This is a story of two murals. Although it unfolds in Los Angeles, self-styled capital of modern mural painting in the United States, it is a pivotal story that has remained mostly hidden for more than half a century.
One part of the tale was dramatically revealed last October, when the newly refurbished Central Library opened its doors to the public after more than six years of renovation and expansion, including the cleaning of a major mural cycle in the main rotunda. The second, even more important chapter should be unveiled within the next year or so, when art conservators for the Getty Conservation Institute complete some demanding labors on Olvera Street.
The two murals couldn't be more different from one another, even though they date from the same moment and were painted a scant 10 blocks apart. Indeed, one could be described as the artful declaration of an official fantasy, the second as the dramatic assertion of an unofficial reality. Together, they speak to one another across space and time, giving shape and depth to history in a way that only art can.
Near the plaza of El Pueblo, where the village of Los Angeles had been established late in the 18th Century, a painter was hard at work in the late summer and early fall of 1932. On a south-facing exterior wall on the second floor of Italian Hall, once a thriving community benevolent association, the great Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1898-1974) had been commissioned by F. K. Ferencz, director of the Plaza Art Gallery, to paint a mural that would be called "America Tropical."
Siqueiros' vision of tropical America was painted in segments across an 18-by-80-foot brick wall facing a rooftop beer garden that overlooked Olvera Street. Working with a changing team of assistants for 47 days between August and October, he sketched out a luxurious jungle scene filled with huge, tangled vegetation, both vaguely erotic and threatening.
In the center of the shallow, flattened space loomed a richly decorated pyramid, its twin entrances cleverly merged with a pair of actual shuttered windows in the building's brick wall. Totemic sculptures flanked the temple, while a tall, carved stone arose in the jungle at the left.
Compositionally balancing the monolith, a small building was painted around a door at the right end of the wall. Again the mural's illusion merged with the building's physical design.
Neither the decorated pyramid nor any of the carved sculptures can be stylistically pinpointed to one ancient civilization or another. A sculpture by the temple's base, for example, loosely recalls an 800-year-old Chacmool figure from the Yucatan, but not with specificity. Siqueiros' designs aren't Mayan, Toltec, Aztec or Olmec.
Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his style is all of those and more. His fresco fuses a variety of pre-Columbian styles.
Still, Siqueiros' aesthetic is even more complex. The artist had worked with Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco in the government-sponsored mural campaign in Mexico City, between 1922 and 1924. A veteran of his country's civil wars, he had also traveled to study art in France, Italy and Spain. In Barcelona in 1921, he had issued a formal Manifesto to the Artists of America.
With youthful exuberance, Siqueiros had exclaimed, "Let us live our marvelous, dynamic age!" Recalling the fiery rhetoric of the Italian Futurist painters, he sought to inject his art with a vigor commensurate to the technological and political upheavals that marked the tumultuous new century.
While painting in Mexico City, Siqueiros was also drawn into trade-union organizing. First he joined the Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. Later, in Jalisco, he became president of the National Federation of Mineworkers. Finally he served as secretary of Mexico's Communist Party. He came to Los Angeles in 1932, to teach at the old Chouinard School of Art, after a year spent in prison for participating in a banned May Day celebration in Mexico City.
In addition to its sources in ancient Mexico, "America Tropical" was inflected with the grave simplicity and muted color of the early Renaissance murals of Masaccio, which the artist had so greatly admired in Italy, as well as with a flattened, distilled form and space that is thoroughly modern. Overall, this complicated merger complied with the pointed directive Siqueiros had set out a decade before, in his flamboyant manifesto.
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By turning to ancient sources for his hybrid style, and by experimenting with such untried modern techniques as the use of an airbrush, he sought a "synthetic energy" that would manage to avoid "those lamentable archeological reconstructions (Indianism, Primitivism, Americanism) which are so in vogue here today but which are only short-lived fashions." It's as if the Olvera Street mural declared that Siqueiros' artistic identity must be taken as the sum of his own social, cultural and personal histories.
