[3][4][5] After spending several months on the run from Mexican authorities disguised as a peasant, Siqueiros was eventually apprehended in Jalisco, although he would never be brought to trial and was freed shortly.

[8][9] Many details of Siqueiros's 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 himself.

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.

[11] 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 government of President Victoriano Huerta.

[citation needed] When Huerta fell in 1914, Siqueiros became enmeshed in the "post-revolutionary" infighting, as the Constitutional Army battled the diverse political factions of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata for control.

[11] In Barcelona he published a magazine, La vida Americana, in which he issued a manifesto to the artists of America to reject the decadent influence of Europe and create a new form of public art with the latest tools and technology.

[12] By 1921, when he wrote his manifesto in Vida Americana, Siqueiros had already been exposed to Marxism and seen the life of the working and rural poor while traveling with the Constitutional Army.

In "A New Direction for the New Generation of American Painters and Sculptors", he called for a "spiritual renewal" to simultaneously bring back the virtues of classical painting while infusing this style with "new values" that acknowledged the "modern machine" and the "contemporary aspects of daily life".

In his work, as well as his writing, Siqueiros sought a social realism that hailed the proletariat peoples of Mexico and the world, even as it attempted to avoid the widespread clichés of "Primitivism" and "Indianism".

Siqueiros, Rivera and Orozco worked together under Vasconcelos, who supported the muralist movement by commissioning murals for prominent buildings in Mexico City.

In 1923 Siqueiros helped found the Syndicate of Revolutionary Mexican Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, which addressed the problem of public access to art through its paper, El Machete.

The fresco features a group of pre-Conquest style workers in a funeral procession that are carrying a giant coffin, decorated with a hammer and sickle.

A feud within the Syndicate—regarding a choice between publishing El Machete or losing financial support for mural projects—led to Siqueiros moving to the forefront of the organization, when Rivera left in protest over the decision to prioritize politics over art.

Despite being dismissed from a post at the Department of Education in 1925, Siqueiros remained deeply involved in labor activities, in the Syndicate as well as the Mexican Communist Party, until he was jailed and eventually exiled in the early 1930s.

[11] After spending many years in Mexico and being heavily involved in radical political activities, Siqueiros went to Los Angeles, California in 1932 to continue his career as a muralist.

[23][24] In the early 1930s, including his time spent in Lecumberri Prison, Siqueiros produced a series of politically themed lithographs, many of which were exhibited in the United States.

In addition to floats, the Siqueiros Experimental Workshop produced a variety of posters and other ephemeral works for the CPUSA and other anti-fascist organizations in New York.

After his return, in a stairwell of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas, Siqueiros collaborated with Spanish refugee Josep Renau and the International Team of Plastic Artists to develop one of his most famous works, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, warning against the dual foes of capitalism and fascism.

An armed, brave-faced revolutionary, of unnamable class or ethnicity, confronts the machine, and a blue sky on the ceiling flanked by electrical towers displays hope for the proletariat in technological and industrial advances.

American-born poet and eventual fellow Spanish Civil War participant Edwin Rolfe was a great admirer of Siqueiros's "ability to function" as "artist and revolutionary".

[5] Following the attack, police found a shallow grave[34] on the road to the Desierto de los Leones with the body of New York Communist Robert Sheldon Harte, executed[4] by one shot to the head.

[35] Siqueiros's colleague Josep Renau completed the SME mural, transforming the generator into a machine that converts the blood of workers into coins.

Siqueiros was charged for attempted homicide, criminal association, improper use of uniform, usurpation of functions, breaking and entering, firing a firearm and robbery.

[6] Despite Siqueiros's participation in these events, he never stood trial and was given permission to leave the country to paint a mural in Chile, arranged by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

In a school library in the town of Chillán, he organized a team of artists to paint a mural which combined the heroic figures of Mexico and Chile in "Death to the Invader."

In 1957 he began work on 4,500-square-foot (420 m2) government commission for Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City; Del porfirismo a la Revolución was his biggest mural yet.

In the lobby of the Hospital de la Raza in Mexico City, he created a revolutionary multi-angular mural using new materials and techniques, For the Social Welfare of all Mexicans.

Known as the Polyforum Siqueiros, the exterior consists of 12 panels of sculpture and painting while the walls and ceiling of the interior are covered with The March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the Cosmos.

Known for making art that was easily read by the public, especially the lower classes, Siqueiros' message in The March is more difficult to decipher, though it seems to fuse two visions of human progress, one international and one based in Mexican heritage.

[43] A few days before his death, he donated his house in Polanco to the Mexican state; since 1969, it had been used for Public Art Rooms and a Museum of Mural Painting Composition.