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David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Sleep, 1939, Duco on Masonite, 22 x 40 inches. Collection of the ASU Art Museum, gift of Oliver B. James. © 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

David Alfaro Siqueiros, a member of the Mexican muralist group that included artists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, painted Sleep (The Dream) in 1939. The painting features the image of a young girl with the side of her blond head nestled in the crook of her bony right arm. One observes her exhausted slumber from the front and slightly above. Gold flecks in her hair, perhaps airbrushed, and pale pyroxylin (Duco) pigment at her knobby elbows not only speak of the artist’s experimentation with industrial media, they also give a sense of movement despite the melancholic stillness of the subject.

In 1919, after participating in the Mexican Revolution, Siqueiros traveled to Europe to study art. There, he penned, “Tres llamamientos de orientación Americana” collectively known in English as “Manifesto to the Artists of America.” Influenced by the Italian futurists and French modernists, Siqueiros was also keenly aware of Marxism and its revolutionary effects in Russia. Following his return to Mexico and beginning in 1925, the artist worked toward union organization and was a leader in the miners’ strikes that followed. Always abreast of political strife both in the Americas and abroad, Siqueiros remained active as an artist and revolutionary until his death in 1974.