The tendency of Latin America’s avante-garde to regard Mexican muralism as an unfortunate aberration seems to have abated recently. The death, in 1974, of Siqueiros, the last survivor of the big three (the others being José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera) removed muralism’s most polemical defender; meanwhile the work of historical revisionism has begun with the writings of Raquel Tibol and a younger generation of critics. Inevitably it is the differences rather than the similarities between the big three that now strike us—between the decorative and narrative style of Rivera, the moralistic humanism of Orozco and the technologism of Siqueiros. The writings of the latter, collected in Art and Revolution provide basic materials for such a revision, beginning with Siqueiros’ own view of the history of muralism; his early constructivist manifesto (Barcelona, 1921) ; the first manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors of 1922 which was drawn up by Siqueiros and signed by Rivera, Orozco, Jean Chariot, Carlos Mérida and others, which includes essays on Rivera, Orozco and Dr. Atl; chapters from How to Paint a Mural; and various articles and conferences describing new techniques and defending figurative art.

To read these documents in chronological order is to retrace the decline from post-revolutionary euphoria to the increasing defensiveness of Siqueiros’ later years when easel painting not muralism, abstractionism not figurative painting had seized the imagination of the young and when he sadly confessed that Mexico “is no longer what it was.” Muralism which, in 1923, had seemed a definitive breakthrough towards the social art of the future had come to be associated, by the 1950s with outdated rhetoric. Yet Siqueiros himself had from the first believed that there had to be a revolution of form and not simply new content. Painting was to be made a public and collective event, fully incorporated through its use of new materials into the technological era. While Rivera seemed to look backwards nostalgically to a mythic Golden Age, Siqueiros used the camera instead of the sketch pad, industrial paint such as pyroxiline and a spray gun to replace the brush. One of his ideals, first formulated in Buenos Aires in 1933 and one which still inspired the huge panels of the Polyforum on which he was working just before he died, was to integrate painting, sculpture and architecture and to create a new and dynamic relation between the integral art work and the spectator. The inclusion of some illustrations in this otherwise useful collection would have enabled the reader unfamiliar with Mexico to visualize some of these experiments and perhaps to appreciate the contradictions which beset the revolutionary project. Indeed Siqueiros’ rampant individualism was at odds with the ideal of a collective art and his monumental painting tends to overpower spectators rather than to stimulate perception.