MASP

Since the outset of his artistic training, Siqueiros was actively engaged in political life, participating in the movement of Emiliano Zapata. In 1919, sent to Paris as a military attaché, he became acquainted with avant-garde art and made friends with Diego Rivera (1886-1957), with whom he conceived the idea of a new monumental and heroic style of painting, linked to the pre-Columbian and folkloric traditions of Mexico. Returning to Mexico, in 1922, with Rivera and Orozco (1883-1949), he was a member of the muralist movement, developing an epic realism of great popular appeal. He was particularly interested in the use of industrial materials and techniques — airbrush, cinema, photographic collage — and in the propagandist aspect of art, due to his Stalinist convictions, which marked his opposition to Rivera’s popular themes. Anguish (Artist’s Mother), and Omen (Angélica Arenal de Siqueiros), a portrait of the painter’s last wife, from 1950, are studies for the mural Monument to Cuauhtémoc, painted at the Palacio de Bellas Artes of Mexico City. The two works have a framing inspired in the work of Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), who positioned the camera very close to the characters to powerfully emphasize expressions of their feelings. The use of a limited color palette accentuates the sculptural volume of the figures.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017

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By Luciano Migliaccio
The two works, Anguish (Artst´s Mother) and Omen (Angélica Arenal de Siqueiros) seem far removed from Marxist-oriented ideological-political themes and also from the monumental size, features to which Siqueiros owes his fame as a radical communist, concerned with art as an instrument of propaganda for the people. In fact, they are studies for the mural of the Monument to Cuauntemoc, a hero of the Aztec resistance to the Spanish conquest, executed in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City (a communication from Maria R. Balderrama, the curator of the collection of Mexican art in the New York Metropolitan Museum). Therefore, these works should not be construed as easel paintings but as the mural artist’s working documents. The works show signs of Siqueiros’ original researches as much in the choice of materials as in the style and iconography. In fact, in determining the two female figures’ cross section, the Mexican artist shows signs of his awareness of the techniques used in shooting a film. This refers to framing in the primary plane, which calls Eisenstein’s photography to mind and that of the Soviet political cinema. We know that the artist, by using photographs, usually analyzed the point of view from which the public would see his works. He then drew the murals from this documentation, aiming at intense visual impact and the maximum integration of painting and space. The figures appear to transcend the picture’s spatial limits due to the plastic force with which they are constructed, the paints are reduced to hues of earth, white, and black, creating a relief effect close to sculpture. As shown by the inscriptions above, the pictures were painted in vinylite on masonite or chipboard. These were the result of experiments with new material undertaken by Siqueiros and artists in his atelier, principally in mural painting.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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