#david alfaro siqueiros

David Alfaro Siquerios is a central artist in the exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925-1945, currently up at the Whitney Museum in New York City. Siquerios attempted to kill Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Victor Serge has an opinion on him, of course, so here it is from an entry dated March 5, 1944 in his Notebooks: 1936-1947:

David Alfaro Siqueiros, a founder of the Mexican CP and of El Machete, colonel in the Spanish Republican Army during the Civil War (with no particular distinction), painter of frescoes, good artist, GPU agent, organizer of the May 24, 1940 attack on Trotsky (the murder of Sheldon Harte), freed on bail in 1941, left for Chile with the assistance of Pablo Neruda (renowned poet, consul general of Chile, Communist-GPU), has returned to Mexico City, despite having jumped bail. Protests in the newspapers. A magistrate declares that there’s a warrant for Siqueiros’s arrest but that he (the magistrate) can’t force the police to arrest him. Interesting fresco and portrait painter and landscape artist. Through intensity he achieves a primitive depth in the portraits I’ve seen; dark, violent tones, hot lively eyes, burning without spiritual fire. An adventurer straight out of the Italian Renaissance, born to manipulate plots, knives, pistols, paintbrushes. Rumor has it that a bloody incident involving a woman forced him to leave Havana.