Arnold Belkin

Biography

At fourteen, a boy in Vancouver saw reproductions of Diego Rivera’s work in Time magazine. Four years later he left for Mexico.

Arnold Belkin was born on 9 December 1930 in Calgary, Alberta, under the surname Belken Greenberg. The family soon moved to Vancouver, where his father, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, became a prominent figure in the local Jewish community; his mother had come from England. His parents were socialists, and Belkin later traced his interest in social subjects to them. From 1945 to 1947 he studied at the Vancouver School of Art and in 1947–48 at the Banff School of Fine Arts; at fifteen he won first prize in a contest run by the Labor Arts Guild of British Columbia with a painting, “Workers on a Streetcar”. The Canadian landscape tradition held no attraction for him.

In 1948 he enrolled at La Esmeralda, the national school of painting, sculpture and engraving in Mexico City, and studied with Agustín Lazo, Carlos Orozco Romero and Andrés Sánchez Flores. He was influenced by José Clemente Orozco, Rico Lebrun and Leonard Baskin. In 1950 he travelled to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and wrote a script for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a radio documentary on the region’s music and legends. That same year he met David Alfaro Siqueiros, the muralist, and the two became colleagues and friends. He assisted Siqueiros on the murals “Patricios y Patricidas” and “Cuauhtémoc” (1950–51). He also painted his first independent fresco, “¡El pueblo no quiere la guerra!” (“The People Do Not Want War!”), at the National Polytechnic Institute; it has been destroyed. Later he studied metal engraving with Lola Cueto and lithography at the School of Book Arts.

In the 1950s he painted walls across the country. The frescoes “Canto a la tierra” (“Song to the Earth”), based on poems by Nezahualcoyotl, for a bank in Monterrey (1952), and “La bahía de Acapulco” (“The Bay of Acapulco”) for the Continental Hilton hotel in Mexico City (1956) date from this time; the second was destroyed in the earthquake of 1985. His first solo exhibition took place in 1952, with an introduction to the catalogue by Siqueiros. For the theatre and ballet Belkin designed sets and costumes, for forty productions in all. In 1956 he began teaching mural painting at the Universidad de las Américas.

From here it is easier to list than to explain. In 1959 came the first of his ten “portable murals”, “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”, later bought by the Vancouver Jewish Community Centre. The idea was that a mural could be moved and adapted to the low walls and prefabricated panels that were replacing older architecture. In 1960–61 he painted the federal prison in Mexico City with the fresco “Todos somos culpables” (“We Are All Guilty”), which shows a criminal’s path through the eyes of a social worker rather than a law-and-order official. In 1961, with Francisco Icaza, he founded the Interioristas group and co-wrote the manifesto “Nueva Presencia” against the “academic art of good taste”; the group Nueva Presencia grew out of it. A mural for a children’s educational centre (1963) was painted over: the wife of President López Mateos found it too sad.

From the late 1960s until 1976 Belkin lived in New York. At Expo 67 in Montreal he represented Mexico rather than Canada. In 1972–73 he painted a wall in Hell’s Kitchen of almost 40,000 square feet, “Against Domestic Colonialism”; anyone willing to learn was welcome to help. He worked at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania and at a high school in Dumont, New Jersey, and taught at the New School for Social Research, the Art Students League and the Pratt Institute. On canvas, from 1974, he worked on the series “Historic Battles”: “Massacre at Kent State”, “My Lai Massacre” and the military coup in Chile in 1973. It includes paraphrases of European masters as well, for example Poussin’s “The Rape of the Sabines”. To my mind, these pictures show that even after leaving the Mexican school he kept speaking about the same thing: armed men and the defenceless.

In 1976 Belkin returned to Mexico for good, and in 1981 he became a Mexican citizen. In 1978 he founded the Community Muralism Workshop, whose students painted several walls in Mexico City. The series devoted to Zapata began in 1979, the cycle on Lucio Cabañas in 1985. In 1982, at the first Havana Biennial, his works on Zapata and on Rubén Jaramillo won the Wifredo Lam Grand Prize.

In the 1980s his main work was the murals at the Metropolitan Autonomous University in Iztapalapa. From 1983 he was artist-in-residence there, taught a course and painted the Teatro del Fuego Nuevo; six murals, together with the sculpture “El Estudiante” (1981), remain on the campus, and the last mural was finished in 1988. For the Colegio Madrid he painted “Identidad y futuro” (“Identity and Future”), on the Spanish Civil War and the Republican exiles (1985–86). In 1987 in Managua he painted “Los prometeos” (“The Prometheuses”) on the National Palace: Zapata and Sandino beside Prometheus. His last major work, “1492”, is dated 1991. In 1987 his book “Contra la amnesia: textos 1960–1985” (“Against Amnesia: Texts 1960–1985”) was published.

Belkin died in Mexico City on 3 July 1992 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery, the Panteón Judío. About thirty of his murals survive in Mexico, Nicaragua and the United States. In 1997 a retrospective was held at the Diego Rivera Mural Museum, and in 1998 he was honoured at the Museo Universitario del Chopo.