This significant monograph on Siqueiros appears in Colección de Arte, the series published by the National University of Mexico that is dedicated to the history of art. It is profusely illustrated in black and white and color, printed on glossy paper, and appears in a convenient format.
The text describes Siqueiros’ artistic biography with analyses of individual works and explains his contribution to contemporary art in formal terms. The creation of the effect of dynamic movement in an almost Baroque (neobarroca) space is probably the most significant quality in his murals. The illusion of movement, so successful and powerful, is based upon traditional perspective and foreshortening treated from a multiplicity of viewpoints.
The artist’s stormy political biography is presented as the setting for his artistic production. He is a Communist in national politics and a formidable opponent in the struggles within the artistic community of Mexico. As an intellectual and a thinker, he has formulated his ideas on art in two significant public statements published here as appendices: the “Manifiesto a los Plásticos de América,” originally published in Vida Americana, a rare periodical difficult to find even in major libraries; and “Declaración Social, Política y Estética,” more usually known as the “Manifiesto del Sindicato de Pintores, Escultores y Grabadores Revolucionarios de México,” often cited but rarely reprinted by writers on modern Mexican art.
The illustrations are unfortunately bled out to the edges of the pages and, in many instances, cropped so drastically as to give a false impression of the original painting. Proportions are changed, as, for example, in the portrait of “Arqueólogo Alfonso Caso”; a full and spacious portrait seems cramped through unnecessary cropping. There are other instances where details of a mural are given without an illustration of the whole to key them into the total design. This rather arbitrary treatment of the illustrations means that they will have to be checked against other sources of illustrations if the book is to be useful for the study of the artist’s style.
This monograph is, however, an important contribution to our knowledge of the mural movement in Mexico and of modern Mexican painting in its social and political setting, for in many ways Siqueiros made new and unique contributions to the history of world painting above and beyond the other modern and recent Mexican masters.
