David Alfaro Siqueiros - Youth

Youth

Many details of his childhood, including birth date, birthplace, first name, and where he grew up, were misstated during his life and long after his death, in some cases by his own reports. Often, he is reported to have been born and raised in 1898 in a town in the state of Chihuahua, and his personal names are reported to be "José David".

Siqueiros was born in 1896 the second of three children in Mexico City in 1896. He was baptized José de Jesús Alfaro Siqueiros. His father, Cipriano Alfaro, originally from Irapuato, was well-to-do. His mother was Teresa Siqueiros. Siqueiros had two siblings: a sister, Luz, three years older, and a brother Chucho, one year younger. David was four years old when his mother died and his father sent the children to live with their paternal grandparents. David’s grandfather, nicknamed "Siete Filos" ('seven knife-edges'), would have an especially strong role in his upbringing. In 1902, Siqueiros was enrolled in school in Irapuato, Guanajuato.

He credits his first rebellious influence to his sister, who had resisted their father’s religious orthodoxy. Around this time, Siqueiros was also exposed to new political ideas, mainly along the lines of anarchosyndicalism. One such political theorist was Dr. Atl, who published a manifesto in 1906 calling for Mexican artists to develop a national art and look to ancient indigenous cultures for inspiration. In 1911, aged 15, Siqueiros was involved in a student strike at the Academy of San Carlos of the National Academy of Fine Arts that protested the school's method of teaching and urged the impeachment of the school's director. Their protests eventually led to the establishment of an “open-air academy” in Santa Anita.

At the age of eighteen, Siqueiros and several of his colleagues from the School of Fine Arts joined Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutional Army fighting the Huerta government. When Huerta fell in 1914, Siqueiros became enmeshed in the “post-revolutionary” infighting, as the Constitutional Army had to battle the political factions of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata for control. His military travels around the country exposed him to Mexican culture and the raw everyday struggles of the working and rural poor. After Carranza’s forces had gained control, Siqueiros briefly returned to Mexico City to paint before traveling to Europe in 1919. First in Paris, he absorbed the influence of cubism, intrigued particularly with Paul Cézanne and the use of large blocks of intense color. While there, he also met Diego Rivera, another Mexican painter in “the big three” just on the brink of a legendary career in muralism, and traveled with him throughout Italy to study the great fresco painters of the Renaissance.