David Alfaro Siqueiros and “Los vehículos de la pintura dialéctico-subversiva:” Four Principles to Create Revolutionary Artwork

As one of the most distinguished Mexican muralists, David Alfaro Siqueiros played an important role in Mexican political and artistic history in the twentieth century. Despite the violence that took place in the first half of 1900s in Mexico, art flourished during this period. Inspired by the democratization that characterized the revolution, political art became common during the early twentieth century, and as Mexicans grappled with post-revolutionary identities, many artists, including Siqueiros, turned to communism as the way forward. In his speech “Los vehículos de la pintura dialéctico-subversiva,” delivered in 1932, Siqueiros delineated how to meld revolutionary ideology with the artistic process to create subversive art. Siqueiros’s speech underscored four main principles needed to produce subversive art: art should be the expression of a collective, demonstrate a political statement, use modern techniques, and be available to the public. Siqueiros used the four principles presented in “Los vehículos de la pintura dialéctico-subversiva” to align painting with the social and scientific nature of the time in the hope of creating revolutionary art and techniques that would inspire the rejection of bourgeois artistic values