dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: Philip Stein
titel: Siqueiros. His Life and Works
isbn: 0-7178-0709-6
+: New York, 1994
«The 25th Venice Biennial, which opened in June 1950, included 60 works of four Mexican painters. The Mexican government hat been invited to send 15 works by each of the four: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros and Tamayo. […] The Swedish critic Nils Lindhagen wrote:
Siqueiros is a man of excess, in his life as well as in his art. He presents his art as an assault and a violation. never in the history of art has the means of illusion been utilized as powerfully as here. […] Naturally this art will be horrible for a person who looks only for aesthetic sentiments.
The effect was profound and widespread. The Italian critic Marco Valsecchi could hardly get over the shock when he moved from the pavilion that housed the works of Kandinsky to the Mexican pavilion a few steps away.
On one side the myths of abstractionism, the triangles, the colored circles and the severe surfaces of hermetic mysticism. On the other, the lofty discourse, the noisy and bloody voices of a people that wand their history, their revolution, their fiestas to be reckoned with without delay. The painting of the Mexicans is an art of great collective preoccupations, didactical, propagandistic. […] The painting is the substitute for the book and the newspaper. […]
Of the painters – with the exception of Tamayo, who follows tendencies that are clearly European and Parisian – I don't yet know at what point they will be able to enter the heaven of art as it is known on the Old Continent. But […] one ist taken by surprise and […] falls victim to the vertigo of those dazzling colors, of that primordial and gerocious expression. Perhaps one is not completely convinced, but leaves with something nailed in memory.
[…]» (p. 184–185)