Word: muralled
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Commissioned by the National Actors' Guild to do a huge, 127-ft. mural for the Jorge Negrete Theater on the subjects of "Tragedy," "Comedy" and "Farce," Siqueiros was one-third finished before the guild's horrified Secretary-General Rodolfo Landa saw what Old Party Member Siqueiros was up to. By "Tragedy," it turned out, Siqueiros meant "the aggression of the government against the workers." A blazing blue-eyed soldier is slugging a striker while near by a mother weeps over the body of a youth draped in the Mexican flag. Sketched out on adjacent walls were Siqueiros...
Secretary-General Landa ordered the murals boarded up, explained plaintively: "The actors wanted the mural to depict scenes related to their art." Siqueiros promptly let out a cry of rage, called it wanton censorship, threatened to take the issue to the actors themselves, by "force if necessary; jail does not frighten me." With the fire of battle glinting once again in his green eyes, Siqueiros scoffed: "What kind of tragedy did you expect me to portray in a mural?°A Greek tragedy? Nonsense. For me, tragedy in present-day Mexico is the struggle of labor to become independent...
...heartbreaking. In a recent scale model, Benton had painted a birchbark canoe being set on the ground by a group of Indians. "People looking at it would ask right off what kind of damn fool Indians would be dragging a birchbark canoe across rocky ground. That changed the mural's entire design and set me back weeks. I had to do the model all over again...
Last week Missouri-born Artist Benton was meticulously documenting each projected detail for two new murals for two individualistic patrons who know their own minds: ex-President Harry Truman, who authorized a $60,000 mural for the Truman Library in Independence, and New York's Robert Moses, who wants a smaller ($21,000) piece for the New York State Power Authority administration building in Niagara Falls...
...didn't want to do any more murals," says Benton. "Painting a mural is a lot of moving and climbing around all over the thing. It's just too damned much work. But the Truman thing seemed so important, and then they all wanted me to do the second." A good mural, Benton feels, "must have a world of depth into which you can move. That kind of art is at a low ebb. Ages ago, artists were in demand to make images of a people's God. The artist was a necessity, even though he might...