Siqueiros, David Alfaro (1896–1974)

Mexican painter and graphic artist, labour organizer, and revolutionary. He was a prominent social realist and an outstanding member of the Mexican muralist movement of the 1930s. A lifelong political activist, who served as captain with the revolutionary army of Venustiano Carranza before 1919, his work championed his revolutionary ideals, as in Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939, Electrical Workers' Union, Mexico City). He was imprisoned 1960–64 for organizing a student riot.

In the 1920s Siqueiros worked with Diego Rivera and José Orozco on allegorical frescoes for the National Preparatory School, Mexico City – the first of many such mural commissions. Unlike the others, he incorporated elements of fantasy, such as human-and-machine hybrids. He was the master of a vigorous style, typified by massed, churning figures and the use of foreshortening and multiple viewpoints.

He was also an active labour organizer 1925–30. Exiled to the USA in 1932, in 1936 he fought as a lieutenant colonel in the Republican Army in Spain. He was implicated in the 1940 assassination in Mexico of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, and lived in exile in Argentina and Cuba 1941–43.

His principal works are murals in Mexico City, dynamic and strongly proletarian in sentiment, as in The March of Humanity. His easel paintings and woodcuts, like his murals, express deeply felt themes of protest, for example Echo of a Scream (1937, Museum of Modern Art, New York). He also painted many portraits. He worked and taught in the USA, where he influenced the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.