The Electric Forest
The Electric Forest
Artist
Materials
duco on cardboard
Dimensions
19 3/4 x 27 in.
Credit line
Gift in memory of Ann Tyndall Durham
Accession number
46.74
The foreboding quality of the forest and the three tiny spotlighted figures, frozen in poses of fright and struggle, suggest the aftermath of a disaster.
The use of the explosive material pyroxylin, a fast drying duco, is in keeping with the artist's image of forces beyond man's control.
American Modernism
David Alfaro Siqueiros
The Electric Forest
duco on cardboard
19 ¾ x 27 in.
Gift in Memory of Ann Tyndall Durham
Learn More
One of the great Mexican muralists, David Siqueiros was a volatile figure who fought in the Mexican Spanish Civil Wars and was charged with attempting to murder Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary. A painter of monumental canvases with intense social commentary, Siqueiros occasionally executed smaller but still powerful works on paper. Siqueiros was born in Chihuahua City, Mexico and studied at the Franco-English College in Mexico City. By age fifteen he was already studying art and involved in political activism. He led a successful student strike at San Carlos Academy that forcee changes in their teaching methods. He was elected secretary general of Mexico’s Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors and Engravers Union. Throughout his life Siqueiros continued his activism both in his personal life, writings and in his art.
Electric Forest, one of seven landscapes composed for a 1940 exhibition in New York, exhibits the artist’s first use of pyroxylin, a cellulose nitrite substance contained in automobile paint. This explosive material is in keeping with Siqueiros’s frenzied image of the power and unpredictability of nature.
Reference
David Alfaro Siqueiros. London: Art and Revolution, Lawrence and Wishart, 1975. ISBN-13: 978-0853153290
