David Alfaro Siqueiros

David Alfaro Siqueiros’s image of surging cloud of smoke was painted in late 1939 for a one-man show that opened on January 2, 1940 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Two of the larger works, The Sob [El sollozo] and Ethnography [Etnografía], soon entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fire was one of six smaller landscapes done on paper, originally priced at $100 each. It was acquired by dealer, scholar and collector Germain Seligman. Although Siqueiros’s subjects (landscapes and figure studies, primarily) were somewhat conventional, all seventeen works in the New York exhibition, including Fire, were created with the innovative tools and materials that the artist believed were essential for creating a modern revolutionary art. Siqueiros used an airbrush and stencils, and his chosen medium was pyroxylin, a lacquer also known by the trade name Duco. When dry, pyroxylin becomes shiny and inflexible, and while this was not a problem for the larger works done on composition board, the smaller images on paper were more fragile. Fine cracks can be seen across the surface of Fire today (the work was later remounted on a rubbery backing). Rendered in cool grays, the cloud erupts threateningly, moving towards the viewer, highlighted against a crisp blue sky. Low hills in the foreground give way to a flat horizon that may represent the reflective surface of the ocean. The airbrush brilliantly reproduces the abstract texture of the cloud: aerated paint is literally used to represent the evanescent, moving smoke. But this was more than just a formal exercise. Like The Sob, Fire acknowledges the advance of fascism in Europe and Asia, though through elegant metaphor rather than didactic pamphleteering. Four of the works on paper depicted clouds similar to those in his apocalyptic mural Portrait of the Bourgeoisie [Retrato de la burguesía] (1939-40; Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, Mexico City). Though only Oil Well on Fire [Pozo petrolero en llamas] (present whereabouts unknown) explicitly referenced wartime destruction, Fire was surely meant to recall the destruction of the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi blitzkrieg, and the Japanese advance in China.