Echo of a Scream

Echo of a Scream is a painting completed in 1937 by the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, executed in industrial pyroxylin enamel on wood, a synthetic paint Siqueiros favoured for its bold colour and speed of application. It depicts an enormous, distorted head of a screaming child set within a wasteland of twisted industrial wreckage, with a second, smaller version of the same screaming head emerging from the larger one's open mouth, intensifying the sense of anguish. Painted during the Spanish Civil War by an artist who was an active Marxist and political militant, it stands as one of the most forceful anti-war images of its era and is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.