Leopoldo Méndez

25 Prints

1945

Woodcut

Mexico City, La Estampa Mexicana

25 prints

Concierto sinfónico de calaveras [The symphonic concerto of skeletons]

Sarah C. Rosenthal

David Alfaro Siqueiros created the woodcuts of 13 Grabados (13 engravings) in 1930 while incarcerated in Lecumberri Prison, and the printed images reflect a state of imprisonment.1 They present constrained, isolated moments set in box-like spaces, and they focus on human figures trapped in rigid bodies. The binary visual system of the woodcut medium makes each image appear stark and simple, unwilling and unable to transcend into illusionistic realism. And yet, when one views the prints together, the series is almost unwieldy. The individual sheets have no indicated order, and the artist represents different bodies and spaces in dramatically different ways. In some images, a small group of nearly identical figures, presumably prison guards, appears stiff and robotic, with helmets replacing facial features (p. 346 left). In others, female figures stand tall and dignified. Their long garments, whose folds are rendered in sharp, angled cuts, conceal their limbs, but their faces in profile invoke their agency (p. 345 right). In a few prints, figures’ arms and legs are clearly articulated and show moments of action or boundedness. Elsewhere in the series, the human body becomes nearly unrecognizable. In one print, two figures rendered in black shrivel behind a stoic, upright figure whose body takes on the color of the paper. And in another, three figures appear flat and nearly unrecognizable as human beings (p. 346 right).. They are presumably shrouded female figures bent over and carrying babies on their backs, but their forms resemble abstracted animal faces or raised fists. In one image, Siqueiros leaves out the human body entirely, presenting a hammer and anvil, as though inviting the viewer to action. With this series, Siqueiros thus tests the possibilities of representation, seeking a fluid, visual language that reflects a social state lacking stability. For Siqueiros, artistic practice was a political practice, and under the political conditions of Mexico at this moment, no single, most accurate representation of the human body was possible. This was and is especially true for the image of incarcerated individuals, who retain the potential for empowerment and liberation despite living under oppressive conditions. But for Siqueiros, the project of making art that could itself create radical political change was more complex than a matter of abstraction. An aesthetic project could devise images that reflect states of agency and subjugation. But such a project needed to engage with the terms of viewership and consumption to spur direct political action. As a set of prints, 13 Grabados is reproducible and distributable, but one wonders how its revolutionary potential compares to that of Siqueiros’s main artistic production in murals.

To understand how Siqueiros conceived of art as a political tool, one must position it in relation to his political action more broadly. His imprisonment was the result of years of political activism in lieu of artistic practice: from 1926 until 1929, Siqueiros had concentrated on labor activism, specifically focusing on organizing the miners of the state of Jalisco. His revolutionary ideology gained the negative attention of the Mexican state and led the artist-turned-activist, like other Mexican communists, into hiding in late 1929 and early 1930. He was then arrested when he appeared in public for an unauthorized May Day march in 1930.2 The arrest does not seem to have been prompted by any specific action of the artist. Rather, it reflected general, long-standing political tension in Mexico, exemplified by a 1930 assassination attempt against the freshly elected President Pascual Ortiz Rubio. Siqueiros was never questioned about this attempted violent insurrection and likely was not directly involved. 3 But the event was seen as a pretext to intensify the imprisonment and deportation of communists for their government opposition, indicating the degree to which communist uprising was seen as a threat to the existing social order in Mexico.4

Like other political prisoners, Siqueiros was sent to the Palacio de Lecumberri, also known as the “Black Palace.” In this panopticon-like prison in Mexico City, he was kept apart from the other imprisoned communists and was reportedly held for ten days in solitary confinement. 5 That he had access to the materials needed to make any art, let alone woodcuts, is perhaps surprising. But letters written by his partner of the time, the Uruguayan writer Blanca Luz Brum, mention his making woodcuts and paintings.6 Though the letters do not state so explicitly, some believe that Luz Brum brought him the painting supplies (and perhaps a knife) and that for the woodblocks Siqueiros used wood from crates or other scrap wood found in the prison.7 In a letter dated May 28, Brum offers a concrete motive for the project, mentioning her hope that some of the artist’s former friends now working in government might provide financial assistance in exchange for prints or paintings made from prison.8 However, it is unclear whether Siqueiros printed from the blocks while in Lecumberri or only after leaving the prison. After his release toward the end of 1930, he was forced to the town of Taxco, where he connected with an international network of individuals involved in the arts, including American designer and silversmith William Spratling. Spratling, an agent for the Weyhe Gallery, took an interest in Siqueiros’s work and published the woodcuts carved in Lecumberri as a portfolio titled 13 Grabados in an edition of one hundred.

Siqueiros’s primary artistic concern was whether and how art could function as a tool for political revolution. In his theorization of the most effective radical art, images’ formal program, technical mode of production, and means of distribution to the masses all play a role. As his work and writing into the 1930s indicate, he identified the following as the most effective characteristics of revolutionary art: it should move away from “traditional” forms that appeal to a touristic mode of consumption, it should be made with the most current techniques, and it should enable collective viewing.9 The last characteristic led him to favor murals, provided they were on buildings chosen for their visibility to the masses rather than for the aesthetic qualities of their architecture. But from the 1920s, he also expressed the importance of the graphic arts, understanding ephemera and publications like broadsheets to function like portable murals. One sees this potential exemplified in works such as the illustrated newspaper El machete, which in the 1920s was pasted on city walls, supposedly reaching “all corners of the country, to areas where workers, peasants and Indian tribes were concentrated, [and] to labor unions and agrarian committees.”10 With 13 Grabados Siqueiros even appealed to the longer history of Mexican political prints, as the bright orange and pink tissue-like paper of the prints (mounted on cardstock for the portfolio) recall José Guadalupe Posada’s popular works. Yet murals, if perfected, seemed to remain Siqueiros’s ideal art form for revolution. Siqueiros’s art tends toward dynamic abstraction, but in works from throughout his career, one can see how it continually grapples with what Carla Macchiavello calls “an impossible reconciliation between the human figure, pure plastic forms, and ‘revolutionary’ social content.”11 Siqueiros’s attempts to resolve this “impossible reconciliation” resulted in abstract, “disintegrated” human figures.

The formal program of 13 Grabados presents a dialectic on the question of whether abstract figures are dehumanized or liberated. And such a dialectic had international resonance at this time: Kazimir Malevich confronted it as well, especially with his figural paintings of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In these ambiguous works, perfectly geometric bodies, rendered voluminous through stark color gradients, appear at once distinctly human and eerily machinic. The figures’ status as agent and subject in modern society is therefore unclear. In contrast, the status of human beings in Siqueiros’s 13 Grabados is more legible. The artist used the marks created by carving the wood blocks and an iconography of prison bars and bound wrists to inscribe abstract forms with legible markers of human suffering, subjugation, and resilience. However, the relationship between abstract human form and social content is here more legible partially because the series includes such a variety of human forms. This diversity reflects the contingency of different individuals’ agency and social standing. And the ability to gather figures in this way, with their relative positions remaining dynamic, is uniquely possible in a portfolio of separate, loose-sheet prints. For Siqueiros’s political aspirations, however, this was potentially

David Alfaro Siqueiros

Dos mujeres mirando hacia las vías del tren [Two women watching a railroad track], 1930–1931

Cinco mujeres haciendo fila de pie [Five women standing in a row], 1930–1931

David Alfaro Siqueiros

Tres hombres sentados frente a dos filas de hombres de pie

[Three seated men facing two rows of standing men], 1930–1931

Tres mujeres llevando a sus bebés a cuestas

[Three women carrying their babies on their backs], 1930–1931 a problem for the image of a revolutionary world. The subjects scattered across the series remain cordoned off from one another and unable to unite, even if small groups exhibit solidarity or conformity within individual prints.

While collectivity may prove impossible for the represented figures, it may still be a goal for viewers. Seeing the world split apart into cells of imprisoned people, some of whom remain eager to act, may inspire a goal of corrective unification. However, other characteristics of the portfolio may explain why Siqueiros returned to making murals rather than creating more prints after his release from prison. First, the woodcut technique is regressive. For Siqueiros, a technical experimenter, the medium would not have reflected the conditions of modern life and work, despite its associations with printed newspapers. Second, the actual production and marketing of the series, despite the small edition size, brought it into the realm of tourist art. Spratling, who facilitated the portfolio’s publication, had made a career appealing to touristic interest in folkish-looking Mexican art and crafts. But Siqueiros spoke out against the commercial appropriation of important cultural heritage. While “Mexican curious” painting, he said, “is one of the effects of Yankee imperialist penetration” and a “popular art fetish,” authentic Indigenous art holds genuine artistic value.12 In 13 Grabados, one print perhaps reflects an interest in finding less problematic ways to borrow from Indigenous practices: in the image of two women and a railroad track (p. 345 left), the profile view of the figures, their flat (or shallow, relief-like) presentation on the page, and the sequential presentation of each form evokes Aztec or Mayan hieroglyphic systems. This might also be an appeal to the utopic idea of a universally legible writing system based on pictorial units. Yet ignoring this gesture toward an appropriate, subdued artistic borrowing, Spratling’s preface to 13 Grabados positions Siqueiros as “reaching further than others toward something that is purely Mexican and powerful as such.”13 More troubling is the rejection of a universal audience in favor of the assertion that the portfolio “will attract the serious attention of all who are interested in modern Mexican art and, most certainly, collectors thereof.”14 Spratling’s support was likely of great help to Siqueiros in a period of limited geographic mobility and does not detract from the artist’s revolutionary formal project. But it nonetheless frames the series as a bourgeois art commodity incompatible with Siqueiros’s revolutionary artistic project.

Siqueiros never again made woodcuts after 13 Grabados, and he ultimately focused on murals rather than prints as the most effective form of radical, revolutionary art. Still, 13 Grabados demonstrates the potential of a flexible, contingent, and legible approach to abstraction in a medium associated with popular, mass viewership. For an artist in prison, creating these prints and working through the question of how to represent humanity in various states of liberation might itself have been an act of self-emancipation and self-determination. And the intimate viewing experience of handling these small images on fragile, colorful paper allows individuals to interrogate themselves in relation to the figures they see, whether compressed into sharp, humanoid trapezoids or lost in a robotic army. But these figures stop short of giving viewers a way forward, beyond the confines of their prisons. They therefore lack the impact of murals, which can vanish the very structures of an oppressive society and replace them with images of collective liberation.

1. I thank Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Mary Schneider Enriquez, and Jennifer Roberts for their insights and guidance as I wrote this essay. Thank you as well to the editor and translator of the text, as well as the staff of the Museo Reina Sofía.

2. Olivier Debroise, “Action Art: David Alfaro Siqueiros and the Artistic and Ideological Strategies of the 1930s,” in Portrait of a Decade: David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1930–1940 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1997), 32.

3. Philip Stein, Siqueiros: His Life and Works (New York: International Publishers, 1994), 67.

4. Ibid. Siqueiros was expelled from the Communist Party in the months preceding the assassination attempt due to his involvement with Brum, whose uncle was Uruguay’s democratically elected prime minister (and former president) Baltasar Brum, deemed an enemy of the party because he was a government official.

5. Ibid.

6. Blanca Luz Brum, Un documento humano: (Penitenciaría-Niño Perdido); Segunda edición corregida (Montevideo: Impresora Uruguaya, 1933).

7. Raquel Tibol, “David Alfaro Siqueiros: Woodcuts,” in Siqueiros: 13 Grabados = 13 Woodcuts (Mexico City: Ediciones Toledo, 1992), 13. See also John W. Ittmann et al., Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920 to 1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 160. The origin of the belief that Siqueiros used found wood is unclear; I have found no clear documentation to support it.

8. “Ayer he ido de arriba abajo con esas cartas que me has dado para pedirles dinero a tus antiguos amigos, pero todos ellos ocupan altos puestos de

Gobierno y ha sido para mí muy difícil verlos y explicarles que tú sólo quieres de ellos una pequeña ayuda económica en cambio de un trabajo tuyo, de un grabado en madera o un cuadro que tu pintarás desde la cárcel, porque el niño y yo nos estamos muriendo de hambre.” Luz Brum, Un documento humano, 17.

9. David Alfaro Siqueiros, “The Role of Mexican Art in Functional Revolutionary Art,” American Friends of the Mexican People, no. 1 (February 1937).

10. Stein, Siqueiros, 47. Stein’s hyperbolic language about the newspaper’s reception makes me question his account, but it is possible that the newspaper reached as many demographics as he says.

11. Carla Macchiavello, “Between Abstraction and Figuration: The Contradictions of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ ‘DialecticSubversive Painting,’ 1932–1942,” Art Criticism 22, no. 2 (2007): 51.

12. David Alfaro Siqueiros, “New Thoughts on the Plastic Arts in Mexico (1952),” in Art and Revolution (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 31.

13. William Spratling, “13 Woodcuts by Siqueiros: Preface by William Spratling,” in 13 Grabados (Taxco, Mexico, 1931).

14. Ibid.