rs. Because the government objected to murals in which Siqueiros "insisted on linking the spirit of the Revolution to contemporary social and political concerns" he was forced to give up public commissions and devoted his time to smaller paintings and to political activism (Reynoso 16).
Siqueiros was jailed for his work as a communist organizer in 1930 and then sentenced to a year of internal exile in the city of Taxco. Both Orozco and Rivera were having some success in the United States and Siqueiros decided that he too needed, as he put it, to "familiarize myself with the great industrial society (quoted in Reynoso 17). He moved to Los Angeles where, despite successful gallery exhibitions and small commissions, he remained in need of money. Friends persuaded the reputable Chouinard Art School to invite Siqueiros to teach a course in mural painting. He decided that the best approach to teaching was to actually paint a mural and formed a team on which he was "the master artist and the other artists were his apprentices" (White 141).
The mural was painted on a prominent 19 x 24 foot wall in a little more than two weeks and Siqueiros kept the central theme to himself. It was to be called Meeting in the Streets and was to feature, as he told the school's owner, street performers as the focus of the composition. The night before the unveiling Siqueiros himself painted in "a labor organizer addressing construction workers from a soapbox and flanked by a black man and a white woman, each holding a child and listening to the speaker" (White 142). The surprise theme, when revealed to a city in the grip of unemployment and ethnic tensions, caused considerable outrage. Though stories vary considerably about what came next, the result was that the mural was quickly destroyed.
This story was repeated almost exactly when Siqueiros received his second commission in Los Angeles. In June 1932 F. K. Ferencz, director of the Plaza A...