This painting by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Our Present Image, 1947, was part of the Whitney Museum’s exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945 that ran from February 2020 through January 2021.
From the museum about this work-
In this painting, which demonstrates how Siqueiros would continue to develop the techniques he pioneered at the Experimental Workshop long after he left New York, the artist has replaced the face of a man with an oval stone to signify not one specific race or nationality but all of humanity. Rejecting the fixed perspective of more traditional painting, Siqueiros employed multiple viewpoints that cause viewers moving through space to experience the figure in motion. Although the exact meaning of the figure’s foreshortened arms and outstretched hands is ambiguous, Siqueiros was a dedicated Communist who believed in the ultimate triumph of the proletariat. Hands, for him, symbolized the heroic strength of the worker. The people, as he wrote in another context, march from “a distant past of misery and oppression… toward industrialization, emancipation, and progress.
