Child Mother is a lithograph of a girl carrying a toddler on her back, in a Mexican rebozo; both have a severe expression. The piece —that can be inscribed into social realism— suggests a helpless march to nowhere. Bare feet, torn clothes, the image transmits abandonment, in which both characters symbolize a lost childhood. Their faces are next to each other, the toddler’s hair is covered with a hat, but we can still notice how their facial features are remarkably alike. The lithograph is based on an earlier painting in pyroxiline under the same title from 1936. Raquel Tibol has suggested that a 1920s photograph by Hugo Brehme served as inspiration for the painting. David Alfaro Siqueiros was used to working from photographs, some of them from newspapers but very often he would photograph his models, his wife Angélica, or even himself in specific poses he envisioned. In the original painting it is the landscape that surrounds the figures —abstract shapes that seem to be fire, stormy skies, and destruction— that makes the image more despondent. In the background of Child Mother he did a “controlled accident” by dripping paint and mixing wet paint with half-dry paint on the canvas. In the lithography, he tried to recreate a similar background for the two figures.
David Alfaro Siqueiros (was born in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He is known along with José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera as Los tres grandes (The Great Three) in reference to the muralist movement or “Mexican Renaissance” that emerged during the presidency of Álvaro Obregón, who appointed José Vasconcelos as Secretary of the Ministry of Education, in October 1921. Mural painting became one of the pillars of his political and cultural program. Mexican history was the central theme captured on the walls of public buildings, a history that included native Mexican people and their culture, the revolution, and the mestizo Mexico. In 1911 Siqueiros started attending Academia de San Carlos. At the age of eighteen, he joined Venustiano Carranza to fight in the Mexican Revolution. In 1921 he traveled to Europe, first to Paris where he was exposed to cubism. He then met Diego Rivera and traveled with him in Italy. He embraced painting and political causes as one. He participated in the Spanish Civil War fighting with the Republicanos, and he had a very active agenda as a member of the Communist Party. He believed art should be for the people and not for the bourgeoisie. He spent time in several countries along the American continent, where he got in touch with other artists with leftist ideology, organizing workshops and spreading what he believed was the revolutionary potential of mural painting. He painted América tropical in the United States (1932), Ejercicio Plástico in Argentina (1933), Muerte al invasor in Chile (1941), and Alegoría de la igualdad y confraternidad de las razas blanca y negra in Cuba (1943). He was an innovator in terms of the use of materials and tools. Thus, from the 1930s, he experimented with industrial paint (Duco) and also used stencils, airbrush, and celluloid rulers. He was sent to prison on four occasions because of his political activities.
