from Europe, he sought the support of his old colleagues [...]

This article centers on two events: Orozco’s participation in the student exhibition at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos during the critical year of 1910 and his start as a caricaturist for opposition newspapers. The government [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 document includes an article in which José Clemente Orozco vents his negative opinion regarding symposia. He remarks that instead of wasting money on the artificial and pedantic speeches regarding the relationship between art and the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

José Clemente Orozco calls for the production of a new brand of art produced in the Americas—what he calls the “New World”—that constitutes a “new spiritual and physical medium.” This art is neither rooted [...]

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 [...]

Once the Centro de Arte Realista was founded, David Alfaro Siqueiros refers to the successes of the last 40 days. He awaits the response from the opposition to the proposals made about “La Pintura Mexicana Moderna”. The Centro’s first success [...]

In this text, José Clemente Orozco marks his distance from the ideological and aesthetic positions of either Diego Rivera or David Alfaro Siqueiros. Without mentioning them by name, Orozco criticizes the political orientation that [...]

In his essay written in the form of a letter, David Alfaro Siqueiros refers to four of José Clemente Orozco’s major areas of interest as he looks back on the life of the recently deceased painter, identifying him as an artist and a friend, and as [...]

While visiting Argentina, Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros forms his opinions about Argentinean culture from an ideological split. In his view there are two columns that he calls, in general: the aristocratic and the red one, defined by their [...]

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 [...]

David Alfaro Siqueiros defines the visual arts in the era of the proletarian struggle by their dialectic and subversive form.  This mechanically produced art is materialistic, dynamically objective, and is exemplary on multiple levels. Its approach [...]