by cosmic transcendence. Flames generalize the form of the body and the torture by fire is displaced from the earth‐bound trauma of actual violence. The mystical nature of this image, however, confesses a profound political dissatisfaction on the part of the artist of any chance for Mexico to truly progress into advanced forms of social life. Orozco presents his paintings as the conscience of the revolution and finds it sorely wanting.
1.2.3 David Alfaro Siqueiros
The most vehemently political of these three painters was Siqueiros. He was committed to the theory that for each period of art, the political content of the artwork be progressive but also that the materials and techniques should be the most advanced possible. Such insistence on modernity in content and in materials would guarantee that art of political conscience would not slip back into outmoded principles. Thus, he moved away from conventional symbolism in his topics and from fresco in his technique and toward contemporary topics such as the organization of the Mexican working class and toward techniques such as electrical spray machines.
In 1923 the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors was formed. The Manifesto of the syndicate, written mostly by Siqueiros and signed by Rivera and Orozco among others, is marked by language taken from radical workers' groups and instantly gave a sharp political edge to the activities and artwork of its members.4
The Manifesto attacks “bourgeois individualism.” Easel painting is aristocratic, to be replaced by “the monumental expression of art because such art is public property.” A crucial paragraph reads: “We proclaim that this being a moment of social transition from a decrepit to a new order, … our supreme objective in art … is to create something of beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle” (Anreus et al. 2012, p. 320). This sort of discourse would inform Siqueiros' words, actions, and art throughout his career.
Retrato de la burguesía (Portrait of the Bourgeoisie), painted by a team headed by Siqueiros, is an intense, highly dramatic burst of political rhetoric by an artist committed to exposing the dangers of the growing threat of fascism (illustrated in Folgarait 1998, plates XIV–XVII; Rodríguez 1969, pp. 361–362; and Rochfort 1963, pp. 153–158), covering three walls and the ceiling of a stairwell at the headquarters building of the Mexican Electricians' Syndicate in Mexico City. Painted in 1939, at the very height of the tensions leading to World War II, the images warn of international conspiracies on the part of both the Western democracies and their fascist enemies to exploit and butcher workers and the helpless masses for the sake of increasing their wealth and power. We see the lynching of a black man, a peasant mother huddling with her child, countless troops marching to war, a metallic war vulture hovering, a huge machine pumping out gold coins, and cartoon‐like men representing the great world powers about to go to war. A large figure dominates the left wall (illustrated in Rodríguez 1969, p. 361, and Rochfort 1993, p. 156). It is a grotesque hybrid of animal, human, and machine. The trunk of a man flails its arms wildly, so much that they leave motion traces in the air to suggest a manic animation. The head is that of a parrot, swiveling so forcefully that we see two stop‐action positions. A microphone broadcasts his message to a seething mass marching below his perch. By this monstrous creation Siqueiros meant to depict a fascist dictator. The mass slowly forms into regimented ranks, eventually becoming German soldiers advancing in formation.
Siqueiros, during the execution of this mural, was living a life as politically charged and dramatic as is this imagery. A devoted Stalinist, he took direct action against Stalin's archenemy, Leon Trotsky, who was exiled in Mexico City to escape Stalin's assassins. Siqueiros organized and carried out a terrorist act against Trotsky, leading a band of gunmen who left multiple machine‐gun bullet holes inside the Trotsky residence. I recount this act to impress upon the reader that art and politics were not seen as distinct areas of social behavior by Siqueiros and that he believed in fully carrying out the mission of his political beliefs, attacking his enemies with paint and with bullets.
1.2.4 Rufino Tamayo
And, now, Tamayo. Rufino Tamayo (1899–1991) is often referred to as the fourth muralist, or the Fourth Great One, a condescension that he forcefully refuted.5 In this charged relationship to the Big Three and in my ironic opening sentence is captured the vast but vexed importance of this extraordinarily prolific painter who worked mostly in framed easel painting. At times considered an afterthought and at times a forceful rejoinder to the Big Three, the murals of Tamayo occupy a place of opposition to their politicized nationalism and display an awareness of advanced European and American abstract style and thus a commitment to a Mexican presence in international modernism. His murals are at once deeply indebted to cubist figurations on the one hand and colors derived from Mexican folk arts on the other. Human figures are rendered in refracted shards of saturated reds, blues, or yellows, sometimes barely registering human anatomy. The subject matter is of the timeless and universal conditions of existential angst and of deeply symbolic recyclings of ancient Mexican mythology. There are no narratives of the Mexican Revolution or critiques of Yankee capitalism, and certainly no Marxist indulgences.
Perhaps the best example of his murals with the greatest public exposure is Nacimiento de la nacionalidad (Birth of Our Nationality), 1952, located in the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City. It is a large wall painting on canvas, affixed to the wall, rather than a fresco. This is not an inconsiderable point, as the fresco technique favored by Rivera and Orozco was unavoidably tinged with old world technology and also obligated to a strict adherence to the given architectural setting. The production of frescoes in public view, as it were, loads them with a stressed social situatedness that studio‐produced murals lack by definition. Studio production is also weighted with the possibility of future transfer to other locations, and perhaps other owners, raising the potential of commodification not applicable to frescoes.
Nacimiento de la nacionalidad, located in the atrium of the Palace of Fine Arts, places it in the same interior space as earlier, major murals by the Big Three themselves, thus creating a convenient venue for comparing Tamayo to his ideological and stylistic adversaries. Staking out his place in what essentially makes up a museum of Mexican muralism (Rivera's example is from 1934, Orozco's from 1935, and Siqueiros' from 1945 and 1951), and from his privileged vantage looking back at his competition, Tamayo presents an uncompromised modernist style of violently exploding forms and rocky shapes seemingly tumbling into the viewers' space, the imagery dramatically imposing itself upon the hapless, tiny human. Because the style is so abstract, the subject of a Spanish conquistador wielding ferocious power astride a demonic horse becomes a metaphor for European‐derived modernism also invading the nationalist domain of Mexico and of The Big Three.
1.2.5 Tepito Arte Acá and Other Alternative Mural Production
Once the peak of The Big Three & Tamayo passed, “official” mural painting, that seen on government and commercial buildings, was understood as too closely allied with elitist interests and ossified into academic practice that had little to do with the needs and values of el pueblo, the people. A gigantic, late project by Siqueiros, La marcha de la humanidad (The March of Humanity), of 1964–1971, housed in the Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum in Mexico City, was seen as a pompously inflated and apologist statement related to the corrupt and vicious policies of the government, in light of the state‐perpetrated massacre of students at the Tlatelolco square in 1968. That the patron for this project was the epitome of a capitalist industrialist seriously undermined Siqueiros' self‐proclaimed radicalism. The great Mexican mural tradition has lost its social purpose and political core. But its early history as a viable and vital social art remained in the memories of younger artists, and eventually a grassroots, unorganized, and highly local form of unsponsored, spontaneous, and even guerilla muralism sprung up in the larger Mexican cities.6
The