Art of the Collective: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau and their Collaboration at the Mexican Electricians' Syndicate

Jennifer Jolly, Art of the Collective: David Alfaro Siqueiros, Josep Renau and their Collaboration at the Mexican Electricians' Syndicate, Oxford Art Journal, Volume 31, Issue 1, March 2008, Pages 129–151, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcn006

Extract

Between 1944 and 1949 David Alfaro Siqueiros was hard at work in Mexico City, trying to rally a flagging Mexican Mural Movement. Founded in 1922 with a series of Secretariat of Public Education commissions to decorate public buildings, Mexico's ‘Mural Movement’ was a loose collection of artists who sought state and private support for mural work and at times coalesced into a self-conscious, unified movement. Siqueiros recognised the importance of mobilising his muralist colleagues as a movement, and claimed a key role in promoting, organising and defining Muralism as such. Returned from exile in Chile and Cuba in November 1943, he had re-entered the art scene with the opening of his mural, Cuauhtemoc Against the Myth, and the new Centro de Arte Realista Moderno (his house) in June 1944. In pamphlets and lectures at the Centro, he employed his classic avant-garde strategy, launching a series of polemics that decried the misdirection art had taken in his absence. He seemingly made a great deal of progress, as mural commissions (his own and others') increased in the latter half of the 1940s, and muralists unified in the face of opposition – most notoriously in support of Rivera's attacked Hotel del Prado mural in 1948. But his tirade against muralism's detractors continued, and in 1949 he initiated a regular column in the city paper Excelsior, entitled ‘Crítica de la Crítica de Arte’.