Ione Robinson to her mother, Mexico City, July 20, 1929 (from: A Wall to Paint on) (dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch)
eingetragen von Alex Winiger am 16.03.2016, 10:34 (email senden)
geändert von Alex Winiger am 12.06.2017, 22:00 (email senden)
Séqueiros [sic], who was one of the founders to the Painters' Syndicate, returned the other day from Buenos Aires, where the spent some time in prison because he is a Communist. It seems that everyone [of the friends of Tina Modotti] has been in jail; I feel that I have missed something! He brought a new wife back with him, a poetess named Blanca Luz, which means white light, but she looks awfully dirty to me and has a horrid child who got into my paint box and squeezed most of the tubes dry. I met them at a small party Tina gave to celebrate his return, and when I came in he was sitting in the middle of the room like a prophet, talking with an energy that had everyone spellbound. He, too, is a green-eyed Mexican, very handsome with white skin and black, curly hair.
Ione Robinson to her brother Fred Robinson, New York, November 6, 1935 (from: A Wall to Paint on) (dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch)
eingetragen von Alex Winiger am 16.03.2016, 10:34 (email senden)
Yesterday afternoon, When I had an unexpected visit from the Mexican painter, David Siqueiros, and another young artist, Antonio Pujol, I was glad they came. […] David sat near the fire talking to me until it was far past dinner time. […] His green eyes kept shifting from one object in the room to another. He believes that the era of studio painting has come to an end in our lifetime. He said that artists must find new materials, that they should utilize the products of the twentieth century, such as cement and plywood, in place of canvas. He almost shrieked as the told me that mere brushes were completely passé; that an artist should paint with an air-gun filled with duco automobile paint! […]
I don't think David knows where he is half the time, he lives in such a world within his own head. He was wearing his same old black leather windbreaker, with great smears of paint down the front, and his hair was very long, curlin around the collar of his jacket.
Siqueiros talks like a Biblical prophet interpreting some divine message. He told me that I would be completely lost unless I identified myself with the «World Struggle»; that people had no right to live for themselves. As I had hardly spoken a word during these hours, I wondered how he had come to his conclusions about me. When I asked him this, he looked about the room with scorn, and went on talking about his workshop and air-guns.
Ione Robinson to her brother Fred Robinson, New York, January 3, 1936 (from: A Wall to Paint on) (dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch)
eingetragen von Alex Winiger am 16.03.2016, 10:34 (email senden)
Nearly everyone I know in New York is on one of these Art Projects and everyone, it seems, is beginning to paint on an wall! How I envy them, as that is what I have wanted to do for a long time in my own country. Now I am considered on the other side of the fence in the present scheme of things — simply because of the family I married into.
I have been trying to work at home, and I find myself scorning this room — just as Siqueiros said I would — because I am part of nothing. The other day I went to see David in his workshop. Because he realizes that I am alone and unhappy, he told me that I should try to forget myself and work with him and other artists. He has organized his own W.P.A.… but then, it is completely Communistic. David must have received some money from the Communist Party to pay for his automobile paint and air-brushes. He has about fifteen people working for him — very miserable-looking young painters — and even though he tells them they are free to do what they want as painters, this is not the case. David designs every poster, panel, or picture this brotherhood works on. He really is an amazing person. His energy is like a wild bolt of lightning. His ideas are forceful, and he is clever in projecting them into the imagination of other artists, making them feel they have conceived them.
David has one boy cutting heads and other objects from magazines. These are placed in a lantern and enlarged on the plyboard; then someone else traces the forms, while someone else stands ready to blow on the duco with an air-gun! What a system! No one would ever need to be a draftsman. This way of painting, in fact, even eliminates the necessity of having the smallest bit of talent. All one has to have is the urge to think that he is an artist!
In spite of the trickiness of all this, David certainly is turning out some weird pictures. He is so brilliant and in a sense a genius. These air-brush designs have power. I would like to see him leave out the propaganda, but this is fundamentally what he is after, at the moment. He is turning out enormous posters for different unions, and he has several giant-like heads of communist leaders that look like colored scultpures.
Siqueiros laughs at the W.P.A. Art Projects. He says all the painters in America are merely trying to do what was done in Mexico two decades ago: painting on the inside of buildings. He paced back and forth across the splintered, rickety floor of his workshop, while he rattled off in Spanish his ideas for street murals. He said that in «our time» people are too busy to walk into a building to look at murals, that they should be painted right out in the streets, and not with the old academic plastic forms. He had discovered a method of distorting forms to make them move with the eye as one walks past a wall. That is, certain parts of the composition would be exaggerated to increase certain forms in the composition and to hold one's eye, forcing it to follow the different subjects. Like a plane, flying on an beam!
Ione Robinson to her daughter, Barcelona, October 6, 1938 (from: A Wall to Paint on) (dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch)
eingetragen von Alex Winiger am 16.03.2016, 10:34 (email senden)
When I asked [Antonio Pujol and Bennie Pancho Barrios] about David Siqueiros, Pujol told me he had been made a colonel, because he had been a major in the Mexican Revolution. But he added that Siqueiros had never been near the front [in Spain]! Pujol said that David had changed completely since he had been wearing a uniform. He had become a real «neat and clean» Don Juan, with never a hair out of place!