Animating Internationalism: David Alfaro Siqueiros and Antifascist Art in the 1930s

Abstract

This essay uses the art and travels of Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to analyse the transnational antifascist artistic culture of the 1930s. Siqueiros was one of many artists who joined antifascist (and later Popular Front) organizations, and circulated their art beyond the traditional spaces of localized art worlds – into the streets and across national boundaries – to animate a global artistic network. The process of making the period transnational – artists and journal editors' work of clipping, replicating, and reusing images, texts, and ideas in new contexts, with new meanings – created chains of transnational iconography, and rendered montage as the period's central aesthetic. Period debates and polemics, waged at conferences and in journals, weaponized this culture. Siqueiros and Josep Renau's 1939–40 mural for the Mexican Electricians' Syndicate began as a final homage to the fallen Spanish Republic; the transformation of the mural, however, ultimately marked the end of Popular Front art.