Trigger Men

Free on bail in Mexico City last week was the fieriest Mexican muralist of them all, David Alfaro Siqueiros. In 1922, when he was a baby-faced revolutionist, Siqueiros organized and ran the famed Syndicate of masons and painters (Charlot, Orozco, Merida, Montenegro, de la Cueva, Rivera) who revived true fresco in America. Since the dispersal of that illustrious company, Sparkplug Siqueiros has led strikes in Mexico, preached socialist esthetics in Manhattan, fought in Spain as a colonel in the Loyalist Army. When he returned from the war last month he vowed to settle down and paint. Fortnight ago President Cardenas personally had him jugged for egging on an anti-Fascist crowd.

A brilliant if febrile artist, Siqueiros has the distinction of having discovered the modern paint gun as an artistic implement. In 1923, when Pontiac, Mich, produced the first automobile (an Oakland) ever finished by being sprayed with quick-drying lacquer, the spray gun took its place among the garage man's favorite toys. Always alert to industry, Artist Siqueiros considered it more than a toy, urged its use for murals. Neither Siqueiros himself nor other muralists have actually done much with it. But last week in Manhattan two trigger men appeared with demonstrations of what a spray gun can do.

> At the Delphic Studios a 29-year-old Bolivian artist, Roberto Berdecio, friend and disciple of Artist Siqueiros, displayed a number of experimental paintings and two large murals which proved beyond any doubt that "the mechanical brush" is capable of a wide range of artistic effects. Artist Berdecio works with an air-compressing machine and a spray gun of the common industrial type (same principle as an atomizer), using not ordinary Duco enamel but a similar nitrocellulose paint. It has taken him six years, since he first started work with Siqueiros in Mexico City, to train his trigger finger to its present control. Painted on pressed wood, his two mural Portraits of New York were full of refined detail, though somewhat lifeless in color and very stark in symbolism. Each embodied a major ingenuity which Artist Berdecio calls "kinetic perspective" by which distortions are so anticipated and utilized as to make the mural a satisfactory, if somewhat different, picture to spectators from each side as well as in front.

> At an Automotive Maintenance Show in the New York Port Authority Building, an oldtime garage man from Chicago, Ralph L. de Gayner, astonished dealers and jobbers by gunning out clean little landscapes in five minutes each. Gunner de Gayner never knew David Siqueiros, but he had the same inspiration about seven years ago, has been getting so good at his specialty (pictures of clipper ships) that several have been sold. "The artists still think it's cheese," said he, "but dealers sell it and that's the big thing. I wouldn't be caught dead with a brush in my hand."

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