During his career, he visited the United sattes, the Soviet Union, and several Latin American countries as a guest lecturer and visiting artist. His prints are stellar examples of mass and volume and expressive abstraction. Their capacity to evoke passion and anger are beyond the world's sometimes limited scope of understanding of printmakers and the work they do. His background as a painter helped keep his original prints from Looking like prints, thus making them unique compared with his colleagues.
The main part of Siqueiros’ life was spent between making his art and his interest in politics. Schooling aside, the opportunity to network with fellow students for political debate and marches and protests was a larger part of his educational experience. While in school, he came across the writings of Dr. Atl, who in 1906 published a manifesto calling for Mexican artists to look toward their ancestral roots to develop a national Mexican art style. This inspired the young artist to become active in politics. At the age of fifteen, Siqueiros was involved in a student strike at the Academy of San Carlos of the National Academy of Fine Arts, which eventually established of an “open-air academy”. Three years later, he and several of his friends from the School of Fine Arts joined Carranza’s Constitutional Army. In 1914, Siqueiros became interested in the army’s “post-revolutionary” infighting. He traveled throughout Mexico during his military service and saw the difficult conditions of his country’s poor working class. It instilled in him a lifelong passion to speak for the masses with his art and his political activities.
In 1919, he went to Paris and
learned about Cubism, the work of Paul Cezanne and there he met Rivera, with
whom he traveled to Italy to study the work of the Renaissance fresco painters.
During this period, Siqueiros' artistic and political activities had become conjoined
and by 1921 he wrote a manifesto
in Vida Americana, called
"A New Direction for the New Generation of American Painters and
Sculptors." He called for a "spiritual renewal" to bring back classical
painting while infusing "new values" about the “modern machine” and
the “contemporary aspects of daily life". Through this style, Siqueiros
hoped to create a bridge between a national and universal art.
In 1922, Siqueiros returned to Mexico City work for the government with fellow artists Rivera and José Orozco painting murals in several prominent buildings. In 1923 Siqueiros helped found the Syndicate of Revolutionary
Mexican Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, which addressed the problem of
widespread public access through its union paper, El Machete, the weekly paper that became the official
mouthpiece for the country's Communist Party.
He later settled in Cuernavaca
where he lived until his death in 1974.
Some people don't get those weirdly surreal images, but no matter. Siqueiros' work was consistent showing us the suffering of humanity, the suffering of the poor and the suffering of an artist as all artists suffer to bring forth their view of the world. His world wasn't a calm or happy place, but it was real, and it still speaks volumes for present-day Mexico's suffering masses about the societal and political woes that have befallen that poor abandoned country.
