Siqueiros Rides Again

It was almost as if Gyp the Blood had wired that he would be a house guest. In Mexico City last week David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of Mexico's Big Three mural-ists,* revealed that he is about to visit the U.S. on the last lap of an "Art for Victory" tour of the American continents. Muralist Siqueiros (pronounced See Kay-ros), who was arrested for leading an armed attack on the Mexico City hideaway of the late Leon Trotsky which resulted in the kidnapping murder of the late Sheldon Harte, Trotsky's U.S. secretary, will visit Manhattan to do a massive outdoor mural, probably in Times Square. The mural will be painted by 15 Latin American artists under Siqueiros' direction. The subject has not yet been disclosed, but it will be part of a vast project which Painter Siqueiros (now a devoted United Nations supporter) has worked out for an "authentic continental art for victory."

Cry from the Scaffold. The Siqueiros Art for Victory movement got under way early last year in Chile, where Muralist Siqueiros fled while awaiting his trial. There he painted Death for the Invader, a mural regarded by the Modern Museum's Lincoln Kirstein as "the most important pictoric work since the Cubist Revolution of 1911." But peering down from his scaffold, Siqueiros observed that Latin American artists were doing nothing for the war, that they had lost touch with the masses, that Latin American governments had not given their artists a chance to develop. So he tore off a manifesto exhorting Latin America's painters to back the attack. Last January the aroused artists formed a Continental Committee of Art for Victory, planned a series of propaganda tours. Argentina's Antonio Berni would tour the east coast of South America. Chile's Antonio Quintana would tour Chile, Bolivia and Paraguay. Siqueiros undertook a modest swing through Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Cuba, Mexico and the U.S.

Rockefeller Helps. Siqueiros claims that his tour has been a thumping success, stresses the fact that the greatest help came from Nelson Rockefeller's coordinators of inter-American affairs. Only the Mexican press attacked Siqueiros as a gangster and a fugitive from justice. Says the muralist resignedly: "No one is a prophet in his own land."

High point of the Art for Victory tour came in Cuba where (according to Siqueiros):

P: President Batista patted him on the back, called him "Chico, great lover of art."

P: Nelson Rockefeller paid him $2,500 for two movable murals (Two Mountains of America: Lincoln and Marti,* and The New Day of Democracy) to be donated to Cuban public institutions.

P: Siqueiros denied that he was implicated, as some Cuban and Mexican newspapers charged, in the sudden death (from an overdose of cocaine) of a Cuban girl in the house of a multimillionaire where the artist was painting murals.

P: At a cocktail party in his honor, a tipsy guest shouted: "Viva Trotsky!" Siqueiros looked at him blankly, murmured: "My friend, you are an optimist."

Siqueiros himself now refers to the Trotsky affair as "an unfortunate bit of political sniping on my part." Though he is out on bail, indulgent Mexican courts have cleared him on all counts but wearing a uniform without authorization and impersonating an officer. Asks Siqueiros: "If I were really a fugitive from justice, as my political opponents claim, how do they explain that I traveled all over Latin America by plane with priorities?"

* The other two: Diego Rivera, Jos6 Clemente Orozco. * Jose Julian Marti (1853-95), hero of Cuba's rebellion against Spanish rule.

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