For the President and many members of Congress to insist that it is to support our troops that the war in Iraq must be re-funded, is to compound the deceptions that began this illegal futile bloodleeting without any end in sight. It is a shameless effort to hide behind the backs of the soldiers who risk their lives for lies. The troops are being made the human shields of the politicians.

We must not permit the Great Deceiver to frame the issue or we deceive ourselves. The truth is that the $100 billion that Bush wants from Congress is not for the troops but for his policies, which the American people voted against last November.

Part of that money is to pacify Afghanistan, which also is burdened by civil strife in addition to a bumper opium harvest, and where the US seems no longer to be pursuing its original target--Osama bin Laden.

The commander-in-chief says that he listens only to the generals in the field, but he cashiers them when they don't tell him what he wants to hear. This began with Gen. Shinseki, who told him before the war that twice as many troops would be needed as then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld insisted were sufficient for his cut-rate invasion.

More recently Generals Casey and Abizaid were brought home when they told Bush that more troops were not needed and the war couldn't be won because the Iraqi troops wouldn't do what we wanted, like show up.

Gen. Petraeus, the new commander, was appointed because he agreed to lead a "surge" that would require half as many troops as he said would be needed for counter-insurgency in the new field manual he authored. Now we are witnessing surge-creep: requests for more troops and more time.

How long will soldiers and many more civilians be killed for Bush's illusion of empire and the careerism and partisanship of members of Congress who fear they may be blamed by voters in 2008 for "losing" Iraq or for increased violence there should our troops leave before they have "won"?

Although the violence can hardly get worse that it is now, Washington keeps insisting that our troops are necessary to restrain the brutality while Iraqis blame the US for provoking it.

Our leaders don't get it or don't care: thousands of human beings--each one a universe who has only one life to lose--are being forced to die for Washington's deceit.

In fact, we are witnessing what could well be the endgame of the US Iraq adventure. It could result from the refusal of Congress to give Bush the money he wants without strings attached.

This could occur during the next few weeks when Bush vetoes the bill that Congress sends him, as he has promised, and no new combination of money and conditions under which it is to be spent can be cobbled together which he would approve. Both sides are diging in deeper.

Bush says he must have the money by April 15 or the military "will face significant disruptions." The non-partisan Congressional Research Service says the Pentagon could pay for operations until July. The stalemate between Congress and Bush means no money to continue the war and occupation: End of Bush's plans for permanent US bases in the Middle East to control the world's chief oil-bearing region: End of empire.

There would be bitter recrimination all around, much of it deserved. But American politics would finally be forced to get real. Terrorism, by both sides, low-tech and high tech, might begin to subside. And thousands of lives would be spared.

This is the website of Alan Barnett dealing with politics and art from the perspective of social justice, participatory democracy and peace.

Since high school I have been a political activist, engaged in doing art and teaching its history along with political science, philosophy and literature as part of humanities programs at San José and San Francisco State Universities. I am a veteran of the civil rights, peace and prisoners movements, as well as being a rank-and-file trade union activist, since the early 1960s. The connection I pursue between politics and art has drawn me to murals, posters and other works on paper, all of these being forms of public and social art that are widely available to people. I have written extensively, my largest piece being Community Murals: the People ’s Art, 516 pages, published by Associated University Presses, 1984. I am currently a member of the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition in Marin County, California.

My thinking and activity have been driven by the conviction of the need to reintegrate work, art and community. It takes as its premise that their union is necessary to a fulfilling and deeply satisfying life. Their divorce seems to me unnatural and crushes the human spirit. I believe that if people controlled their labor, they would work with insight, skill and style for those they care about and build community around that. At present we tolerate the separation of work, art and community not because we do not want to be creative in our daily life but because our livelihood seems to require it.

It appears to me that the greatest violence that human beings throughout history have inflicted on each other is not the intermittent warfare that takes so many lives but the continuous suppression of the talents and aptitudes of most working people by oppressive economic and political systems that control their labor. Indeed, if people could express their creativity in their work, it is likely that they would be less prone to violence.

Politics is about the control of work; it should be about people liberating their talents through the collective self-management of their occupations. Most art throughout history has been produced under the domination of state, religious and now market power. The liberation of the gifts of people requires their controlling their labor and the community nurturing and providing opportunities for what is best in its members. This is why politics and art are necessarily connected.

This website will contain shorter and longer pieces. Some of these will be commentary on current events, some longer analytical pieces on both politics and art.

The graphics on this page come from the work of the Mexican muralist José Hernández Delgadillo (1927-2000). The header is a detail of a mural done in the School of Design and Crafts in Mexico City in 1973.

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If Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice are not investigated by the House of Representatives to determine whether they should be impeached, the impartial structure of laws on which this nation is built will be discredited. Our system of justice will be undermined if the highest crimes that can be committed are not pursued with the full force of the law.

The White House cabal is finally being exposed by the press, which is beginning to recover its integrity after having failed citizens in the run-up to the war. The New York Times and other major papers have publicly confessed their negligence.

Already on June 1, 2002, the President at West Point signaled his intention of removing Saddam Hussein by a pre-emptive attack. During that summer there was little eagerness to go to war expressed by the public or Congress and least of all the press. At the end of August the Vice President before the Veterans for Foreign Wars began his hard sell, insisting that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and would use them against us as he had on 9/11. Both charges have of course by now been exposed although Cheney still refuses to take personal responsibility for them, passing them off to bad intelligence.

Through September of that year Congress seemed skeptical, and early in October the administration came up with its instant National Intelligence Estimate, extracted from the CIA with unaccustomed haste. The administration, we now know, deleted views that dissented from the case for war from the version of the NIE that it presented to most members of Congress and the public. This alone should make clear Bush’s intention to deceive us.

Panicked by impending mid-term elections in November, Congress fell into line and voted the President unconstitutional authority to go to war at his own discretion.

Then there was Bush’s allegation in his 2003 State-of-the Union address that Hussein posed an imminent threat due to his effort to purchase of weapons’ grade uranium from Niger. When it was later revealed that the evidence was known by the CIA in advance to be bogus, a Bush aide and CIA director Tenet had to take the rap.

Sixteen days before the invasion of Iraq Newsweek reported that it had learned that Hussein’s son-in-law, who was in charge of weapons production, revealed to the CIA in 1995 when he defected that all WMD had been destroyed in 1991. This should have raised serious doubts about the justification for the impending attack. But never mind, the drumbeat for war silenced dissent, except for the hundreds of thousands of protestors who took to the streets.

If the present Congress does not recognize its responsibility now to investigate and prosecute the deliberate deceptions of the Bush cabal, then it becomes complicit in the wrongs that have been committed.

Even though it may seem to be asking too much for a Republican majority to impeach a Republican president, the party will go down in history as compounding its earlier caving in to the law-breakers for partisan reasons. The only way that the party can restore its integrity is by acting in the interest of justice now.

As for the congressional Democrats, a majority of their minority in the House of Representatives and a smaller proportion in the Senate, refused in October, 2002, to be stampeded into granting the President war-making power. It should therefore be easier for them to urge impeachment even though they are still in the minority.

At very least Democrats standing for next year’s elections for the House should pledge now that if their party wins a majority, they will pursue impeachment. Given the fact that more than a majority of citizens recently polled believe that Bush lied the nation into this war and that therefore he should be impeached, the candidates’ promise to impeach should help the Democrats recover a majority in the House.

If citizens do not insist that Congress acts, they, too, must share the guilt. Many of us have lived through the impunity with which the Vietnam War was deceptively sold. Can our history tolerate another such stain? How is a future war by deceit to be prevented if we do not set this wrong right? How many more soldiers and civilians must needlessly die?

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Never has paint been so ear–splitting. His canvases rage. Banks of loud speakers turn up the decibels. Glaring brass tubas and coronets blare. Multiple red–lipped toothy mouths shout from table–top radios. Rifles gripped by steel–helmeted Wehrmacht aim at you. Flame bursts from the darkness. Terrified and terrorizing faces scream. Slogans shout from banners. The prostheses of veterans flail incoherently. A prone naked soldier with a toy tank on his chest grimaces and waves an Iron Cross. Marionettes and puppets shriek. Brueghel’s broken and hollowed–out Tower of Babel is there, its blank windows like the multitude of languages that prevent communication. Icarus screams as he plunges. Bosch’s phantasmagorias are updated in sound as well as haunting light. Cacophony assaults you, along with masks and naked flesh that are dumped in your face.

The paint is troweled on to the canvas; crusts of pigment make it more articulate. Helmets, gun muzzles, hooks and limbs seem to extrude from the surface. The acid pink, scarlet, bright citron and bitter absinthe–green screech. Nazi schwarz, weiss und rot insignia lurk under corpses. Both artist and his subjects cry out, he at them and us, they in their hysteria inflamed by leaders, entertainers, sports idols and hot metal flying unseen through the air. The effort to push sensation to its limits and synesthetically confound sight and sound are driven by an urgency to break through to viewers’ attention, to force us to come to grips with the reality we desperately try to evade by distractions.

In fact, the artist is trying both to draw our attention by all this noise and to undercut it by its excess. The cacophony, he hopes, will be self–canceling and help us hear the truth he has wrung from the clamor and violence. The multiplication of Babel’s languages will prevent work on the tower intended to assault heaven. The recklessness of Icarus flying too close to the sun will dash him to the ground.

Die Wut der Bilder (The Rage of Images) titles the retrospective of some 70 works of Bernhard Heisig, now 80 years old. The canvases have been brought together for an eight–month tour of Germany, beginning in Leipzig last May, thence to Düsseldorf, the cockpit of non–narrative painting, and now concluding in January at the Martin–Gropius–Bau, Berlin’s Municipal Museum. A previous retrospective traveled to West Germany in 1989–90 as the Wall was coming down, while the only showing of his work in the US was in a group exhibition at the same time that visited Harvard, UCLA and the University of Michigan. Heisig was not permitted by the US to accompany his work here. He participated in an earlier group show in England at Oxford in 1984.

His big works, some of them mural–scale, are intended to assault viewers and shock them out of their complacency, their refusal to recognize the reality in which they are complicit. The canvases are indictments of statism and militarism in general, in particular that of his country since Fredrick the Great and especially since the Nazis. Nor did he shrink from criticizing the East German Communist regime for which he was alternately its ornament and embarrassment.

His decades–long indictments are driven by guilt for his own acts and fury at his countrymen for their denial of theirs. At 17 he volunteered for the Nazi Waffen SS. He served in a panzer unit, driving a tank, fought in the Ardennes Forest on the Western front and defended his native Breslau in the East during a three–month siege and bombardment by the Russians. He blames the Germans as much as the Soviets for its destruction. He was seriously wounded several times and held in a Soviet prisoner camp. His mother, who had fled on foot across the battlefield during the attack, later visited her son before he was released. They returned to Breslau in 1946 to find it 70 percent destroyed and finally settled in Leipzig in what was then the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Heisig–s painting is driven by his trying to live down his youthful folly and anger at his contemporaries for not taking responsibility for collaborating with the Nazis. He says that “a sense of guilt slowly came over me.” [Christina Tilmann and Michael Zajonz, Wut erhält mich am Leben, Tagesspiegel 10.21.05] Asked if he would have acted differently knowing what he does today, he replies, “I can only say that I didn’t know any better then. I did what I thought was my duty.” In a number of his canvases a figure holds a rag protesting that “I did my duty and no more than my neighbor.” A recently repainted mural displays the disclaimer: “Saw nothing /Heard nothing/ Did nothing.” Other works show wounded veterans who manicly persevere in their patriotism. Heisig has said that, “The only thing I can really paint well is anger.” [Hanno Rauterberg, “The Only Thing I Can Really Paint Well is Anger,” Die Zeit, 3.17.05, Trans. from the German on line http://print.signandsight.com]
Bernhard Heisig was born in 1925 in Breslau, the capital of then German Silesia, (now Polish Wroclaw), which until its conquest by Frederick the Great in the 18th century was Austrian and German-speaking. By World War II it had a population of 600,000, still mainly of German descent, most of whom fled or were killed.

The son of a painter, Heisig describes himself as “sort of a child genius” whom he says his father found almost impossible to teach. It was in his studio that he received his first training. [Rauterberg] The boy entered the College of Arts and Crafts in 1941. A lithograph crayon self–portrait of the following year shows his intensity and precociousness. In 1942 he signed up with the Waffen SS. After the war Leipzig in East Germany became his home for most of his career. For 12 years now he has lived in the small rural town of Strohdene in Brandenburg. In 1947 he joined the SED (Sozialistiche Einheitspartei Duetschlnds, Socialist German Unity Party), that ruled the GDR, and was later accused of being insufficiently enthusiastic about his membership. He insists that he was then and remains a socialist, though not entirely of the kind the GDR envisioned.

Although he sought admission to the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, he could not gain entrance until 1948 and dropped out three years later because he would not succumb to official Socialist Realism, which was ironically dubbed “Socialist Idealism” because of its prescribed depiction of smiling workers devoted to their tractors and assembly lines. The authorities criticized him for his dour painting. The models he sought out were social dissidents: Bosch and Brueghel, Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckman. He was also drawn to the painterly Lovis Corinth and Oskar Kokoshka.

Heisig’s early training had been in the graphic arts and book illustration, which he continued to practice and teach throughout his career, building a reputation. The current exhibition offers a selection of his lithographs, among these a series of Prisoners of the mid-1960s that show the incarcerated stripped and forced to stand against a rough wall of which they seem to become a part. From this period are lithographs that he did for Berthold Brecht’s Mother Courage, that show her and the soldiers of the wars of the 17th century reduced to predatory survival. He also illustrated Brecht’s Three Penny Opera, riffs from which appear in his oil canvases.

Before his cast of mind was apparent he was hired as a tutor at the Hochschule, then instructor and finally elected rector, because, he said, no one else wanted the position. During his tenure he did not shrink from criticizing the authorities for wanting to impose political orthodoxy on art. In 1964 in a public address he challenged them for their paternalistic restraints on artists, calling for an art that “makes waves, provokes, attacks.” He was relieved as rector but, recanting his indiscretion, was retained to teach. He shifted back and forth from compliance to resistance and underwent interrogation and re–education by the party in 1968, doing caricatures of the authorities between sessions. He finally resigned from teaching.

Between 1968 and 79 he could do an energetic but conventional portrait of Lenin and an ambiguous one of him humorously trying to convince a skeptical old peasant. He expresses his regret for not always standing up to the authorities, for instance, to defend demonstrators who were pulled out of a procession because of their banners, but he did help the opening of an unauthorized exhibition of artists in 1985. Finally he had enough and in 1989 shortly before the tearing down of the Wall, he handed back to the East German government prizes and medals it had awarded him. “It only became clear to me then what a “pile of shit the state was,”he says. [Rauterberg]

Among his earliest freelance work were lithographs of 1951–54 on the revolution of 1848 in Essen and the Paris Commune of 1871 when the populace briefly seized the government after the Prussian defeat of the French. For him this was a defining moment of socialism that was to become a continuing subject of his canvases. Receiving a prize for his illustrations to Brecht’s Mother Courage in 1965 at the Leipzig book art exhibition, he was exhibiting around the GDR the following year. When in 1973 he mounted the first comprehensive exhibit of his work in Leipzig and Dresden, he was becoming recognized in East Germany as one of its leading artists. He had been rehabilitated and was appointed chair for the federation of art educators in Leipzig and by 1974 in all East Germany. Two years later he returned to the Leipzig Hochschule as rector to remain until 1987.

The sequence of oil canvases on the Commune between 1962 and 72 reveals how his passion loosened his design and rendering. His painting is still tight in an earlier scene of working people and militia pausing in the street before resuming their battle. But oil studies of 1963 and 64 are painted with a violence that anticipates his mature style. His brushwork in a triptych a decade later matches the fury of the revolutionaries battling the Versailles and Prussian armies backed by a Prussian officer’s uniform propped up by a tailor’s rack, bankers and a bare–breasted dancing girl. In one side panel a communard stands by an ascendant Marianne, symbol of the French people, while in the other she expires among the despairing.

In another painting that also memorializes the Commune on its centenary, Heisig compresses his imagery in a single canvas, so that the scenes become less narrative and more a montage of symbols. Shoved together are the open coffins of the communards, one still firing at the troops of Versailles, a financier with a turned–down collar and tie holding up a puppet of Napoleon III with horns as scapegoat. The dramatis personae fast–forward to troops of both World Wars, a bank of loudspeakers, a table radio and Heisig himself in the foreground in animated speech.

Already in 1964 he did Soldier’s Nightmare, which was to become the first of a series that extended into the next 17 years with titles like The Nightmare of an Ignorant Soldier. Each shows an anguished trooper, his body in various stages of undress, suspended prone above the mayhem with a toy tank on his stomach, who desperately holds up his Iron Cross and ribbon. Heisig replays obsessively his horror of battle and painfully dawning recognition of the dementia of war. In one version in a lower corner his mother is screaming at her son’s plight. The title of the 1981 culmination of the series that shows the soldier entirely stripped, is simply The Battle of the Ardennes, but the struggle depicted is in himself, still fighting to preserve a remnant of his patriotism and pride. One of his paintings of Icarus plunging naked to the ground is clearly a self–portrait and reverse image of his nightmare with toy tank and Iron Cross. Behind him is the Tower of Babel, another effort to defy human limits. Heisig was to come back to both repeatedly in other works.

The turning point of his style from realistic history painting to phantasmagoria is marked by Fortress Breslau—The City and Its Murderers of 1969. His characterization of the near total destruction of his native city, this is one of his typically ironic titles. The Nazi decision to defend it had turned it into a fortress and invited its demolition. The suspension bridge across the Oder, that curves placidly and broadens out from the opposite direction, is like a cornucopia that pours out its bitter fruit: a snaking tram stalled by the fighting crowded into the foreground. Wehrmacht soldiers reel from bullets while one soldier closest to us in a lower corner, continues to fire his machine gun. Another, still helmeted, is strung up by the neck with a caption attached: “I made a pact with the Bolshevik,” in fact to join in the destruction of the city and himself by continuing to resist for three months. Parallel to him but upside down, the nude body of a young woman, her lip–sticked mouth and teeth gaping, is trussed up by her feet above a steel–framed bed (analogous to the bridge) and just showing beneath her, a Nazi flag.

In a version of ten years later, this scene is the center of a triptych in which two nude dancers cavort against a banner whose swastika arms look like theirs and a huge black spider. On the opposite side a veteran holds up an Iron Cross while his other arm has been replaced by a hooked prosthesis. The portrait of a spiked helmeted relative hangs on the wall and the pendulum of a grandfather clock swings, as history repeats itself. The Breslau bridge was to haunt many of Heisig’s images, suggesting that the needless destruction of his native city where he grew up was a transforming experience for him.

Meanwhile Heisig followed the aging of his mother, Hildegard, in a sequence of moving portraits from at least 1966 to her death 12 years later. They show her as a small woman but tough, reflective but independent, gradually losing weight and becoming bent but at the end sitting upright, casting a sidelong glance at her son with a tentative smile. Two years earlier she seemed the survivor as the iconic bridge of Breslau and her city burn. Now she was in possession of herself. Through the succession of six portraits, the artist’s brush, which even in the first sweeps freely in bright hues, is increasingly replaced by palette knife and the tones darken, but his mother’s face remains bright. Her likeness appears in a number of his big montages of horror, a witness.

Heisig’s youngest son, Walter, also is a repeated subject, particularly after he appeared in his father’s studio one day in the uniform of the GDR, having been called up for service. Heisig rememberss that he was dumbstruck at the similarity of cut of his jacket to that of the old Wehrmacht, which he once wore. [Brochure of the Exhibition] He paints him in uniform but his face chalky, his mouth screaming, his arms out in front of him with two clenched fists. He seems both hysterical in a pose reminiscent of Hitler and terrified. Around him are the now familiar detritus of Heisig’s haunted attic: a prone soldier holding up his ribbon and Iron Cross, fragments of the Nazi banner, howling faces and a giant cosmic egg out of Bosch from which bursts an enlarged crustacean that suggests the technology of war.

During the late ’70s imagery alluding to Bosch and Brueghel appears, although their influence likely was implicit in Heisig’s earlier nightmarish landscapes crammed with human follies. Babel and Icarus, both used by Brueghel, are two versions of the effort to storm heaven, reaching for god-like power, applicable to all imperialisms. In News from the Tower of Babel (1977) a scantily dressed bunny girl pours her heart into a microphone as she sits on the canon of a tank naracistically blinded by her well–primped hair. A soccer player who balances a ball on his nose like a clown suggests the distraction of sports. Meanwhile Icarus screams while plummeting headfirst to earth.

Heisig’s studio became the setting for his phantasmagoria with his collection of stuffed dressmaker dummies, marionettes, puppets and masks that suggest manipulation by leaders and the misuse of art. Das Atelier of 1979 shows his studio crowded with a live nude model amid props, including a shiny tuba, jester’s cap and bells as well as a maquette of Babel. A prone stuffed dummy with its legs akimbo and a black hand grasping the air is being examined by a barely dressed young woman. Falling backwards, he recalls the artist’s naked image of himself and Icarus in other paintings. A helmeted soldier charges in with a rifle at the ready: Heisig was still struggling with his demons. Meanwhile his mother looks in from a grandfather’s clock. To provide even more immediacy, the artist’s hand with brush reaches in from the edge applying paint to the nude model’s thigh.

In The Persistence of Forgetfulness, also of 1977, a shouting veteran, who has only one limb intact with which he proudly holds up an Iron Cross, kicks up a wooden leg, as if goose–stepping had become automatic. His own wounding and the corpses of his comrades that sprawl beneath him make no difference, in fact steel him in his militarism. Meanwhile naked lovers embrace, and a jester in cap and bells thumps on his big tuba. Above a tumult of mouths a carnival banner is stretched by cables to read: “We Are Still Brothers and Sisters,” as if their heroics had made them so.

Christ Refuses Obedience is one of his most powerful paintings. In the second of a pair that he was doing between 1984 to 88, a bare–chested soldier with a dog-tag and a red wound in his side grimaces as he rips off the crown of thorns from his bleeding brow and pulls away from the cross. This is said to be a self–portrait. [Exhibition leaflet] The more traditional crucified Christ lies in the shadows. They are enveloped by grotesque human masks and a bullnecked storm trooper (or is he a Teutonic Hell’s Angel?) in the foreground and skeletal puppets at the side, recalling James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels of 1888. One skeleton pulls a gag across the mouth of a man. A big banner suspended by cords reads: “Everyone So Wise, Judge,” while “Ja,Ja,Ja” are shouted for crucifixion by faceless mouths.

Heisig was led to examine the origins of German authoritarianism that took him first to the repression of the socialist-led revolution of 1848 against the Prussian monarchy. From his works on this the exhibition offers The First Civic Duty of 1977, that takes its title from the words of the counter–revolutionary general who proclaimed that “The first duty of citizens is order.” The canvas narrows in on the tumult with the rifles and bayonets of faceless soldiers over the sprawling corpse of a spike–helmeted officer while civilians rush forward and shout, one of them recognizable as Heisig vehmently points in accusation towards us.

The exploration of German history took Heisig back two centuries to Fredrick II, whom the artist presents as the progenitor of German militarism. A series since 1996 on the fighting kaiser display a mad violence that seems the more incongruous because of the decorative white knee britches, blue jackets and cocked hats of the troops that remind you of toy soldiers. Their orderly ranks that reach to the horizon are shattered as the first bullets take their toll. Faces howl in horror as their counterparts would continue to do in the centuries to follow. Fredrick holds the head of his close aide whose execution he ordered when he was exposed as homosexual. As Heisig pursued the subject of Frederick, his subject seems to age and become more crazed and the artist’s rendering more ragged.





During these same years Heisig did a number of smaller works on anti–Semitism. One, The Hunted of 1989, shows in the shadows a lonely white bearded old man with a yellow star on his coat grasping the railing carefully as he trudges up the stairs of what seems an apartment building. A bit of light catches his cheek and a larger spot the street seen through a window, suggesting his being forced to withdraw increasing from the world.

The title of another work, Two German Painters, done in 1992, is important because they are Jews, who as such were denied their citizenship by the Nazis. In the sunny background “Jew House” is scrawled on a building and two caskets are being borne through the street. The two artists are in the shadowed foreground. Felix Nussbaum with a yellow star on his coat holds up his identity card, as he appears in a self-portrait that became famous. He had successfully eluded the Nazis until just before liberation when he was captured, deported to Auschwitz and murdered. Behind him is Max Liebermann, the god–father of German modern art, who in 1898 led the Secession from the Berlin Association of Artists in a demand for artistic freedom. After World War I and the discrediting of anti-Semitism, which the Kaiser had formerly given license, Liebermann was selected head of the Prussian Academy. But the advent of Nazism brought back discrimination, and Liebermann died depressed in 1935. Heisig borrows from a well–known photo for his image of the bent old man with a poster of Hitler behind him.

Heisig summed up his view of the world and career in three murals. One of them, Men, War and Old Painter, dates from 2002–04. Near the center and larger than the other faces is Heisig himself, brush in hand, glancing sidelong at his entire repertoire of imagery, but in particular a woman, in a dark cloak (perhaps his deceased mother} flying off in a dark coat. She is connected by a pair of spurting arteries to a giant golden egg yoke or sun (the source of life?)These lifelines suggest that human blood is incendiary. She flies towards a burning apocalyptic Babel, as if this is the trajectory of life, from fire to fire. Near Heisig is his stock ironic image of a worker with the strip of cloth affirming that “I did my duty like my neighbor.” The rest is a city in flame and heap of heads, including von Hindenburg (German World War I commander who later as president invited Hitler to become chancellor) Hitler himself, Nussbaum, faceless Wehrmacht helmets aiming and shooting, a brass band, the Pope, women of high society and laughing populace. Dante’s Inferno burns in this world.

A yet larger work, composed of five panels, Yesterday and in Our Age, was begun in 1974 with revisions completed in 2005. It is an encyclopedic historical panorama and critique. It, too, is not so much a centralized composition as episodic, a montage of incidents, notables and themes familiar in Heisig. The central figure is hardly more prominent than the largest figures in the other panels. He is Heisig’s anti–hero, a worker in sleeveless undershirt who holds a piece of cloth with the broken message: “We only did our duty/No one is more guilty than his neighbor/No one is more cowardly than his neighbor/Doer of our duty.” Next to him a worker submits to crucifixion. Below a chorus of soldiers and civilians presumably shout the same message as coils of brass tubas blare and further down one person covers his mouth, while Heisig himself looks on. Other workers, some in concentration camp stripes, guarded by a soldier, dig the earth. Behind, Mother Courage, desperate to protect her children, pulls her wagon across battlefields on a little stage. Scantily clad ladies join the chorus, and behind them the Tower of Babel looms, symbol of the human welter before us.

The left panel offers a central kiosk with loudspeakers massed at the top and advertisements of grimacing and shouting girlie mouths along with a poster of von Hindenburg. In the lower left corner a prisoner raises his arms in irons to point an accusatory finger toward Hitler. Confronted by this defiance, Der Führer crumples hysterically while a rigid watching Wehrmacht soldier turns out to be only a tailor’s rack fitted with a uniform and helmet.

The right–hand panels are devoted first to the Paris Commune and a US soldier collaring a guitar-playing protester while the Statue of Liberty looms behind them. A longhaired hippie holds up a placard: “Stop the World. I Want to Get Off.” Icarus plummets again into a bloody sea where a shark surfaces,alluding not only to Mac the Knife in Brecht–s song, but to a world become predatory. Meanwhile three figures, a jester, a blindfolded bald bourgeois and a third looking at his hands are explained by captions: “Saw nothing/Heard nothing/Did nothing.”

Withdrawn from the mural or painted over is a panel that appears in the catalog showing smiling workers, one nursing an infant, and an older woman wearing GDR medals. This seems to have been an early version intended to conform with the authorities’ wishes. With the exception of those who resisted authority—the Communards, the anti–Nazi prisoner and long&ndashhaired protestors in this mural, and elsewhere the soldier ripping off a crown of thorns and insertions of his mother’s face as an antidote in his painted indictments, Heisig rejected positive images in his narrative works. It seems that it was not that he was opposed to the ideal of the worker enjoying his labor—he claimed after all to be a socialist—but he refused to join with officials who used that goal to legitimize their control.

A third mural, Time and Life, done for a Reichstag cafeteria, dating from 1999, pulls together many of Heisig’s familiar images and generated heated controversy as to whether an artist of the GDR, that some regarded a criminal regime, should be hung in the legislature of united Germany.
The influence of Berthold Brecht on Heisig is pervasive. In one painting Brecht’s Jenny wails into a microphone imagining herself a pirate who will revenge the ignominy of her life. The dramatist’s impact reached to the artist’s very conception of painting and composition. The painter&rsquos pandemonium, his pushing painting to its limits, inflicting his scene on you, generates what Brecht called an “alienation effect” intended to move viewers to distance themselves from the action, forestalling identification with the characters so that you will critically examine their and your own conduct. [David Elliott suggests Brecht’s alienation effect is a general feature of the work of the GDR artists, including Heisig, which were shown at Oxford in 1984. He does not go into any detail, and does not specifically refer to Heisig’s use of this. See the catalog of the exhibition, Tradition and Renewal, Oxford, England: Museum of Modern Art, 1984, p. 10]

This tactic of detaching viewers from personal involvement yet drawing their attention, even fascination, is also accomplished by the provocative slogans and messages strung up in the paintings of Heisig. Again like Brecht, it is pressed on you that you are confronting a make–believe scene so as not to lose yourself in it. The artifice and illusion are part of a more complex reality that includes both and forces you to try to decipher what is real. Brecht and Heisig entertain and absorb us by taking us behind the scenes, flaunting rather than concealing their artifice with a view to debunking the pompous flimflam of the establishment.

The strategy of both is not mimesis, that is, telling a story, but the analysis of the human condition by selecting illuminating though not necessarily directly connected episodess. Viewers by being lured into figuring out what they see are led to re–evaluate their own conduct. While theater and painting usually invite you to savor someone else’s reality, Heisig like Brecht wants his viewers to rethink it, realize that it did not have to be this way and change their own lives. The idea is not only to induce viewers’ pity and fear. It is not to give them a thorough–going catharsis at contemplating an unavoidable catastrophe of heroic but flawed persons, but to help them see how they and we are responsible for our own disasters and could prevent them if we wanted. The point is: reality is artifice, something we can make or unmake. But there are also consequences and limits, as Icarus, the builders of Babel and militarists discover.

Heisig’s settings are often his studio with all its paraphernalia of conjuring tricks: masks, puppets, marionettes, dummies, live models and maquettes. Or you are at the carnival with its clowns, freaks, masquerades. With these props implying how people can be manipulated, he exposes a world of patriotic illusions and unthinking violence from which a young soldier, later veteran, struggles to disabuse himself. Which is intended to help viewers also to clarify their vision. Art becomes an instrument of demystification and re–engagement.

Another analog to Brecht is Heisig’s use of montage and welding together seemingly disparate images and episodes from different times and places. These include his nightmarish scenes of his own war experience, the inclusion of Babel and Icarus in modern contexts, a charging soldier invading his studio, his mother witnessing these scenes. Heisig’s pulling in far–flung references to throw new light on the issue leads him to expand his canvases into tryptiches and five–panel murals or to divide up a single panel into framed sub–sections, such as the one that exposes different aspects of Fredrick II’s rule.

Large or of medium scale, these canvases are sprawling but calculated scrambles of images and words. They are universes. No part dominates the others, but each throws light on an enfolding reality. In general, Heisig’s canvases do not tell a story or display a consistent setting; they present conflicting and re-enforcing examples, each evocative, intended to build a new conception of things or pose problems that make it difficult for us to evade. This is comparable to what Brecht called “epic theater,” in which there was no tight narrative sequence as in a conventional drama so much as a series of mutually illuminating juxtapositions. By “epic” Brecht seems to have intended a structure composed of varied, discontinuous scenes that cut across time and place, encompassing human history and revealing its perennial plights.

Heisig’s art like Brecht’s is shamelessly didactic, intent on getting viewers to reflect and learn. This is a problem since people resist being told what they should think. And neither artist does. They are problem–posing rather than problem–solving. But they insist on the destructiveness of the way we currently live, forcing on us the responsibility of choosing a solution, while not imposing one themselves. Both artist and dramatist try to overcome resistance by surprise, irony, extreme spectacle and sensory assault, Heisig by brilliant color and stridency, Brecht by song and dance.

They are convincing also because of their unflinching realism, their refusal to sentimentalize. The world they present is unforgiving. It is largely of anti–heroes, its most attractive figures rough–hewn and shrewd. Mother Courage fails to save her three children during the Thirty Years War because as a peddler to opposing armies she is small‐time war profiteerer who gets carried away by haggling for a better deal. While we may be tempted to admire her durability, what is pressed on us by Brecht and Heisig is her becoming a victim of her own unscrupulousness. But some of Heisig’s images of her look like those he did of his mother, whom he shows as someone who has seen everything and remains unbending to the end.
Heisig’s criticism of his contemporaries, one might complain, is only an effort to shake off his own guilt. But he is the first to declare his responsibility and paints not only to confess it and work through his pain but to persuade his contemporaries to do the same and, even more important, to act so as to prevent what he and they perpetrated and condoned from ever happening again.

These are not paintings for your dining room. They are public art appropriate to government buildings and schools in particular, museums of course.

Heisig is important because he presents the overwhelming issue of our time with both passion and craftsmanship. That issue is war, in particular, aggressive, unprovoked war. What is special about Heisig’s indictment is his holding himself and fellow citizens responsible for enthusiastically collaborating with and not resisting state terrorism. It is not so much the Nazi leaders whom he condemns. He accuses those like himself who eagerly enlisted and the public who supported the bigotry, nationalism and militarism that empowered their leaders, who had begun as angry and ambitious small–timers. He decries the evasions of people, their effort to exonerate themselves and their persistence in self–justification and what they continue to believe is patriotism. He exposes how they use the wounds they have suffered to reinforce their belief in the righteousness of force. He presents collective aggression as a dementia that not only wrecks carnage on others but is self–destructive, threatening total catastrophe. As socialists, Heisig and Brecht argue that the people can only save themselves from this and exploitative leaders by taking control themselves and building an egalitarian society. It was by lending themselves to a class–divided society that they drew the worst out of themselves.

Asked if his painting has relevance to the fighting in Iraq today, he says that he is also asked why he keeps painting about the past since it is over. [Tilmann and Zajonz] He replies to both questions that he must understand the past to comprehend the present. “Nothing is over.” His art, he says is a reflection on history. He adds that he wants to avoid an art of lemmings who rush blindly to their own extinction.

He connects the Tower of Babel’s attempt to reach the heavens and Icarus flying too close to the sun to the ambitions of Frederick II, Bismarck, Hitler, and, most important, his fellow human beings today in whom he sees the same threat. That is why he paints. Nothing could be more relevant when once again the West has undertaken a new crusade and empire building. In this age of world wars and war against terrorism, when the state in its self-proclaimed effort to protect civilians kills ten times as many as soldiers, reversing the proportion of a hundred years ago, Heisig’s paintings are nothing if not attacks on the hypocrisy of the “civilized.”

If there is any work that is akin to his, it is the Catharsis of José Clemente Orozco, a mural painted in 1934. It is a huge tangle of political bosses, prostitutes, the populace charging off in opposite directions brandishing weapons, all depicting the betrayal of the Mexican Revolution. In his apocalyptic works Orozco like Heisig attacks not so much leaders as the common people for permitting themselves to fall prey to them. Both artists hold those whom they most care about as responsible for leaders who exploit their weaknesses, their greed, carnality and eagerness to attach themselves to power.

What has provoked criticism is not only Heisig’s message but that his art is even the bearer of a message in this age when painting is supposed to have freed itself from that burden. He of course would say that this is just one of the evasions of our reality as socially responsible beings that puts our very existence at risk. His message is our pursuit of distractions as well as illusions of grandeur. His achievement is self–knowledge in spite of its cost in personal humiliation and seeking to share his understanding not only with his countrymen but with us.

Heisig has contrived the means to command our attention in spite of our resistance. Both his composition and painting technique grab you. The slashing pigmentation appeals because of its vigor but also its savvy ability to simulate appearances, for instance, the glare of polished brass horns and dull metal of helmets. His painting engages us also by its sheer lushness and clashing hues. Heisig invites us to indulge in the mixing of the senses, the transformation of the visual into the acoustic. Finally he exploits the sound and fury, the in–your–face shock, not as an end in itself like the pyrotechnics of the entertainment media, but inversely to yield the silence of reflection.
***
Photo credits. All color illustrations used here were taken from the catalog "Bernhard Heisig: Die Wut der Bilder," edited by Eckhart Gillen and published in Köln, Germany, by Dumont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2005. The two black and white illustrations are from Berthold Brecht,"Mother Courage," illustrated by Bernhard Heisig, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 2001.

(Click on the images for enlargement.)

He is safely dead. He will no longer be a thorn in the side of Mexico’s oligarchs—its presidents and politicos, its labor bosses and business tycoons. He also did not hesitate to criticize publicly those artists who failed to take them on.

Mexico’s greatest political artist of the last third of the 20th century died December 26, 2000. The name of José Hernández Delgadillo was sufficiently recognizable in Mexico for him to be nominated for president on the Socialist ticket in that country’s first primary election in 1987. No other Mexican artist, not even Rivera, Orozco or Siqueiros, los Tres Grandes, could claim as much. As matters turned out, the left opposition to PRI (the Partido Revolutionario Institutional) that had ruled Mexico since 1929, finally chose Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who had defected from PRI. He was not a socialist at all but a “progressive democrat,” as Delgadillo described him, but that was enough for the painter, and he devoted his skills as a muralist to the Cárdenas candidacy. On election night the computers counting the votes “were allowed” to break down. After eight days the PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas, was declared the winner with 50.7% of the votes. Like millions who protested in the streets, Delgadillo believed that Cárdenas actually had won. Because PRI held all positions of state power, Cárdenas conceded in the interest of preserving peace. Delgadillo believed that decision was a major mistake.

Delgadillo was selected as a presidential candidate because he had worked with the disenfranchised all over Mexico—trade unions and campesino associations independent of PRI control, as well as university, polytechnic and secondary students, who traditionally had been a source of democratic socialist activism. He sought to give them a voice, not only by participating in their planning but also engaging them in painting big brazen billboard–like graphics inside and outside their meeting halls and classrooms, along major thoroughfares, even on a barn. Since 1969 he had absorbed himself with creating these works of political art—murals and monumental sculpture—and could count over 200 of them before his death. What is compelling about them is that they are not just propaganda, which they are in the best sense; they are powerful art, drawing not only on the tradition of Social Realism but also on Aztec and Mayan design and his own passionate heart, his gran corazón.
***
Delgadillo’s life is like that of a hero of a picaresque novel, a Don Quixote, not of self–delusion, but a creator of new realities, an itinerant battler against oppression, driven by an unquenchable thirst for social justice and armed with the talent and ingenuity to succeed. It is well to recall that Che Guevara thought of his compañeros and himself fighting against all odds in the Sierra Maestra as Don Quixotes.)

Delgadillo was born in 1928 in Tepeapulco in the state of Hidalgo in the heart of Mexico. [This information about his early life is derived mainly from his Autobiographical Notes, transcribed by his friend Benito Balam in 1981 and translated by Catalina Sherwell Hand in 2003] His father, Francisco Hernández Islas, an apprentice saddle–maker at 13, was kidnapped during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 by an army allied to the Zapatistas and in two years rose to the rank of captain. He was released to take care of his family when his father, searching for him, was mistakenly killed by his son’s troops. Francisco married María de la Paz Delgadillo, whose parents were landowners in the state of Tlaxcala near Puebla. Although they lost ownership of their hacienda during the Revolution, Delgadillo remembers in his Autobiographical Notes its distemper murals depicting local daily life with the peons painted smaller than their master. The large house where he lived until he was seven also was decorated with murals that he describes as “very beautiful.” The art he grew up surrounded by clearly made an impact on him. From his father he gained a strong sense of justice, he says, and from his mother, who occasionally painted, a love for art and literature. As a boy Delgadillo would accompany his father to work in the fields and hunt in the mountains, mixing with the workers and their children who brought maguey to the fermenter that his father owned to be prepared for pulque. They became the subjects of his early drawings. The fledgling artist also was interested in politics by one of his teachers in elementary school. The boy read the newspaper daily, absorbed by the coming of World War II and developing early a hostility to imperialism and the United States.

A teacher encouraged him to go to a rural normal school to become a teacher himself. There he studied with the sons of campesinos, who greatly influenced him as a result of their doing farm labor together. Another teacher introduced him to the Mexican Communist Party that he joined. But he says he did not understand at the time the hammers, sickles and red banners in the murals that had been done in an auditorium converted from the chapel of a nearby hacienda.. His talent was discovered by a biology teacher when he was not paying attention and had to disclose the drawing he was doing of him. As a result he was appointed the illustrator of the school newspaper. He describes how on travelling to Puebla for paints he barely escaped with his life when he came under machine-gun fire as governing party thugs attacked the office of a rival candidate. That was in 1940 and his first encounter with political violence.

It was his copying of bullfight posters (he had done some bullfighting himself) that attracted the attention of a well–known matador in 1945 who offered to take him to Mexico City where he was introduced to the prominent painter Carlos Ruano Llopis. He referred the young man to a disciple, Antonio Navarrete Trejo, whose apprentice he became, developing his drawing and oil technique. Meanwhile he supported himself by clerking in a wholesale grocery and making furniture and pottery. Visiting museums and exhibits, he discovered los Tres Grandes, preferring Orozco to Rivera and Siqueiros. He painted working people and landscapes, as well as portraits, selling them to tradesmen and friends, soon making it possible for him to live off his painting. He had his first one-man exhibit in 1954. The following year he enrolled in La Esmeralda (The National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving), studying with Pablo O’Higgins and Ignacio Aguirre, whom he regarded outstanding teachers. O’Higgins had come from the US in the 1920s to do murals with Rivera and became one of the major figures of the second generation of the Mexican muralists and graphic artists of the Taller de Gráfica Popular. It was O’Higgins that Delgadillo credits with teaching him al fresco technique, that is, painting on wet plaster so that the pigment becomes part of the wall.

Delgadillo did his first mural in 1957 as part of his training. It was across the street from La Esmeralda in the Escuela Niños Héroes, an elementary school. In those days every public building had to have a mural, and doing one was frequently part of an art student’s training. Delgadillo’s was a traditional fresco facing an open-air patio. In the monumental manner of Orozco’s murals in the patio of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria it displays a march of indigenous people in their native garb through their village with a banner calling for justice and schools. Delgadillo says that it represents a boy whose father was killed violently in the fields, parting from his mother to go off to school. The mural was damaged by the earthquake of 1985, and the cracks were filled with plaster and left unpainted. Orozco was to remain a strong influence on Delgadillo’s work after 1968, but it was the older artist’s expressionistic Man of Fire theme and style that was to inspire him rather than his earlier solid forms that his young admirer took as a model here.

Between 1956 and ’61 Delgadillo worked in an office doing architectural drafting and engineering for the government of the Federal District, participating in the design of the central Merced and Jamaica markets of the capital. This experience as a draftsman together with his early determination to master the academic drawing of the human figure were important skills he could utilize later. While at the Esmeralda he began to paint more freely, admiring the work not only of Orozco, but also Siqueiros and Picasso. In 1959 and ’60 he received public commissions for high relief sculpture in concrete for the arena in the Magdalena Mixuca Sports City, and he designed a 25–meter high symbol of the book fair there and murals in pavilions. By now he had decided to take as his surname, his mother’s maiden name rather than his father’s because, he said, “Delgadillo” was less common than “Hernández.”

During most of the 1960s he confined himself to easel painting, some very sizable. Most of it was of rough-hewn and shadowy hulking figures even having difficulty to breathe in a murky ambience of oppression and war. Hombres, a work of 1961, shows two haunted figures, one robust, yet shielding his body with his arms, the other behind, skeletal, suggesting a photo negative, as if exposed to atomic radiation. It won him a scholarship to Paris for six months, but he remained there two years partly through commissions by the Mexican government. During his stay he learned French, the only foreign language that he could speak. His work brought him considerable recognition although his principal motif during the decade was the human figure at a time when it was out of fashion in the international art circles dominated by abstraction, both gestural and hard edged. He was one of a group of artists who were utilizing the human form to express the plight of mankind in the face of violence, especially the Cold War that was not cold at all in Latin America and Vietnam while threatening to engulf everyone in thermonuclear apocalypse. These artists did not share a common analysis, ideology or politics. Indeed, most were non-political. Nor did they join together in any lasting association. It was precisely their separateness and alienation that characterized them. It was only this shared sense of helplessness conveyed by the use of the vulnerable human body that united them in the minds of a number of art critics who described them as the “New Humanism,” “Interiorists” or even more vaguely in the self-characterization of some of the Mexican artists who exhibited together, “The New Presence” (La Nueva Presencia).

Individualism prevailed, and the Mexican Mural Movement that had flourished during the post-Revolutionary era was now in eclipse. But the veterans of this socially concerned art, who were organized in the Salón de la Plástica Méxicana, invited Delgadillo to become a member in 1961 and he exhibited in their annual shows. The Salón, although funded by the government, was governed by the artists themselves, and Delgadillo was to serve on its board of directors. Artists still received a few state commissions to do public art but simply repeated the old themes, which had lost their political and artistic credibility. Delgadillo himself complained of this although he designed a mural in 1963 for a building of PRI and received second prize for his efforts. For most young ambitious Mexican artists it was the abstract styles that had emerged in the United States during the 1940s and ’50s that they belatedly embraced in the hope that they would gain distinction and clients.

Having exhibited widely during the ’60s, particularly in Europe but also gaining a one–man show in Beverly Hills in 1967, Delgadillo began undertaking new projects in Mexico City that year. On the basis of his growing reputation and connections, he received a government commission to design murals for the newly completed Metro in the capital. Based on his knowledge of the Paris Metro together with his architectural and engineering experience gleaned a decade earlier, he rejected the temptation to repeat the worn out themes of the Mexican Revolution and instead submitted a complex proposal using new materials and technologies for public art. The government wanted him to do the murals by himself or with assistants, but, while he believed that he possessed the skills to carry out the project on his own, he felt it would be wrong not to share the design and execution of the project with other artists. This led to his abandoning it altogether.
***
All of this was to change utterly. Delgadillo was caught up in the popular demonstrations led by students in 1968 that galvanized the widespread grievances that had been accumulating since the end of the Revolution in 1920. Most of the government leaders for a quarter of a century after the Revolution had been generals and officers in its armies who had seized power but had co-opted its causes of free elections, the distribution of land to those who tilled it, collective bargaining by trade unions, public education and social welfare. They made only token concessions to consolidate their power. Among these were the encouraging of murals on revolutionary and nationalist themes. Muralists had been from the end of the Revolution among its chief advocates but also the most outspoken critics of officials and bosses who had assumed its mantel. Because the government sought to trumpet its revolutionary achievements, it found it difficult to gag its artist critics, particularly when they won international fame. The former generals, now politicians, allied themselves with the bosses of labor unions and campesino associations, forming in 1929 the predecessor of what was to become the Partido Revolucionario Institutional, which constituted a nationwide political machine that managed to remain in power for 70 years, the longest regime of any nation in the world during the 20th century with the exception of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, which ruled only four years longer. The 19th century oligarchy of regional magnates, caudillos, who had presided over enormous estates and populations, now was replaced by a new oligarchy appropriate to an industrial, urbanizing society but one in which agriculture continued to play a major role. Party bigwigs initially rebuffed corporate business, especially foreign and particularly US investors, nationalizing the nation’s rich oil resources in 1938 and grabbing for themselves government contracts in all types of production. Mexico developed economically as a semi–modern nation run by a network of bureaucracies with everyone dependent on favors and connections under the domination of party magnates.

During World War II private fortunes had been made in industry and agriculture supplying the US with consumers goods and food while its domestic production had been channeled to armaments. By the 1950s the PRI oligarchs were collaborating with investors and industrialists outside their circle and from the US. The government had never met its full legal obligations to create new community-owned countryside, the ejidos, by redistributing the land of the pre–revolutionary haciendas. The state insured the votes of campesinos by controlling the distribution of seed and deciding who should receive roads and irrigation. The disparities between rich and poor increased with campesinos being driven from the land by US agribusiness investors to shan-tytowns (colonias proletarias, ciudades olvidades) on the margins of the cities. The wages of industrial workers lagged for years, and strikes had been severely repressed. Workers and civil servants’ demands for unions independent of PRI control were denied, often violently. PRI had never allowed itself to be defeated in presidential or gubernatorial elections In the mid–60s the government also clamped down on efforts to open the nominating process for public office and annulled mayoral elections that the party had lost. In 1968 civil servants con-trasted the low level of their pay with the cost the state was spending on preparations for the impending Olympic Games. The international competitions were intended to show the world the results of three decades of rapid develop-ment, Mexico’s economic “miracle” that had in fact imiserated much of its population.

These contradictions were brought to a head during the summer of ’68 as the result of a tiff between two secondary schools which escalated because of police over-reaction. Street demonstrations followed, and the brutality of the authorities drew in the students of University and Polytechnic students, then the middle sectors of the population with their varied grievances against the government. As elsewhere around the world that year, students became the advocates of truly representative government. Because these moderate demands were denied, people in all sectors—workers, campesinos, professional people whose advancement was stymied, and especially students, increasingly took matters into their own hands to dismantle the political machine. They called for participatory democracy, auto–gestión (workers’ self–management) and authentic community control in the urban barrios and the ejidos. They were demanding direct citizen involvement in public decision–making at the workplace as well as constituencies, direct democracy. The students formed a Consejo Nacional de Huelga (National Strike Council).

On October 2, ten days before the beginning of the Olympic Games, some 5,000 protestors marched to Tlatelolco near Mexico City’s Centro for a rally. It had in the 1960s become a show-place re-development project. The Foreign Ministry and affordable residential high-rises were built around the Plaza de las Tres Culturas with its Aztec remains and a colonial church. As the crowd was about to break up, tanks and troops suddenly appeared and shots rang out. It became a killing-ground. Afterwards the government charged that students had begun the fray by firing on the soldiers.

It was only in the last few years that the truth of Tlatelolco has begun to be exposed. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, fearing that the demonstrations would embarrass his government if they continued to the Olympic Games, ordered that snipers place themselves in the apartment buildings that flanked the plaza and fire on the soldiers below so as to provoke their shooting into the crowd. Luis Echeverria, head of the Interior Ministry and later to become president, directed the attack. One of the first to be hit was a general in command of a paratroop battalion. [Sam Dillon, “Anniversary of ’68 Massacre Brings Facts to Light,” NY Times, Sept. 14, 1998] Between 200 and 1,500 were killed. Some 2,000 demonstrators were beaten and jailed. The number of dead could not be verified because the army quickly carried off the bodies.

Delgadillo, whose mother and sister had an apartment at Tlatelolco, was not present at the shooting, he said, because he was repairing a crack that had developed in an elaborate mobile sculpture he was working on in the basement of the Palacio de Bellas Artes a mile away. While down there, he heard the shooting. The massacre changed his life and art. As he wrote, “From 1968,the year of the brutal repression of the Mexican people, I decided to take their side in order to struggle against this unjust system directed by the upper bourgeoisie and imperialism.” [Statement in Presencia del Salón de la Plástica Méxicana, INBA, 1977]

At that time Delgadillo was teaching at the Esmeralda, and his prestige was such that in 1969 he had been made director of art for the Centro Residencial Morelos, another new affordable housing project in the capital. The project was financed and under the direction of the National Bank of Mexico. Delgadillo and 24 of his students did 40 murals between the rows of windows at ground level. The students were given freedom in the design of their works. Delgadillo contributed at least three and likely more of these. His pieces depict robust women and men seated on the ground in conversation or watching the residents pass. The figures are monumental like sculpture, garbed in flecked apparel with even legs x–rayed to take advantage of the pattern of bones. These are impersonal decorative works that bear a resemblance to his more haunted, atmospheric easel work of the 1960s. A particularly beautiful even more abstract composition using these forms is a bas relief mural he created using polyester. But one of the panels shows a blindfold bandaged bound figure, seemingly beaten into submission while another is prone on the ground. “69” is stamped on the first, its numerals awry, while the date is partially shone again, as if to drive home the aftermath of the tragedy. This was his first mural explicitly about the political oppression of the time, although his earlier painting of the 1960s alluded to the general ambience of foreboding.

Meanwhile, Delgadillo along with two other well–established artists, Benito Messaguer and José Capdevila, designed three murals composed of fully abstract forms about 20 feet wide and rise from the ground the full 15–story height of the towers, perhaps 150 feet. Similar works were being done about the same time in New York City where they were called “supergraphics.” They were to become ubiquitous around Mexico City and the world over the next decade, employed to decorate bare walls of high rises. Delgadillo and his compañeros, following the traditional method of fresco muralists, picked out their designs on full–scale paper so that craftsmen could mount the sheets on the wall, charcoal through the holes, strip off the paper and recreate the design. Workmen who were used to the height then airbrushed the final murals. The results were impersonal, without meaning, simply rather elegant shapes floating along the flanks of the towers that broke up the rigid rows of windows and brick corners.

But the final work of the project marked a turning–point for Delgadillo. Without advising the bank, he decided to com-memorate the victims of Tla-telolco. In the center of a little plaza among the apart-ment towers, he created a three–story high free–stand-ing monument in crusted concrete (cemento de arena) around a steel armature. There are three separate pieces. In the grass lies a twice–life–size severed head painted bone–white and screaming at the sky. The remaining pieces are unpainted raw gray concrete. Resting on a simulated tombstone, a massive casket on its side exposes the corpse inside, its body wrapped in bandage-like straps. Behind it a big arm rises in a pledge, its muscles and tendons echoing the casket straps. Stark abstract pattern is adapted to the human forms with a view to expressing a deeply felt message, a mix Delgadillo used in some of the murals here at the Residencia and was to pursue elsewhere. A journalist described the work as La Noche de la Tinta Negra, (The Night As Black As Ink), and the name has stuck. Tlatelolco changed Delgadillo’s art and life, and this work signifies that transformation. His previous painting depicted passive victims. It had been characterized by introverted pathos. This monument and his following work was also about victims, but they now resist. The transformation is from plight to fight. His adoption of new stylistic means embodied this. From the murky stippled images of suffering there suddenly appear hard–edge figures of resistance. With this work he put at risk a promising career within the art establishment to commit himself to an art of popular protest and proletarian revolution.

In his autobiography Delgadillo says that after Tlatelolco, he decided never to work for the government or its private affiliates again. He refused to cooperate with a regime that abused its people, and he insisted on artists’ freedom of expression. In 1975 the government offered to send him and his works on an international tour, but he refused. Such an exhibit of protest art, he said, would lend credence to the authorities’ claim that free speech and democracy existed in Mexico. He would do as few things for the private sector as possible, only for a minimal livelihood, and these usually were political in theme. Some of these works were on exhibit and available to purchase at the Salón de la Plastica Méxicana and a private gallery, Mer Kup, that handled his pieces for many years. He now sought to devote himself mainly to serve what he saw as the “ongoing revolution.” He joined together with other artists, singers and actors of the Arte Colectivo en Acción. He did illustrations for magazines, newspapers and other publications, like small books of poetry, as well as covers for phonograph records and tape recordings devoted to revolution and distributed to students, workers and the popular sector. This was one of the tasks to engage him for the rest of his life. Delgadillo says that the “massive mobilizations of the people of 1968 and the fascist tendencies of the Mexican government that turned Mexico City in just a matter of days into a terrorized city” that culminated in the massacre of Tlatelolco moved him to study Marxism to understand what was happening. Although he had joined the Mexican Communist Party while a student in normal school, by the time of Tlatelolco he appears to have left it, realizing that many of its members were opportunistic, willing to sacrifice their politics to their careers or, on the other hand, become ciphers of Stalinism.

Tlatelolco was followed by a reign of terror with paramilitary death squads, Los Halcones (Falcons), attacking suspected opponents of PRI. In 1971 during a march of students and workers through the center of Mexico City calling for educational reforms, political rights and the freeing of political prisoners, 40 students were killed in front of the press. Much of the opposition went underground and some re-emerged as urban and rural guerrillas. During the student strike of 1968, the government, fearful that the democratic contagion would spread to restless labor unions, made a deal with them for better wages. When hard times came again in 1973, workers renewed their demands to make unions independent of government leadership. That year also campesinos who were being marginalized by agribusiness stepped up land seizures that peaked in 1976 with the result that Echeverria, who was president, was compelled to support some at the end of his term, only to have these resettlement efforts overturned by his successor, López Portillo. In the state of Guerrero former school teachers Genero Vásquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas, led insur-gencies until they were killed. Members of the families of business execu-tives and officials were kid-napped, and US subsidi-aries were bombed in 1974.

These events moved Delgadillo to create in 1973 the first of his militant murals. His main support came from student organizations, which invited him to paint at univer-sities, technical schools and teachers’ colleges throughout the country. The murals appear on these institutions’ facades, in their patios and lecture halls. Delgadillo said it was better not to seek permission. Since the universities are formally “autono-mous,” that is, run by the students, faculty and alumnae, the students were often conceded the walls. If the authorities interfered, that itself could become a chance to raise underlying issues. Delgadillo did the designs, and often he invited the students to help with the painting, filling in the flat monochromatic color in the forms he already delineated. He had found a vehicle to engage untrained artists in powerful public statements that all could immediately grasp. A work was often completed in the course of a day, during which students performed music, attracting viewers and discus-sion.

These works are vehemently agitational. The earlier ones from 1973 to ’76 look like billboards or enormously enlarged posters with their strong, flat color and stark, silhouetted figures. Typical of these is a work he painted in 1973 on two adjoining walls of a broad passageway through the Esquela de Diseño y Artesenias (School of Design and Crafts), situated in Mexico City’s Ciudadela (Citadel), built in 1807. Here everything is rendered in black, red, yellow and white. At the left, automatic weapons are pointed from the helmeted heads and hunched shoulders of the military. (In other versions it is only impersonal aimed gun barrels, projecting from the edge, reminiscent of Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra.). In the center, the decapitated heads of civilians lie on the ground, their screams or final breaths rising from gaping mouths like the speech volutes of Aztec painting. At the right, survivors defend themselves with flailing fists and a tool quickly snatched up. (In other works they have found rifles that they point back at their assailants.) Big wedges of color like search-lights cut across the figures and pull the mural together. Mostly the figures are only heads, fists, arms, sometimes chests. The rest is coils, indicat-ing their outward and inward turmoil. Great beaks of flame burst from their midst and like projections of their vehemence strike back at their attackers.

The same year Delgadillo condensed this imagery at the Colegio de Ciencias y Humanidades Azcapotzalco in the capital. Here the defenders have found their own weapons but along with them point a sickle and a book, knowledge also being power. Represented in sharp black silhouette against the white wall, they reach out in both directions from red and yellow concentric crescents, again coils of passion. Black speech volutes and flames project from the knot. Lying on the ground at the side are two severed heads of their comrades. The simplicity of the design and the explosive feelings it displays are compelling. Delgadillo was doing a class here with students who proudly displayed their full–scale mural designs on paper.

Also in 1973 he elaborated this vocabulary of forms into more complex murals where enriched pattern combines decorative appeal with emotive power. At the entrance of the lecture hall of the Law School at the University of Zacatecus, Delgadillo spread his familiar imagery across a long wall, the figures swallowing up the doorway. Against the military who are firing above bodies that breathe their last volutes, the survivors resist with only their shouts and fists, their passion expressed by red and yellow coils, wedges and licking flames. The composition is a big dynamic splaying out of swirling geometric forms. In a secondary school also in Zacatecus that year he painted as vigorous a work on the second level of the central patio open to the sky. Here the fury of the victims of impersonal muzzles pointed from the left strikes back with a single rifle and fists, rendered with even more intense gestures, now in orange, vermilion and black against the cream stucco. Big beaks and talons of color project from the knot of defenders, as one of their number falls backward, but one of his arms is repeated as in a time-exposure but also suggesting other persons who will join the struggle. The variety of these two works done nearby in close succession indicates the inventiveness of the artist as he expanded the possibilities of his forms.

The bold hard–edge patterns of these murals remind you of a vastly magnified woodcut or silkscreen, a pre–Co-lumbian codex and Mayan low-relief sculpture. Their forms have been appropriated from indigenous art: profiles with bridgeless noses and open mouths that indicate speech or shouts; the squarish builds of the figures; the broad, ritualized gestures; the stylized repetitions like the row of heads that suggest ancient rather than modern murder. Arms and faces are cross–hatched, seemingly bandaged and outlined with straining blood vessels, bone and muscle. The markings sometimes resemble war paint or masks. Like earlier Mexican muralists, Delgadillo utilized the forms of Indian culture to emphasize the rich heritage of his people, their capabilities and resistance to exploitation. His figures often seem primordial. It is as if they have sprung from the earth and huddle close together for protection against their assailants as they fight back. Sometimes he represents them with the harrowing faces of his victims in his easel work of the 1960s, their eyes reduced to empty sockets, their mouths gaping. But fight back they do. These big graphics bring to their outrage and calls to action a breadth of reference, a semi-abstract form and monumentality that link them to the fine arts. These murals connect popular and high culture in a new way.

This was the design of Delgadillo’s early murals at schools and universities elsewhere in Mexico City, Cuernevaca, Toluca, Veracruz, Jalapa, Pachuca, Fresnillo, Zapatepec, Durango and Tepic. At the same time as Delgadillo used students as assistants, he encouraged them to do murals of their own with the result that where he has painted, there was usually an outburst of student work, as at the normal schools at Tuxtla Gutiérrez. This was guerrilla art, indicting the attacks on civilians and encouraging their protests. That most remained on walls for years indicates the power of the student movement and the support of some professors.

The most important influence on Delgadillo was José Clemente Orozco. His Promoteo in the refectory of Pamona College in Clairmont, California (1930) and Man of Fire (El Hombre en Llamas) in the cupola of the Chapel of the Hospicio Cabañas in Guadalahara (1939) appear to have provided continuing inspiration to Delgadillo’s spiraling figures wrapped in flames, the fire inflicted on them by their oppressors and the fire of their own outrage and capability springing back in response. They are not merely in flames but more importantly, enflamed. The connection is more overt in Orozco’s burning soaring figure surrounded by a ring of gesturing followers at Guadalahara. But it is also evident in the flame–illuminated muscles of the naked Prometheus who is wresting fire from Zeus. Although influenced by Orozco’s vortices, Delgadillo selected and concentrated them so that his composition stands as original on its own and projects its own power. In fact, the younger muralist’s spirals are usually only part of his full composition with the rest posing a counter force, as in the case of soldiers who attack the coils of workers. Delgadillo transforms Orozco’s fully rounded figures into flat, graphic designs that possess a different kind of boldness. The full expression of his borrowing as well as his independence was to come at the height of Delgadillo’s career in his Hombre Nuevo Hacia el Futuro in Cuernavaca in 1989.

But there is an important difference in the way that Delgadillo and Orozco visualize the struggle for liberation, and it is based on a key difference in their politics. Orozco presents a single leader who is creative and incorruptible surrounded by the frightened quailing masses. Delgadillo shows no leaders. It is the people themselves who together take the initiative to resist. It is not the “man on fire” but the “people on fire” that he depicts. Part of Orozco’s strength is that although he takes the side of the people, he berates their divisiveness, their gullibility before demagogues, their frequent drunkenness and their proneness to brutality. From his point of view, it is only the unique leader who can save them—Quetzalcóatl (in his murals at Dartmouth College), Zapata (his easel painting), Prometheus and the “Man on Fire.” Delgadillo shows the people sometimes frightened and cowering, sometimes in retreat, sometimes even brutal in their outrage (the University of Toluca murals), but it is the people alone, without leaders, who he shows pulling themselves together to strike back.

In his easel work of the 1960s Delgadillo depicted people crushed, intimidated and passive. It was Tlatelolco, then afterwards government and paramilitary attacks that roused in him the determination to challenge the forces of repression and to do so by grassroots organizing. It was the mass organization of the students and their supporters before Tlatelolco and the continuing resistance after it led by teachers like Genero Vásquez Rojas (and more distantly the example of Che Guevara, who also appears in one of his murals), leaders who were close to those whom they led, involving them in the leadership, that Delgadillo regarded as the agents of liberation, the self–liberation of the people. What Delgadillo counted on was not the unique leader but the solidarity of the people. He sought to provide that kind of leadership himself to the groups of students, trade unionists and campesino associations that he worked with, not only doing murals with them but also planning political strategy. Although his friends called him el director de la orqesta, he continually sought the opinions of those whom he worked with. He often took the initiative and offered his talents but sought the participation of everyone else to the limit of their abilities.

Even art critics sympathetic to the Mexican mural tradition like Raquel Tibol complained that Delgadillo repeated himself with this imagery, that he was not showing growth, which was so cultivated by modern artists. His response was that he did frequently draw on the same repertory of forms, but he tried to adjust them to the issues of the groups who sought him out. He was inventive developing considerable variety within his idiom. His imagery is so rich in allusion and bold in design that it is compelling. In any case, Delgadillo said that his viewers in Tuxtla Gutiérrez were not aware of his images in Durango or Monterrey. His principal public were not the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and art professionals but students and working people, especially those in the localities where he painted who needed expression and validation of their resistance. Moreover, Mexican working people and students were steeped in their native traditions at least as much of the better-educated. Delgadillo’s aim was not so much formal innovation as meeting the needs of those whom he painted for. He was moved by the desire to create social activist art. This was against the grain of much sophisticated Modern Art that was pre–occupied with personal expression and innovation to only stimulate the mind. There was however an alternative Modern Art—-that driven by social justice and political mission, which the Mexican muralists and graphic artists had created. At its best it expressed intense feelings, those of social passion—empathy for the abused, outrage against the abusers. But that tradition had fallen into decay. In his easel work of the ’60s Delgadillo had experienced and expressed personal despair but this was not so much for himself alone but for humanity. His feelings were especially desperate because he was isolated, unassociated with any viable political resistance movement.. But now that despair had been transformed into political passion because he was participating in the mobilizing of the oppressed.

It was not only the imagery of Delgadillo’s murals that was new. It was also his manner of working. He wanted to paint in public and engage viewers by allowing them to witness the evolution of the process. He always cooperated with the local students, workers, campesinos or popular groups. He wanted to understand their issues so that he could adopt his thinking and imagery to their needs. Often he joined them in strategizing for their projects, bringing to them his increasing experience about how to do activism and function as part of a larger social movement. At first he designed his murals in advance, but as he became practiced, he was able to size up the wall on the spot, determine how it would be seen and improvise a design while working, as he describes in his autobiography. He also wanted to paint in simultaneous collaboration with other “cultural workers”—-poets and musicians”-who performed while he painted before the crowd that gathered. Los Mascarónes, a political theater group, might put on a skit. Doing a mural became a multi-cultural “happening,” a total experience of expression around a common theme, which he believed would be that much more effective in drawing out people and arousing them to political action. The first time Delgadillo engaged students in assisting him in painting a mural was at the Azcapotzalco Colegio in 1973. Making art with others became a participatory experience with a view to motivating people to act together to take charge of their lives. Few of these activist murals bears a title, a further break with convention. They spoke for themselves. They were calls to action. They were not part of an artist’s oeuvre, his collected works. Delgadillo says that the murals were part of the struggle that he and the community shared.

As to his materials, he tried to get the best paints that he could given his means and those of the groups with which he was working. What was key, he says, was the condition of the wall. If the surface was sound, even the cheapest paints would last for years although there would be fading due to the sun, weather and pollution. But there was not much time to prepare a surface. For exteriors he mainly used vinyl industrial and house paints. He and his crew had to work from ladders, scaffolding being too expensive, and this became precarious with murals that could be three stories high, as at the University of Toluca. While the students protected the walls they had worked on, still the authorities or hostile groups sought to remove them. By 1981 alone, some 30 of the 150 murals he had painted were destroyed. Law suits that he filed against the perpetrators were not successful.

In 1975 Delgadillo described himself as one of the few “artists of struggle” in Mexico at that time. “It is very risky to do political art now,” he said. “You endanger your liveli-hood and freedom.” Wasn’t his celebration of civilians resist-ing with rifles romantic, and wouldn’t it mislead people about the govern–ment's vulnerability? “No,” he replied, “the guer-rillas are contributing to the liberation of Mexico. They cannot do it alone, but they are a necessary part of the rebuild-ing of society.” He took the position that, while popular organizing was necessary in the barrios, unions and schools to bring non-violent pressure on the regime, that alone was insufficient given the shootings of civilians by the government and its paramilitary allies.

In 1982 at an exhibition of his art at the Salón Plástica Méxicana, he put up a statement that c