On David Siqueiros-A Dilemma For Artists
Schapiro, Meyer
I have been asked several times during the last years to sign a statement requesting the Mexican government to release the painter Siqueiros from prison.He has been sentenced for a long...
...In prison perhaps he has at last found himself as an artist...
...During much of his life he has been a Communist militant, more active in leading demonstrations, planning and participating in murders, and carrying out faithfully the instructions of the Moscow dictators, than in painting pictures...
...It is printed in the Bulletin d'Informations of the Commission for the Truth About the Crimes of Stalin, May 1962...
...Most painters would resent as impudent the idea that Siqueiros was one of that company of genius and would feel indignant or amused if they were asked to back that judgment with their signatures...
...He was arrested, and indicted on nine criminal counts...
...In calling for the release of Siqueiros the signers of the petition have made much of the fact that Siqueiros is a great painter and therefore deserves a special treatment...
...From what I have heard of this law, it seems to me unjust...
...It is their statement, I hear, that led Picasso to refuse to join the sponsors of the exhibition...
...Siqueiros never denied his role in the attack on Trotsky's house and boasted of his action as "one of the greatest honors of my life...
...The important thing is to oppose an unjust law and to defend an artist who is its victim...
...They review the history of his crimes and refuse to ally themselves with those who picture the Communist politico Siqueiros as a pure artist, victimized by a reactionary regime...
...Never has he been so productive, never has he contributed so much to the cultural patrimony of Mexico and the world— assuming, of course, that his paintings are good...
...To speak of Siqueiros as a great painter who through some arbitrariness of the state languishes in jail, is to play a dangerous game of political doubletalk...
...He has never been tried for those crimes...
...When this argument was presented in Paris at a meeting of the International Association of Art Critics in order to win their support for the appeal, an inquiry at the Mexican embassy disclosed the fact that Siqueiros was able to paint in prison...
...Imagine, says the letter, Van Gogh, Michelangelo, and Goya, languishing in jail...
...To defend Siqueiros as a victim of injustice, with continued on page 197 continued from page 106 out telling the truth about his crimes, is to maintain injustice...
...This law was enacted, supposedly, to strike at fascists and others who plotted to overthrow the Mexican government which prided itself upon being a revolutionary regime committed to the welfare of the Mexican people...
...In 1940, he organized and led an attack on the house of the Russian revolutionist, Leon Trotsky, in the course of which his band kidnapped and killed one of Trotsky's guards, the American Sheldon Harte...
...From the viewpoint of justice Siqueiros is not invulnerable...
...We are told that Siqueiros, a man for whom painting is his life, is being kept from his easel and that mankind as a result is denied all those masterpieces which we would possess if Siqueiros were free...
...Those who have lived through the 1930s and '40s when the arts were used as instruments of Communist politics and the fascist threats to the liberty of the artist were arguments for support of Stalin's policies—though Stalin had no respect for that liberty at home and exterminated some of the greatest Russian writers—those who remember the petitions and appeals of that time, signed by artists in perfect good faith, will look more skeptically at the gross formulations of the Siqueiros letter...
...I urge those who have approved the Siqueiros letter to read the statement issued by a group of French writers, addressed to the committee of artists that sponsored an Exhibit in Homage to Siqueiros...
...For those who composed the letter, the comparison with Van Gogh, Michelangelo and Goya is more important, even indispensable...
...He has also been accused of a part in the assassination of Trotsky...
...but with the connivance of a foreign consul, he left Mexico and returned after the tumult had died down...
...We hear now that he paints two or three canvasses a week and sells them for over three thousand dollars apiece...
...By elevating Siqueiros to artistic greatness, they divert attention from his sinister political role...
...I have been asked several times during the last years to sign a statement requesting the Mexican government to release the painter Siqueiros from prison.He has been sentenced for a long term because he led a violent demonstration against the government and thus exposed himself to the penalties of a law which classifies such acts as crimes of "social dissolution...
...Like the Smith Act in our own country, this law was once supported by the Communist party, which saw in it no threat to its own members...
...It is my knowledge of this history that keeps me from signing the appeal in Siqueiro's behalf...
...It is like the laws in the Soviet Union that punish severely any public demonstration against the regime...
...The appeal for Siqueiros has also its comic ambiguities...
...If one takes justice seriously, one must describe the painter in a somewhat different and less glamorous way...
...But the issue here concerns the life of a brother-painter, and in such extremes one doesn't hedge over a phrase, no matter how repugnant to an artist's integrity of judgment...
...at any rate, the penalty of eight years in prison for leading a demonstration and inciting to violence is barbaric...
Vol. 10 • April 1963 • No. 2
