art

David Alfaro Siqueiros painting is of a chinese woman stripped,tied up and shot in the head. This painting was the monumentalized martyr, her massive, sculptural body fills the closely cropped composition. Siqueiros was born in Chihuahua City in 1896. Between 1908 and 1911 he studied at the Franco-English College in Mexico City, an institution run by the Marist Fathers. Siqueiros had an early Catholic education.
By  fifteen Siqueiros was already involved in artistic studies and political activism. In 1911 he was the leader of a student strike at the San Carlos Academy. The strike lasted six months and ended in complete victory for the students. I chose this painting because it caught my eye. The way the woman is positioned shows that there was some kind of violence involved. It was interesting to me because there are a lot of crazy unknown things going on in this world and things that went on. I felt like this painting opened up my eyes cause i started to think outside the box. I started to think about all those innocent women who were killed and tortured. Siqueiro chose subjects that dealt with polemical issues of his time. His Artistic career was repeatedly interrupted by his fervent political activity and imprisonments. He caught in the revolutionary army during the Mexican revolution in 1910-20, then organized a mineworkers unions. After that in the late 1930s he joined the republicans to fight against forces in Spanish civil war then finally as an ardent Stalinist, he helped orchestrate an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate leon Trotsky in 1940.