Canadian-born artist Arnold Belkin became one of the best-known public muralists in Mexico. Belkin began studying at the Vancouver School of Art, moving to Mexico City in 1948 to attend the National School for Painting and Sculpture. As a result of his family’s left-wing political background, Belkin took an interest in social issues from a young age and felt particularly drawn to the political public art of muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose works featured bold, nationalistic imagery. Belkin absorbed the influences of these artists and began painting his own murals in Mexico and later in New York, where he lived between 1968 and 1976. Belkin became a Mexican citizen in 1981, spending the remainder of his career in Mexico City painting, writing, and teaching.
This engraving of the interior of the Alte Synagoge (Synagogue) in Berlin is based on a drawing by Anna M. Werner. It was the first edifice in Berlin built specifically to serve this function…
Brickmaking by prisoners. Thebes, Egypt, 15th century BCE. This mural, from the tomb of the vizier Rekh-me-re, shows Semitic (“Asiatic”) and Nubian prisoners of war making mud bricks and repairing a…
You, my dear, will survive me and remember.
How could it be otherwise?
—From a letter
Old people? What can you write about old people?
They barely feel anything!
—From a conversation