Christs in prison

Exhibition presented by Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros

On August 9, 1960, David Alfaro Siqueiros was arrested and placed in preventive custody accusing him of social dissolution. The authorities used the content of his artistic production to send him to the Lecumberri penitentiary, where he remained for almost four years until he was released on July 13, 1964. When he was imprisoned for his work as an artist, Siqueiros always thought of himself as a prisoner of conscience of the State, which was ruled at that time by Adolfo López Mateos. During his years at “The Black Palace” (Lecumberry), Siqueiros continued his artistic production and painted different types of small and medium-sized works: plastic experiments tending to non-figuration, portraits and self-portraits, still lifes and, notoriously, a series of images of Christ.

These works with an iconic religious character were made by Siqueiros within a historical moment of renewal and updating of liturgical art from a series of reforms that took place, during those years, within the Catholic Church with the Second Vatican Council. In Mexico, these changes were radically experienced from the field of art and architecture to that of social organization. Within this context, Siqueiros’ painting carried out a realistic update of the religious imaginary, in particular of the representation of Christ. His own words were: “I consider Christ to be a politically persecuted man, that is what he is, what he was, a victim of repression…” An update also operated in its plastic solution. The Christs of Siqueiros revisit the reference of traditional colonial religious images, placing them in line with a new expressionist figuration that at that time had an international impact.

Shortly after his release, Siqueiros was invited and commissioned by Pope Paul VI to be part of the Vatican Museum’s new contemporary art galleries that the pontiff planned to open in 1973. To this end, the artist painted and delivered The Christ of Peace (1969–1970); a piece that he later replicated as part of the exterior murals of the Polyforum, transforming it into a work of public art of monumental scale. In these instances, Siqueiros continued to advocate for an understanding of Christ as a prisoner of conscience. Speaking of his painting in the Vatican collections, he highlighted the following: “The rebellion of Jesus Christ makes us think of him as the current symbol of the struggle of the weakest (peoples) against the strongest ones”. In fact, during those years, Siqueiros also became an activist in favor of other artists and intellectuals who were unjustifiably deprived of their liberty.

Christs in Lecumberri

In the early 1940s, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano was the first modern artist imprisoned in Lecumberri to paint a religious image inside that prison: his version of the iconic Pietà executed on a mural scale. The artist used the martyrdom of Christ to refer to his unjustified prison sentence through a representation of a young man with a certain ambiguity.

Most of the Christs painted by Siqueiros in Lecumberri, on the other hand, were inspired by representations of the bloodied character that dates back to colonial imagery. When talking about these paintings, the muralist alluded to the religious art he knew in his childhood, as well as to a gold-leafed Christ that he kept in his cell. Behind his Cristo de pueblo (1963) (Christ of the People) he wrote: “Let only he who believes in Christ paint Christ, wrote Fra Angelico. That is why I have painted it thinking –without a doubt– of those terrible Christs of town in which I believed as a child”. In addition to this painting, Christ mutilated, Christ, the conquered redeemer and Black Christ (1963) are other images in which Siqueiros resorts to lacerated, terribly mutilated and bleeding representations. His solution could be described as expressionist, a quality that is also present in several of the inscriptions written on the back of the paintings. In the case of Christ, the conquered redeemer the phrase states: “His doctrine of ‘peace on earth’ was buried in the blood and ashes of two thousand years of increasingly devastating wars”. Undoubtedly, the martyrdom of this character served the muralist to talk about the violence exercised amongst human beings.

Mutilated Christ is, without a doubt, the most expressionist Christ of those painted in Lecumberri. He floats, dismembered, over Mount Calvary. The text written on its base is entitled “The Way of the Cross of Christ” and shows Siqueiros’ enthusiasm for the reforms that took place in the Catholic Church in the framework of the Second Council. In his words, “I admire John XXIII because he was the initiator of a revolt that aimed to reform and revise the doctrine criteria”. Behind the painting, the muralist wrote the following: “First, his enemies crucified him (two thousand years ago). Then, ‘his friends’ mutilated him (as of the Middle Age). And today, his new and true friends restore him under the political pressure of communism (post-Ecumenical Council)”.

Religious Moment

After his release from Lecumberri in 1964, Siqueiros was invited by businessman Manuel Suárez to make a mural at the Casino de Selva, a hotel he owned in Cuernavaca. Siqueiros moved to that city for that purpose. There, he painted his commissioned work for the Vatican Museum. Cuernavaca was, at that time, a kind of epicenter of the dynamics of renewal in the Catholic Church that were manifested, in that city, from the modern religious architecture of Félix Candela, in the liturgical art and architectural interventions of Mathias Goeritz and Fray Gabriel Chávez de la Mora or in the design of the Emmaus Workshops to the initiatives and proposals on ecumenical and social organization of Gregorio Lemercier and Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo. Siqueiros was close to these two members of the progressive clergy, in his words, “national representatives of a universal movement” of renewal.

Christ of Peace

In 1969, Siqueiros began painting his Christ of Peace after the invitation of Paul VI to participate in the new rooms of contemporary art of the Vatican Museum. His work was executed in freedom in Cuernavaca, in a progressive religious context. Therefore, the painting presents a radically different image from the works he executed in prison. In this piece, the expressionist sensibility disappears and a sort of representation that could be called “heroic” enters the scene distinguishing several of the muralist’s works. Raquel Tibol described the figure in this painting as “imposing” and “majestic”. Siqueiros himself added: “He’s a bloodied man who looks more like a modern-day martyr than a conventional religious figure”. Christ of Peace presents the crown of thorns and has a beard as a pair of characteristic elements in the representation of Jesus of Nazareth. On the back of this work that would be sent to the Vatican, Siqueiros strongly questioned people of faith, typical of the critical spirit of the Second Council: “Christian, what have you done with Christ in more than two thousand years of his doctrine?”

Undoubtedly, the papal commission to Siqueiros aroused unusual media attention. At all times, when talking about his painting, the artist maintained his perception of Christ as a prisoner of conscience: “I admire Christ, I admire him as a rebel of his time, DO NOT FORGET THAT HE IS THE FIRST POLITICAL PRISONER… THE TERMS, THE SYMBOLS OF CHRIST ARE THOSE OF A POLITICAL PRISONER IN AN ATTITUDE OF PROTEST”. The posture of the Christ of Peace, of which Siqueiros was a model, conveys just that attitude: although imprisoned and wounded, he is firm and with integrity. It is worth mentioning that during those years Siqueiros made portraits of different persecuted or political prisoners or prisoners of conscience. One case is the work dedicated to the students who were repressed and massacred in Tlatelolco: My answer! On October 2, 1968.

Monumental Christ

During his residency in Cuernavaca, Manuel Suárez’s invitation and project to Siqueiros was transformed from a mural at the Casino de la Selva to an attraction like no other: the world’s largest mural inside a new tourism company in Mexico City. The March of Mankind and the architecture of the Polyforum were the result of this commission. After donating his Christ of Peace to the Vatican Museum, Siqueiros chose to reproduce it at the scale of a monument to become one of the exterior panels of the Polyforum. The work was completed and inaugurated on December 15, 1971, by former President Luis Echeverría.

True to the principles of muralism, Siqueiros had this easel painting, Christ of Peace, end up operating as a work of public art. It is accessible to all passers-by, mobile and dynamic spectators who moved on foot or in a vehicle on Avenida de los Insurgentes. Similarly, he encoded a political meaning in a religious image. The representation of Christ monumentalizes the figure of the prisoner and persecuted of conscience –a figure with which the muralist identified– in a historical moment characterized by violent authoritarianism and brutal repression by the State. “It should be said that Christ was a political prisoner, crucified more for his political revolutionary ideas than for his religious ideas”.

ELC

Towards the end of the 1960s, Siqueiros also devoted himself to being an activist against this type of repressive violence, particularly with the support he gave to Sofía Bassi when she was deprived of her liberty in early 1968 when she entered the Acapulco prison. The artist’s painting was transformed during her confinement En La Cárcel (the acronym with which she signed her works in prison, ELC) going from idyllic landscapes to dreamlike-nightmarish. Like the muralist, Bassi also painted some Christs and took up, in some of her pieces, an imaginary with religious references to create disturbing scenarios. Without a doubt, Siqueiros came to identify with the artist’s experience. In a letter he wrote and published in 1969 in solidarity with her, his own experience of imprisonment resonates:

The cruel drama of the prison has given impetus to writers and artists of great genius to find their way and thus produce masterpieces. In the concrete and current case of Sofia Bassi, an impulse towards drama that is the most fruitful source of creation… Her bitter tragedy, which demands the solidarity of all her colleagues, and the loneliness of cruel confinement would lead her life to, once released, grow that emotion. Moreover, her rigged imprisonment would leave her with a feeling of just retaliation, which would not be erased from her emotions for the rest of her life.

Daniel Garza Usabiaga, curator.