Siqueiros in L.A.

[dedalus_1947]

“A week ago, fifteen feet of the fresco
(América Tropical) was whitewashed,
thus hiding it from Olvera Street.
This brings up once more the question of
artist rights versus owner’s rights…
But property right is, finally, the right of money,
which is not always synonymous with good judgment.
The fresco is not destroyed, but merely partially covered.
Someday we may find that decisions of this kind
will be referred to properly constituted boards
on which art and property are both represented.”
(Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1934: Arthur Millier, art critic) 

 I first learned of American censorship and the destruction of Mexican art while gazing at the murals of Diego Rivera in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. I was there with my mother, during one of our visits to her family. I loved looking at the works of the three famous Mexican muralists, Los Tres Grandes (The Big Three), Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, throughout the city and the campus of the university. Their massive works showed a visually gripping, pictorial history of Mexico and her struggles for land, liberty and justice. Historical figures, events, and ideals came alive in the vast scope of these revolutionary works of art.  They were massive picture books for the public, and, for a boy in love with comic books, an enjoyable way to learn history. My mother had grown up in Mexico City in the midst of this muralist movement and she proudly called it a uniquely Mexican art form that was meant to be politically provocative. It was at the Palacio de Bellas Artes that she told me the story of Diego Rivera and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and how the original mural, Man at the Crossroads, was destroyed in the lobby of New York’s Rockefeller Center in 1934. Of course my mother downplayed the fact that Rivera was a renowned Mexican Communist, attempting to insert an image of the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in a mural paid for by the owner of Standard Oil Company. For her, Rivera had already painted controversial murals in San Francisco and Detroit, and this was an issue of artistic freedom and the duty of a painter to expand awareness and understanding. It was her contention that true Art, especially coming from a Mexican artist, was not welcomed in the materialistic and xenophobic America of the mid-Twentieth Century. I always assumed that the Rivera affair was an isolated incident in Mexican-American Art history, until I learned about Siqueiros, and his volatile experiences in Los Angeles in 1932.

My son Toñito first mentioned the Siqueiros exhibit while we were eating lunch at the Malibu restaurant, Gladstone’s for Fish, after having seen The Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire at the Getty Villa in June (see Flickr album, 2010-6-24 Aztecs at the Villa). While discussing other things we could do together, he mentioned that there were two exhibits of David Alfaro Siqueiros coming to Southern California in the fall. The notion of seeing the works of a Mexican muralist appealed to me, but I filed the information away for the time being. I became more enthusiastic after reading an L.A. Times article about the two exhibits, and having visited two of Diego Rivera’s murals in San Francisco (see Murals of San Francisco). When I finally saw Toñito at my mom’s 86^th birthday party, I brought up the idea of seeing the new exhibits. He told me that he had just finished seeing the Siqueiros: Landscape Painter exhibit at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, but welcomed the chance to see the one in L.A. So we made a date for the following Friday.

I didn’t know quite what to expect of the exhibit called Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied, as I drove to the Autry National Center on a wet and overcast morning in October. I didn’t know too much about Siqueiros’s life, and, despite its provocative title, I wasn’t confident of the Autry Museum’s ability to adequately represent the controversial experiences he suffered in Los Angeles in 1932. David Alfaro Siqueiros is the lesser known of Los Tres Grandes. Although I was familiar with his major works at the Preparatoria Nacional (the National Preparatory School), the National University, and the Poly Forum in Mexico City, I knew little of the man. He was the youngest of the three muralists, and the most radically active. Siqueiros was a Stalinist Communist, who led a failed assassination attempt of exiled Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky in Mexico City, in 1940. Gene Autry, the original American Singing Cowboy, who parlayed his talent as a singer, and movie and television star of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s, into a communication and sports empire, established his Western Heritage Museum in 1988. This boutique museum, whose name was changed to the Autry National Center in 2003, was built in Griffith Park, near the intersection of Interstate 5 and the 134 Freeway, and featured his personal collection of Western art, and movie and television memorabilia. Its originally stated mission was to preserve the “mythic aspects of the American old west”. I wondered how this museum, with its optimistic view of Americanism and materialistic success, would present one of the most politically provocative artists of Mexico. The auguries were dismal when I stationed my car in the ample parking lot in front of the museum and saw a huge, gaudy banner on the side of the building advertising, “How the West was Worn by… Michael Jackson”.
“Oh, oh,” I thought. “This doesn’t look good.”

Once I got past the Michael Jackson billboard, the museum thankfully focused visitors on the central issue of the exhibit. The dominant motif in all its publicity banners throughout the city, and along the walkway entrance to the museum, was the shocking image of a “dark Indian laborer crucified under the North American eagle.” It was the focal point of Siqueiros’s América Tropical mural, possibly representing the painter and how he was treated in Los Angeles in 1932, and the issue of censorship versus artistic freedom. There was a graffiti-style mural depicting political oppression and civil resistance on one side of the wall in the entrance hallway, and on the opposite side, a long, serigraph of thundering, wild horses, with the words: “Is the West a place or a way of thinking?”  The courtyard was filled with multitudes of restless, squirming, bodies of children who were being unsuccessfully directed into neat rows. These elementary school students and teachers were on fieldtrips to view the permanent exhibitions of the museum, which featured the history of the American West, Native Americans, and “The Imagined West”. These tours aligned with their educational curriculum, but would not include the more mature themes illustrated in the Siqueiros showcase. Even surrounded by the dramatic wall murals and stark, overhead banners, the children were more attracted to the life-sized, bronze statue of Gene Autry and his horse Trigger. Toñito arrived soon after, and, with the herds of students having entered ahead of us, it was with a sigh of relief that we found the Siqueiros exhibit almost deserted and completely to ourselves. Walking past a stylized wall rendering of the exhibit titles, and a mural by Barbara Carrasco, called L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, we entered the George Montgomery Gallery and began our tour.

Going to a historical art exhibition with my son, Toñito, is like going to a ball game with my daughter, Prisa. The activity plays to our mutual interests, and it gives us time to watch and talk. We did a lot of individual looking and analyzing, and then discussed our thoughts of the exhibit and some of the pieces at various breaks in the action. However, our first gallery issue was over photography.
“Dad!” Toñito hissed, under his breath, as I snapped a photo of a painting. “There’s a No Photography sign over there,” he warned.
Of course his cautionary remark didn’t stop me from surreptitiously snapping a photo or two, when there was no one else in the room and the gallery guard was looking the other way. But the prohibition ended any hope of a photographic record of the exhibit. It also prompted Toñito to keep a safe distance from me when I was trying to sneak a shot. When we did converge, our longest discussions of the exhibit were while viewing the stylized reproductions of the three murals Siqueiros painted in Los Angeles, and discovering his influence on the Chicano Movement and the muralists in Los Angeles.

From his readings on Siqueiros and viewing the MOLAA exhibit in Long Beach, Toñito had more information than I about the central piece of the show, América Tropical. Even though I had been to Olvera Street many times, I never knew that Siqueiros had painted a fresco on the second floor exterior wall of the Italian Hall building near the plaza. My son described its history of being whitewashed in 1932, ignored for many years, and then covered over by a wooden shed in the hopes of future restoration. On the other hand, I was able to tell him of the only surviving mural, A Portrait of Mexico Today, which I had seen in its present location at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art on State Street. Neither of us realized that Siqueiros had painted the first of his trio of works at the Chouinard School of Art in the mid-Wilshire area soon after his arrival in Los Angeles. However, the most surprising discovery was Siqueiros’s influence on the Chicano Movement because of his revolutionary activities and examples of political activism. He became the spiritual godfather of Chicanismo in the 60’s, and his murals were the wellsprings of the Los Angeles muralist efforts of the 1980 and 90’s. The exhibited works of Wayne Alaniz Healy (América Tropical, 1997) and Barbara Carrasco (L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, 1983) plainly showed this influence. But I was actually most impressed by the framed blueprints of a rejected mural design that Barbara Carrasco submitted to the President of USC. Until Toñito brought it to my attention, I hadn’t realized that the blue-pencil markings on the drawing were the president’s actual comments, citing all the images he found offensive. It was incredible to see that challenging and provocative art was still being censored in 21^st century Los Angeles.

Overall, Toñito and I were impressed with the Siqueiros presentation, and found the other permanent and traveling exhibitions informative. Siqueiros in Los Angeles: Censorship Defied was concise, visually rich, and very dramatic. It was a tightly bound, three-act play that showed us, with just a minimum of paintings, drawings, and photographs, how a wealthy and handsome art student became a revolutionary soldier and a radical, committed Marxist. It presented a coherent picture of Siqueiros after the Mexican Revolution, his time in Los Angeles, and his artistic and political impact on the Chicano Movement. The secondary exhibit, The Art of Native American Basketry, was surprisingly good, and individual pieces and showcases in the rest of the museum were also enjoyable. Words, however, even in narrative style, never adequately describe a visual art exhibition and museum.

The Siqueiros exhibit runs through January 9, 2011, and I would heartily recommend that you see it for yourselves. If you are interested in a photographic tour of our day at the Autry, I’ve provided a link to my Flickr album here: see 2010-10-22 Siqueiros in L.A.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting, Tony. I get a glimpse of why you were a great Principal!

TRH

Хороший блог!

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