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

Abstract

A demagogue agitates the masses. Protesters and fascists struggle in the streets. Gasmasked figures loom, a vulture swoops. A tank advances. Women and children are victimized, African Americans lynched. Buildings topple and burn, civilization is destroyed. The people rise up. Such images appeared in cartoons, prints, and artworks reproduced in the pages of magazines across the globe during the 1930s. They also appear in the mural that David Alfaro Siqueiros and Josep Renau painted with their colleagues, the International Team of Plastic Artists, in the stairwell of the Mexican Electricians' Syndicate headquarters in Mexico City in 1939-1940 (plate 1, and see plate 9 and plate 17), making it a veritable archive, or 'matrix', according to Mari Carmen Ramírez, of the period's popular press. 1 The widespread appearance of such iconography raises a key question for art history: how do we imagine, and thus reconstruct, an international artistic culture? More specifically, how can we make visible the transnational web of connections that animated internationalism in the 1930s?In the 1930s, people across the globe could visualize their interconnectedness like never before. New technologies, from international newsreels in cinemas, to newspapers and journals distributing stories, prints, maps and photographs from around the world, cultivated a global consciousness and contributed to what Jessica Berman calls a 'transnational optics'. 2 Arguably, the rise of fascism generated great urgency for such a global way of seeing and thinking. Activists, artists, and intellectuals responded to the challenge, building networks across national borders to fight fascism.Art history's reliance on style once relegated 1930s artistic production to a realist stumble off the march towards mid-century abstraction. While the administrations of the Soviet Union and Germany consolidated power within their respective artistic cultures to present unified aesthetic fronts, the response from the democratic world was fragmented and contested from within. 3 Typically framed between realism and surrealism, art in the democratic world lacked the same aesthetic clarity: viewed from this perspective, the period appears in disarray, polemical, and unstable. Yet perspectives from the Americas have reframed the period. Scholars in the edited volume, The Social and the Real, reconsider artists' interest in 'realism', noting that, more than a unified style, it signalled the function of art and the social role of artists, included a search for new audiences, and evoked an attitude of engagement with the world. 4 Andrew Hemingway likewise traces a movement (in the United States) held together less by common style, and more by the creation of institutional initiatives, critical discourses, and efforts to develop practices that aligned with political ideals. 5