Diego Rivera: His Art and His Passions 9781780428727, 1780428723, 9781844846559, 1844846555, 9781859956038, 1859956033
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DIEGO RIVERA
Gerry Souter
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Author: Gerry Souter Layout: Baseline Co. Ltd. 127-129A Nguyen Hue Blvd Fiditourist, 3rd floor District 1, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA © Victor Arnautoff © Georges Braque, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ ADAGP, Paris © José Clemente Orozco, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ SOMAAP, México © Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA © Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av. Cinco de Mayo n°2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F. © David Alfaro Siqueiros, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ SOMAAP, México All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification. ISBN: 978-1-78042-872-7
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Gerry Souter
Diego Rivera His Art and His Passions
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Contents
Foreword
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From Training to Mastership
11
His New Exile to Europe or His Artistic Quest
63
Between Painting and Politics
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A Communist Cheered by Americans
169
The Last Years or the Return to the Country
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Index
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Foreword
I
was aware of Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, long before I encountered the many other “Diego Riveras” that roamed the world between the beginning of the twentieth century and the late 1950s. As a photojournalist and graduate of the Chicago Art
Institute, I took advantage of travel assignments to visit great works of art whenever possible. In Paris there are the treasures of the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou. In Mexico, there is Diego Rivera – everywhere. At home, I have the advantage of being only five hours by car from the Detroit Institute of Arts and the incredible murals Rivera created for this American industrial centre. While his easel paintings and drawings constitute a large body of both his early and late work, his unique murals explode off walls in virtuoso performances of mind-staggering organisation. On those walls the man, his legend and myths, his technical talent, his intense story-telling focus and self-indulgent ideological convictions all come together. As I researched my book Frida Kahlo – Beneath the Mirror, I found many photographs of
Diego, first the smiling successful artist with his petite bride, and then as a tired old man following Frida’s coffin to the crematorium. Though their union was compelling, there was no way I could make my mind accept its consummation, both physical and intellectual, nor could I understand what drew beautiful women and powerful men to what appeared to be a shambling caricature. Revisiting his work and standing in front of it as the phantasmagoria of his imagination glowed from the walls, his appeal as a larger-than-life character and creator quickly replaced one’s first impression of a placid man. Large, damp, soft-boiled lunarian eyes set in a moon face above a mouth designed for selfgratification peer expectantly from beneath heavy lids to create a frog-like portrait that sits upon a flesh-padded, tear-drop shaped body. But this large man who filled doorways and
1. Diego Rivera,
caused chairs to groan ominously had small, childlike hands. He appeared soft and lazy, but his
The Making of a Fresco, Showing the
endurance often stretched to eighteen hours a day on a scaffold with brush in hand in front of
Building of a City, 1931.
his mural walls. His personal life was a chaos of politics, seductions, parties, travel, marriages
Fresco, 568 x 991 cm.
and creating his own myth, but his work at the wall was, of necessity, precisely choreographed
San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco.
to co-ordinate his creative execution with the time-driven demands of plaster fresco. In his memoir Rivera, the struggling young artist, praised Picasso to the skies for liberating
2. Diego Rivera,
painters from the grip of stagnation. To his friends he accused Picasso of stealing elements of
Self-Portrait, 1916.
Cubist technique from him and seethed as Picasso advanced while he remained bogged down
Oil on canvas, 82 x 61 cm.
in Paris still without a style of his own. He was a life-long believer in the ideal of Communism
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
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and mostly in denial concerning its ruthless reality. Who could possibly embrace the strict ideology of Communism and still work for rich capitalists? Today, we need only look at China and the entrepreneurial Eastern European states following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. During the volatile twenties, thirties and forties Rivera’s political insights operated on the level at which most contemporaries viewed him – those of a great big child. He gathered friends wherever he went – Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia and the United States – yet jealousy of his successes and the divisive political insinuations he brushed into his art created bitter enemies and left a shambles in his wake. For years he habitually carried a large-calibre Colt revolver ostensibly to fight off attempts on his life. Diego Rivera played many roles, some better than others, but deep inside – and more than 3. Frida Kahlo,
a third of his life had passed before he realised this truth was Mexico, the language of his
Xochítl, Flower of Life, 1938.
thoughts, the blood in his veins, the azure sky above his resting place. Finally, when all the
Oil on metal, 18 x 9.5 cm.
Sturm und Drang of a life lived at the gallop settled and he had achieved his master’s gift of
Private collection.
technique and fully embraced his creative goals, there was Mexico, her history and her stories. Those stories and the life of Diego Rivera mingle as a swift-flowing river gathers the earth into
4. Frida Kahlo,
its stream.
Self-Portrait, c. 1938. Oil on metal, 12 x 7 cm.
Gerry Souter
Private collection, Paris.
Arlington Heights, Illinois
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From Training to Mastership
His First Steps
D
iego Rivera fictionalised his life so much, that even his birth date is a myth. His mother María, his aunt Cesárea and the town hall records list his arrival at 7:30 on the evening of December 8th, 1886. That is the very auspicious day of the feast of
the Immaculate Conception. However, in the Guanauato ecclesiastical registry, baptism documentation states that little Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez actually showed up on December 13th. Rivera’s own description of his natal day many decades later recreates a grand melodrama. His mother had already laboured through three pregnancies that ended in stillbirths. Expecting twins, she pushed out Diego and began to haemorrhage. Diego was scrawny and lethargic and not expected to live, so Doctor Arizmendi, a family friend, tossed him into a nearby dung bucket and went for the second child. Diego’s twin brother arrived and seemed to be the last straw for petite and frail María, who lapsed into a coma. In despair, Don Diego Rivera sobbed over his lifeless wife. Preparations had to be made to deal with her corpse. Ancient Matha, who had been attending Doña María, watched her being laid out and bent to kiss her cold forehead. The crone suddenly stepped back. María’s “corpse” was breathing! The doctor immediately lit a match and held it under María’s heel. Taking it away, he saw a blister had formed. Doña María was alive. Some squawks came from the dung bucket showing little Diego too had a few kicks in him, and he was retrieved. Doña María eventually recovered and went on to study obstetrics, becoming a professional midwife. Diego’s twin brother, Carlos, died a year and a half later while the puny Diego, suffering from rickets and a weak constitution, became the ward of his Tarascan Indian nurse, Antonia, who lived in the Sierra Mountains. There, according to Diego, she gave him herbal medicine and practised sacred rites while he drank goat’s milk fresh from the udders and lived wild in the woods with all manner of creatures.1 Whatever the truth concerning his birth and early childhood, Diego inherited a crisp analytical intellect through a convoluted blending of bloodlines, having Mexican, Spanish, Indian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian and Portuguese descent. His father, Don Diego, taught him to read “…according to the Froebel method”.
2
Friedrich Froebel is considered to be the “father of the modern kindergarten”. This German educator coined the word Kindergarten (“children’s garden”) in 1839. He opposed the
5. Diego Rivera, Landscape, 1896-1897. Oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm. Guadalupe Rivera de Irtube Collection.
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concept of treating children as miniature adults and insisted on their right to enjoy childhood, to have free play, arts, crafts, music and writing. Pointing out the moral in a story did not allow children to draw their own conclusions from what they had read. It is interesting that later non-objective, free-thinking European artists such as Braque, Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian were likely as not also educated in Froebel-based kindergartens.3 Diego Rivera was born into a Mexico that consisted of a class-tiered society dependent on blood lines and political affiliations. The period was called the Porfiriato after the administration of autocratic President Don Porfirio Díaz. The elder Rivera was a educated man, a school teacher and a political liberal who was known as a trouble-maker to the political party in office. He was also a crillolo, a Mexican citizen of privileged “pure” European descent. His military service with the Mexican Army that had disposed of French rule under Maximilian also accorded him a somewhat bullet-proof position among Díaz’ “loyal” opposition. The revered President Benito Juárez had freed Mexico from French rule with Díaz fighting at his side. When Juárez died, Díaz seized rule from the ineffective chosen leader Sebastián Lerdo in 1876. The peasant land reforms of Juárez were shelved over time, and Díaz shifted loyalties to rich foreign investors and conservative wealthy Mexican families. He modernised Mexico with electric light, railways and trade agreements, and balanced the Mexican budget to great international acclaim. At the top tier of Mexican social life, the wealthy embraced French customs, food, entertainment and language. The Mexican peons, the farmers on the lowest tier, were left to starve and scrape a living. To improve his lot financially, young Diego’s father invested in recovering ore from the played-out silver mines that surrounded Guanajuato. Once a booming industry, the silver veins had vanished and no amount of resuscitation could bring them back. The Rivera family went into debt. Diego’s mother, María, sold the family furniture so they could move to a squalid apartment in Mexico City and start again. María was a mestiza, small and frail, but shared her European blood with Indian forebears. She also had a home-taught education, which allowed her to pursue her medical studies and became a professional midwife. Through all this strife, young Diego was the pampered son. He could read by the age of four and had begun drawing on the walls. Moving to Mexico City opened up a world of wonders to him. The city rose on a high plateau atop an ancient lake-bed at the foot of twin snow-capped volcanoes, Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl. After the dusty rural roads and flat-roofed houses of Guanauato, the paved thoroughfares of the capital with its elegant French architecture and the Paseo de Reforma rivalling the best of Europe’s boulevards, Diego was overwhelmed. By now he had a younger sister, María del Pilar, but a brother, Alfonso, born in Mexico City, died within a week. Life was hard in the poorer sections of the city and half of the infants 6. Diego Rivera,
died within a week of their birth. Typhus, smallpox and diphtheria resulted from poor
Beguine Convent in Bruges or Twilight in
sanitation, lack of running water and overcrowding. Diego suffered bouts of typhoid, scarlet
Bruges, 1909.
fever and diphtheria, but his sturdy constitution and María’s medical training kept him going.
Charcoal on paper, 27.8 x 46 cm.
Diego’s father bit back his moral outrage at government corruption and mismanagement in
INBA Collection, Museo Casa Diego
order to provide for his family. He found work as a clerk in the Department of Public Health.
Rivera, Guanajuato.
He had discovered an undeniable truth in any revolutionary movement aimed at the lower
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7. Camille Pissarro, Landscape with Pastures, Pontoise, 1868. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm. Private collection, New York.
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8. Diego Rivera, Landscape with a Lake, c. 1900. Oil on canvas, 53 x 73 cm. Daniel Yankelewitz B. Collection, San Jose.
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classes of society: publishing articles aimed at helping the poor was foiled by rampant illiteracy – they couldn’t read. María began to find work as a midwife and they moved from their poor neighbourhood into better housing. Eventually they ended up in an apartment that occupied the third floor of a building on the Calle de la Merced (Market Street). This neighbourhood was created around two huge markets and their attendant scavengers, both human and rodent. But their colours, the variety of goods for sale, the bustle and mix of Indians, peons and customers from every class produced a rich texture that remained with Diego until his old age. For the young boy this upward change of status meant full time schooling. At eight he was enrolled in the Colegio del Padre Antonio. “This clerical school was the choice of my mother, who had fallen under the influence of her pious sister and aunt.”4 He remained for three months, tried the Colegio Católico Carpentier – where he was downgraded for not bathing frequently enough, an unfortunate lifetime hygiene problem – and departed to the Liceo Católico Hispano-Mexicano. “Here I was given good food as well as free instruction, books, various working tools and other things. I was put in the third grade, 9. Gustave Courbet, A Hut in the Mountains, 1874-1876.
but having been well-prepared by my father, I was skipped to the sixth grade.”5 The Lyceum system of schooling had come directly from French models as required by
Oil on canvas, 33 x 49 cm.
President Díaz. Having driven the French out of Mexico in 1867, Díaz spent the next years of
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts,
his administration wiping out the democracy of Benito Juárez and re-establishing French and
Moscow.
international cultures as examples of progress and civilisation for the Mexican people.
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The downside of this cultural importation was the denigration of native society, arts, language and political representation. The poor were left to die, while the rich and the middle class were courted because they had money and appreciated being able to keep it. The will of the ruling class was imposed on the poor using self-serving “scientific” principles developed by a panel of pseudo social scientists called los Científicos. This was government by Darwinian fiat. In the same year that Díaz and Juárez were chasing the French out of Mexico, a book was published, Capital – A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 that represented a lifetime study of the political economy of the working class in a scientific manner. This work avoided the usual rabble-rousing demands of repressed workers substituting well thought out deductions that established the basic socialist premises of its author, Karl Marx. If there was ever an autocratic government ripe for a strong undercurrent of revolution supported by intellectual pillars of socialist ideology, it was Mexico. The Díaz government’s cultural and economic philosophy devolved strictly around the concept of creating wealth before addressing the issues of the poor, who were, unfortunately for the Mexican Científicos who set the policy, not dying off fast enough to offset their birth rate. Into this conspiracy of the Mexican government, aided by the indifference of
10. Diego Rivera, Landscape with a Mill, Damme Landscape, 1909.
the Catholic Church to marginalise the peones and Campesinos (farmer land-owners) in
Oil on canvas, 50 x 60.5 cm.
favour of international investment that lined the pockets of the rich for trade franchises
Ing. Juan Pablo Gómez Rivera Collection,
and slave labour, stepped young Diego Rivera – after scraping his shoes clean, of course.
Mexico City.
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His father made use of his deep educational background at the expense of his personal politics 11. J.M.W. Turner,
and improved his government position to become a health inspector. The city’s population
Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, 1796.
growth had allowed María del Pilar to grow her midwifery practice to the point of opening a
Watercolour on white paper,
gynaecological clinic. For the first time since the silver mine investment debacle in
31.8 x 41.9 cm.
Guanajuato, the Riveras had actual options.
Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Services, Wolverhampton.
By the age of ten he had experienced the results of Mexico’s autocracy, but would confront the causes later. Making the most of his gift of drawing and endlessly sketching concerned his parents now. They sought practical applications of his frivolous hobbies. Diego liked to draw
12. Diego Rivera,
soldiers, so his father considered a military career, but the boy also spent much of his spare
Notre-Dame, Paris, 1909.
time at the railway station to draw the trains – so what about a job as a train driver? Subject
Oil on canvas, 144 x 113 cm.
matter aside, Diego’s mother defied her husband’s wishes that the boy enter the Colegio Militar
Private collection, Mexico City.
and sent him instead to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts for evening school classes.
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Only a block away from the Zócalo, Mexico City’s large central square, Diego often crossed its beaten dirt surface, stepped over criss-crossing mule trolley tracks, dodged rumbling horse-drawn wagons full of freight and market goods on his way to class. One other distraction had to be the clank of a printing press on a street just off the square. The print shop at No. 5 Santa Inéz belonged to José Guadalupe Posada, a lithographer and engraver whose story-telling prints were the editorial cartoons and “photographs” of their time Using black and white line drawings and ambitious colour, Posada told the stories of daily events, extraordinary happenings, the bizarre, the satirical and the tragic, which appeared in the broadsheets – called hojas volantes (flying leaves) by their readers – of Antonio Vanegas 13. Diego Rivera,
Arroyo, whose shop was next door to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. Every day and
Midi Landscape, 1918.
often into the night, the press clanked and rumbled again and again as pages were inked and
Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 63.2 cm.
the folklore and daily life of Mexico City was committed in such a vivid style to which Rivera,
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
Orozco, Siqueiros and the other Mexican muralists all acknowledged their debt.
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Diego struggled with this day and night school education for a year until at the age of eleven in 1898 he received a scholarship to move his studies full time to the San Carlos Academy. While the school was considered the best in Mexico, its curriculum was bound by dusty European artistic dogma compounded by the societal engineering of the government científicos that mandated strength over weakness in all life experiences. The art school also required classes in physics, mathematics, natural history and chemistry as well as perspective and figure drawing. The professors were Spanish, practising the skills of the French academicians far from the avant-garde of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements. Of these professors, Diego, the youngest student in the class, remembered best Don Félix Parra, who had a rare
14. Paul Cézanne,
appreciation of pre-Spanish Conquest Indian art, but whose own art was very conventional,
Aqueduct, 1885-1887.
and José M. Velasco, the renowned landscape painter who taught lessons in perspective.
Oil on canvas, 91 x 72 cm.
Santiago Rebull was the school’s principal and Diego’s instructor in the balance of proportion
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts,
and composition. In his student days Rebull had studied in Paris with Jean-Auguste-
Moscow.
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15. Diego Rivera, View of Arcueil. Oil on canvas, 64 x 80 cm. Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz, Veracruz.
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Dominique Ingres, considered one of the greatest figure artists of all time. Ingres’ drawings were held up to Rebull’s students as models of perfection. The curriculum built around this perfection was a grind, consisting of two years spent copying reproductions of Ingres studies followed by two years of drawing from plaster casts before graduating to a live model. Diego was singled out by Rebull as promising, and given instruction in the so-called “Golden Section”, a mathematical system of composition developed by the ancient Greeks, that establishes a harmonic ratio between two unequal parts. Its principles were widely distributed in Luca Pacioli’s three-volume work Divina Proportione published in 1509. In the Elements, Euclid of Alexandria (c. 300 B.C.) defined a proportion derived from a division of a line into what he calls its “extreme and mean ratio”. Euclid’s definition reads: A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser. In other words, in the diagram below, point C divides the line in such a way that the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the ratio of AB to AC. Some elementary algebra shows that in this case the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the irrational number 1.618 (precisely half the sum of 1 and the square root of 5).6 This mathematical formula applied to fine art appealed to the engineer in Diego Rivera, who enjoyed mechanical systems such as trains and machines, often taking apart his toys to see how they worked. His practice of employing the Golden Section served him well later as he composed his huge murals over wall surfaces of all dimensions. This academic training including the use of colour optics imposed by “advancing” (warm) and “retreating” (cool) colours and the manipulation of line segments to achieve depth in a two-dimensional plane all became valuable tools in Rivera’s vast spaces. By the age of eighteen in 1905, Diego Rivera was enjoying his final two years at San Carlos and had changed considerably from the docile, shabby eleven-year-old fat boy wearing short pants with pink socks who, back in 1898, sometimes cut class to go fishing in the smelly canals. Where once he shambled about in dishevelled anonymity, now he dressed like a young gentleman in jacket and boiled shirt with a wing collar and four-in-hand necktie. His hair was no longer a bird’s nest but was slicked back with pomade. A straggly moustache sprouted on his upper lip to affect the appearance of maturity upon the youngest student in class. He had won a medal competing in a drawing contest and an award of twenty pesos a month from the Ministry of Education, and then, took the “King’s Shilling”. By 1906, Rivera had completed eight years of study at San Carlos and graduated with honours, appearing in his final student show with twenty-six works. His efforts had paid off with an excellent reputation among the government people he had to impress to keep grant money coming in. This was accomplished, but the money for study in Europe did not arrive for six months, allowing young Diego to live the life of a bohemian artist among his school chums. This gang of “intellectuals, artists and architects” – El Grupo Bohemio – who had struggled to finish college, worked hard at exploring a dissolute lifestyle. The timbre of this bohemian
16. Diego Rivera, Suburbs of Paris, 1918. Oil on canvas, 63.5 x 79.5 cm. Private collection.
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17. Paul Cézanne, The Black Castle, 1900-1904. Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 96.6 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.
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18. Diego Rivera, Suburbs of Paris, 1918. Oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm. Private collection.
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existence is demonstrated in Rivera’s fanciful story in his memoir titled An Experiment in Cannibalism, where he and his pals pooled their money to buy corpses from the morgue. He had read a story where a lunatic had fed the flesh of cats to other cats to be skinned for their pelts, and their coats became glossy and full. Would a diet of human flesh improve the health of humans? Diego claims to have tried it for two weeks and never felt better. He particularly “…savoured young women’s breaded ribs”. The experiment ended because of fear of social hostility rather than “squeamishness”.7 During this time he also came into contact with the curious character Gerardo Murillo, a faculty member and anarchist political agitator against Díaz. Murillo chose the name “Dr Atl” while living in Mexico. In Indian dialect, Atl is the name of the fourth sun – Nahui Atl – and means Water Sun, but Murillo was actually a rabble-rousing criollo, the same as the rest of the governing class. Dr. Atl had been to Europe, and extolled the virtues of the post-Impressionists and rebels such as Gauguin and Paul Cézanne to El Grupo Bohemio in long discussions at their favourite cafés over many glasses of Pulque (an Indian drink made of fermented cactus juice) and beer. But, at most, Atl’s fire-breathing evangelism produced only a woozy fog of intellectual rhetoric, but no revolutionary deeds or marches in the streets. Diego had other things on his mind more important than overthrowing governments. He wanted to win a contest that offered a grant of 300 pesos a month to live and paint in Europe. His rival was Roberto Montenegro, a well-brought-up handsome dandy with a skilled painting technique. He was as elegant and refined as Diego was lumpy and soup-stained. And yet, because of Diego’s life experience and omnivorous eclecticism, Diego was actually more worldly than the city-bred gentleman in the French-cut suit. But when the votes were counted Montenegro won, and headed for Paris with the grant money to meet Picasso, Juan Gris, sip absinthe and dissolve into the City of Light. Diego accepted the decision and turned to his father who had made an accommodation with the Díaz regime he despised for the sake of his family. Now he could help his son with a tug on a few strings. The governor of the state of Veracruz, Teodoro Dehesa, a liberal member of the Díaz government, had come through earlier with 30 pesos a month for Diego’s art education. Now the boy had become the young man and his paintings and drawings were paraded once more before his benefactor. The demonstration of Diego’s skills and potential pried from the Don a travelling scholarship of 300 pesos a month. More conservative than Roberto Montenegro, Diego decided to ease into the European adventure by beginning in Spain. To get to Madrid, he needed steamship fare. One of Dr Atl’s more useful functions was to help students organise shows of their work to raise money to supplement their grants. For this service he received a commission. He fed a dozen of Rivera’s oils and sketches into an exhibition. The sales from this show bought Diego a one-way ticket 19. Diego Rivera,
to Spain. Dr Atl also supplied Diego with a letter of introduction to the Spanish painter
The Old Ones, 1912.
Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera, who had many rich and well-known clients. Atl became a
Oil on canvas, 210 x 184 cm.
shadowy figure who popped in and out of the volcanic mix of Mexican politics and the arts
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
over the next decades and would figure many times in Diego’s future.
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Discovering Europe Diego Rivera was twenty years old when he arrived aboard the steamship King Alphonse XIII in Santander, Spain on January 6th, 1907. He must have been disappointed. The faces that looked back at him from the dock looked exactly like those he had left behind in another life far, far away. Their language was almost the same – except the Madrid natives lisped the letter d, turning it into th, in the elegant Castilian manner. On the train from Santander he would hear Galician that had the odd Graeco-Latin twists of Portuguese and Catalan spoken by the tourists from Barcelona. Two men smoked and swapped pulls from a wicker-wrapped bottle as they spoke in low, guttural Basque. Later, when he set up his easel in the studio of Chicharro y Agüera, his nickname would be “the Mexican”. All he had to do was open his mouth in Madrid and he became the country boy. Diego Rivera hid behind a straggly beard, but he couldn’t hide the soft, frog-like eyes, the sloping shoulders accustomed to stooping so as not to stand out in crowds. He could not hide the sixfoot bulk that supported his large head, which required a wide-brimmed sombrero to shade it because ordinary hats were too small. When Rivera arrived in Madrid, he was the sum of everything he would be for the rest of his days. His life, as the gypsies say, was written in the lines of his palm. His work ethic was brutal, his politics were as yet unformed but inclined toward the lowest level in the trickle-down economy in which his father had been broken by the bosses. His art had no direction, but he was also an empty vessel anxiously waiting to be filled. Diego was ready to learn about women, but he already possessed sensitivity, a gentle nature and an ability to lie with great sincerity as he created stories that would become the myths of his life. He would always have women. Best of all, Diego had discovered that his imagination need not be restricted to the images he created with his brushes and paints. Since he had been a small boy finding refuge from his frail mother’s drive to lift the family from the ruins of his father’s financial failure and ideological naivety, and both his parents’ desire to steer their lumpish son into some useful
20. Diego Rivera,
trade, he had turned to his sketchbook and its linear fantasies. As his skills grew and were
Portrait of a Spaniard (Hermán Alsina),
recognised as a true gift, the fantasies he had created in childhood pictures of soldiers and
1912.
trains and heroic deeds became habitable. At each stage of his formative years Diego met new
Oil on canvas, 200 x 166 cm.
people, involved himself with new groups and with each new telling of his stories his own role
Private collection.
in them became greater. His father showed the sketches he made of battles and the disposition of troops to amazed generals. He stood shoulder to shoulder with strikers to be struck down
21. Diego Rivera,
by a soldier’s sabre and thrown into prison. His clever copying of Goya and El Greco paintings
Portrait of the Poet Lalane, 1936.
in the Prado were passed off as real and now reside in collections. He spent fine evenings with
Oil on canvas.
his bohemian chums feasting on “young women’s breaded ribs”.
Private collection.
Diego Rivera became his own myth. Later, as his fame grew, he inserted himself in his murals together with his patrons, historical characters, Communist ideologues, friends, those
22. Diego Rivera,
who inspired him and the women he was currently courting. He was there at last with his
Portrait of a Military Man.
creations, forever the observer, forever part of history. The extent of his fabulous life became
Museo Regional de Guadalajara, Jalisco.
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clear when he dictated his memoirs to Gladys March who, from 1944 to 1957, took down each fabrication word for word, with a straight face. But standing outside the Madrid railway station at the age of twenty, his palette was hardly more than a tabula rasa. After days spent in discomfort on the train from Santander, still reeking of unwashed travel, wine and stale tobacco from the crowded coach, his waistcoat and trousers still speckled with drips and crumbs of food purchased on the journey, he hoisted his bags and located the Calle Sacramento and the Hotel de Rusta. An artist friend from the San Carlos Academy lived there and recommended the cheap pension. There he crashed and slept. The next day, he presented himself at the studio of one of Madrid’s premier portrait painters, Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera. Diego proffered his letter of introduction from Dr Atl and was led to a corner of the studio he could call his own. The other students scrutinised the fat Mexican farm boy and were unimpressed. A heady perfume of paint and turpentine, open tins of linseed oil, raw canvas and pine wood for stretchers filled the room, and he set to work at once. He painted for days, arriving early and leaving late. Gradually, with his sheer brute concentration and resolve, the value of his stock rose among his fellow classmates and he became part of their social circle. In his Rivera biography, Dreaming With His Eyes Open, the author Patrick Marnham offers an insightful appraisal of Rivera’s time spent in Spain and the value of the young artist’s first attempt to assert himself and discover his own style. “Throughout the nineteenth century,” Marnham writes, “with brief liberal interregnums and spasmodic revolts ruthlessly suppressed, Spain dozed under four Habsburgs – one Ferdinand and one Isabella – and two Alfonsos. Alfonso XIII was still on the throne at the time of Rivera’s arrival.” Spain had been passed by in the cultural, economic and political structure of a very vital Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Only Barcelona maintained a tenuous touch with the rest of Europe, and Picasso had studied there at the School of Fine Arts before bolting in 1900. He had hurried through Madrid, spent a day at the Prado, and penned a letter to a friend stating, “In Spain we are not stupid. We are just very badly educated.” Diego, in his search for the headwaters of the mainstream in modern painting, “…had sailed up a backwater.” 8 As he settled into the rhythms of Madrid and the surrounding countryside, he appreciated the comfort factor of speaking the language – or something at least approximating to Castilian Spanish – and having his hotel only a stone’s throw from the Prado, which housed one of Europe’s finest collections of paintings. When not working with maestro Chicharro in the studio, he set up his easel opposite the finest examples of El Greco with the elongated figures towering above him, or feeling the heat come off Goya’s passionately restrained portraits of the Spanish rich and roughly-brushed stalwart peones massed before ranks of soldiers with bayonets. The vivid colours and brushstroke impasto came to life on the original canvases 23. Diego Rivera, Portrait of John Dunbar, 1931. Oil on canvas, 199.5 x 158 cm. Private collection.
34
as opposed to the pale chromolithographs decorating walls in Mexico City. He slaved over these masterpieces, unlocking the secrets of their line, colour and dynamic compositions. And, here in Madrid, an interesting quirk of content appeared amidst his self-generated themes. No religious paintings by young Diego have been recovered or noted. Among the
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wealthy and those aspiring to higher positions, the purchase of art had contributed to a boom for painters, decorating walls with bucolic rural scenes, family portraits and the scarred and bloody body of Jesus on the Cross. Holy scenes from the Bible were big sellers and the more slickly rendered the better. Diego, however, who had bad memories of the Church and its effect on his mother’s impassioned judgments, and of his father’s anti-clerical teaching and writing, eschewed the gaudy morality plays of Madrid’s commercial painters. He continued as he was, a young Mexican man living off a free ride and working hard to find his own vision and style. Chicharro’s reports to Don Dehesa, Governor of Veracruz and Diego’s sponsor, were glowing and the paintings regularly sent to Dehesa reflected the reports’ praise. Some of Chicharro’s student exhibitions drew critics who singled out Rivera as a “promising talent”. Diego’s brush with the Madrid avant-garde found him embroiled in an anti-modern art movement (el Museísmo) which demanded the abandonment of modern art for the 300-yearold El Grecos. Hardly a plunge into the future, but Rivera’s painting during his isolated two years in Spain was conventional, slick and bland. While Picasso was creating the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, Rivera ground out The Forge, The Old Stone and New Flowers and The Fishing Boat. The paintings were handsome if only because of their superb technique, but they would also have looked at home in any mercado tourist shop. To be charitable, Rivera did manage to keep his meal ticket coming from the Governor of Veracruz. And he met a girl. At the Café de Pombo, a hang-out for the Spanish avant-garde, Diego spent time with the two Ramóns and María Blanchard. Ramón number one was Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a critic
24. Diego Rivera,
and soon-to-be Dada poet. Ramón number two was Ramón del Valle-Inclán, a Spanish
Study for The Jug, 1912.
novelist who had lost his left arm to the swing of a cane in a brutal café brawl. He was a grand
Gouache on paper, 28.5 x 23 cm.
storyteller, and Diego thoroughly absorbed his enthralling gift of prevarication, adding
María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection,
touches to expand his own myth-making machine. María Blanchard’s real name was María
New York.
Gutiérrez Cueto, and she was one of Chicharro’s painting students. She was bright, five years older than Diego and four feet tall with a subtle hunchback caused by an accident to her spine
25. El Greco,
in her youth. She dressed in the English tourist style and made a striking contrast to her
The Visitation, 1610.
towering mountain of a friend (and lover, according to Rivera in later years). In 1908 she
Oil on canvas, 96 x 72.4 cm.
headed for Paris, leaving Diego to finish up his second year in Spain. He prowled the Basque
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D. C.
countryside looking for material, and entered some of his paintings in another exhibition where his friend Ramón Gómez de la Serna gave him a booster review. The bohemian lifestyle of this merry band eventually laid Diego low, so he stopped
26. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1909.
drinking and went on a vegetarian diet – a purge he resorted to again later in his life. He took
Oil on canvas, 59 x 45 cm.
hikes and began reading very serious books: Aldous Huxley, Emile Zola, Arthur
Collection of the Government of the
Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Voltaire and Karl Marx. He devoured
State of Veracruz, Veracruz.
books on mathematics, biology and history, drowning his over-indulged body with intellectual stimulation. After sticking it out for two years, Chicharro, Ramón Valle-Inclan and Rivera, apparently
27. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Woman at her Toilet, 1883.
flush with winnings gathered from a Spanish casino, took a train to Paris, chipped in for a
Oil on canvas, 75 x 63 cm.
horse cab to the Place Saint-Michel and found rooms at number 31, the Hotel de Suez on the
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
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28. Paul Gauguin, Vaïraumati Tei Oa (Her name is Vaïraumati), 1892. Oil on canvas, 91 x 68 cm. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
29. Diego Rivera,
Boulevard Saint-Michel. This hotel near the Latin Quarter was crammed with penniless
Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1923.
American and Spanish art students living off meagre stipends from various sources. No sooner
Oil on canvas, 63 x 52 cm.
had Diego put down his bags than he was out the door, down the hill and across the Seine
Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato.
heading for the Louvre.
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30. Diego Rivera, Flower Vendor, 1926. Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 109.9 cm. Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu.
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The Paris art scene must have overwhelmed him. In the two months he spent in the city, very little time was wasted as he got out his paints and brushes, joining other Paris-struck painters on the banks of the Seine. He wandered through the galleries peering at the works of Pissarro, Monet, Daumier and Courbet. Gallery and museum walls glowed with colour and ways of seeing and techniques so foreign to his well-ordered provincial realism. He must have been desperate to try and locate a path to a style he could call his own. One painter stood out who had decorated the walls of the amphitheatre or “hemicycle” in the Sorbonne across rue St Jacques from a number of panels in the rotunda of the imposing Pantheon – formerly the church of St Genevieve – residing behind its portico of Corinthian columns. Both buildings were a five-minute walk from the Hotel de Suez. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French artist who was born in Lyon in 1824 and died in Paris in 1898. He studied with Eugène Delacroix and rose to prominence in the world of the Paris Salon. He embraced the allegorical tradition of representing abstract ideas of honour, triumph of the spirit, despair and sacrifice with classical figures arrayed on dreamscapes that symbolised the subtext of their actions. He accomplished his painting on large canvas surfaces that were fixed to the walls. His work appealed to both the post-Impressionists and the Symbolists as he simplified forms and used non-naturalistic colours to evoke moods. This first taste of public mural painting by a contemporary artist also drew Diego into the influence of the Symbolists – whose work at a later time might be called ”psychedelic realism” and eventually metamorphosed into Surrealism. Puvis de Chavannes, though the radical postImpressionists praised him, was elected by acclamation to the presidency of the National Society of French Artists and was made a Commander of the Légion d’honneur. Rivera claimed that the work – and respect – of Puvis so inspired him, that he drew another expatriate Mexican artist, Ángel Zárraga, and the artist who had beaten him to the Mexican government bursary, Roberto Montenegro, into a scheme to create murals for the Palacio de Bellas Artes under construction in Mexico City. However, his feverish absorption of French art had to be shelved for much of June as he ended up on his back, sick with chronic hepatitis, a malady that would return again throughout his life. The illness did give him time to plan a trip to Brussels. Enrique Friedmann, a Mexican-German painter, accompanied him. As summer settled over Europe, Rivera and Friedmann travelled from the Brussels museums of Flemish masters to the small city of Bruges, thought by many to be the home of
31. Diego Rivera,
Symbolism. While there, he began the painting House on the Bridge, one of many paintings he
Portrait of Concha, c. 1927.
completed in Bruges, rising at dawn and painting until the light was gone. His cumulative
Oil on canvas, 62.3 x 48.3 cm.
impression of the city appeared to be that of stillness and death – a complete absence of
Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu.
people, landscapes of still waters and uninhabited structures. A steam barge floats without its crew. La Maison sur le Pont carries no traffic. A Night Scene sketch is silent. This introspection mirrors his early Mexican landscapes and picks up his feelings of being
32. Paul Gauguin, Vahine no te tiare
the observer, the outsider looking in, seeing through his gift of artistic translation. He
(Woman with a Flower), 1891.
confided later how he felt as a Mexican among Europeans, experiencing “…my Mexican-
Oil on canvas, 70 x 46 cm.
American inferiority complex, my awe before historic Europe and its culture.”9
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
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While living on the cheap, Rivera and Friedmann wandered into a Bruges café to grab a bite before catching some sleep in the railway station waiting room as though they were waiting for the next train. A sign outside the café offered “Rooms for Travellers”. Hoping for a good deal they entered and took a table, a brioche and two coffees. Rivera was eating when he looked up and discovered María Blanchard, his girlfriend from Spain, grinning at him from the café’s doorway. He stood and held his arms wide. Next to her stood a “…slender blonde young Russian painter...”10 named Angelina Beloff. Angelina was seven years older than Diego and her life paralleled his on many levels. Her father, Michael, had given up his occupation as a lawyer to work for the government in order to put food on the table at their home in St Petersburg. Her devoted mother, Catherine, was a Finnish Swede who wanted Angelina to become a doctor, but when Angelina wanted to switch to art school, Catherine gave her support. Angelina’s art studies were rigorously academic, and when her parents died suddenly she received a small pension from the Russian government. Using that money, she moved to Paris and took up studies with the more experimental and demanding Henri Matisse. His bold ideas seemed too outré and she fled to the more conservative Academia Vitti and the classes of a Spanish academician named Anglada Camarasa. He carved out his work with palette knife and hog bristle brush until the impasto resembled a bas relief. Angelina mused “…he must have sold his paintings by the pound…”11 to his wealthy clientele. It was at Camarasa’s class that she had met María Blanchard. They became friends and journeyed together to Bruges. Arriving on a cold wet day, they found the café with “Rooms for Travellers.” The four young artists hooked up and stayed together, painting and sampling what pleasures their meagre budgets could afford in the Belgian countryside. The foursome was truly international. Diego spoke Spanish, some French and no Russian, María spoke better French and Spanish, Angelina spoke Russian and French but no Spanish, and Friedmann spoke German, Spanish and French. They all spoke a smattering of English. A Polish art student from Paris joined their group and the five painters busied themselves, with Diego not stopping even when the sun went down. Angelina declined to join Diego and María working in the dusk on a house that would become Diego’s Beguine Convent in Bruges or Twilight in Bruges. When María returned to their rooms above the café she was obviously upset; Diego had asked her to be a go-between and convey his love to Angelina who spoke no Spanish. Though Diego and María were “just friends” at this point and not “lovers”, the request put a chill into the friendship between the two girls that he could not understand. On an apparent whim, the group took a “small freighter” to London and visited the 33. Diego Rivera,
Hogarths and Turners in that city’s museums. The cosmopolitan group enjoyed an
Arum Vendor, 1924.
unproductive, carefree existence as Diego gradually fell even more in love with Angelina.
Pencil on paper (study for lacquer
He also encountered a city larger than he had ever experienced. Along with the labyrinth of
project), diameter: 50 cm.
streets and buildings came the attendant urban poverty that had driven Karl Marx to pen
Juan Coronel Rivera Collection,
the Communist Manifesto in 1848 with Friedrich Engels. This crushing poverty of the
Mexico City.
London slums – much worse than the poverty of the poor in Mexico City – deeply affected
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the young painter, but he did not translate any of it, save for a few sketches of a workers’ strike, to his art. Beloff travelled with him to London’s museums, docks, and tourist spots and gradually became attracted to the lumbering young man with the big eyes and awkward charm. Unfortunately she had no allusions as to his art. Rivera’s technique was brilliant, but he chose the subject matter of a forgettable academician. He studied the work of one allegorical realist after another while around him swirled the modern art of Matisse and Cézanne, the flurry of manifestos coming from the Futurists’ overheated presses in Italy, the beginnings of work by two painters named Braque and Picasso cobbling together something called “Cubism”. All Diego wanted was wall-space in the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, a grossly conservative group show of slick academicians, tripping over each other to please rich patrons.
34. Diego Rivera,
When they returned to Paris, Angelina kept her reflections to herself, because both María
Child with a “Taco”, 1932.
Blanchard and Diego owed paintings to their sponsors to keep their stipends coming. They
Lithograph, 42 x 30.3 cm.
set to work with María keeping to her Fauve style while Diego did his best alternating his
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
painting with study of Puvis de Chavannes’ murals. The Seine chose that time to spill over its banks with a historic flood. No one could cross the bridges to the Right Bank, telephones and
35. Diego Rivera,
electricity were down and many streets were flooded. The Hôtel de Ville, whose interior walls
The Rural Teacher, 1932.
had been decorated by Puvis, was unreachable because of high water, leaving Diego only the
Lithograph, 31.8 x 41.7 cm.
Pantheon and Sorbonne for study.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
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Being trapped by the flood gave him time to produce an etching, Mitin de Obreros en los Docks de Londres; he finished the House on the Bridge begun in Bruges and started a new painting, Le Pont de la Tournelle, in which he transposed the remembered London mist with its unique pinks and greys to the banks of the Seine. This painting shows workers unloading wine barrels from a barge onto the quay. To Rivera it represented a first look at what was emerging as his own style and it signalled the arrival of his empathy for the toil of the worker. He credited this new class sensitivity to his relationship with Angelina Beloff and the writings of Karl Marx The Salon des Indépendants accepted six of his paintings: four Bruges landscapes, La Maison sur le Pont and Le Pont de la Tournelle. By 1910, this Salon had frittered away some of its avantgarde reputation, but acceptance would look good in the Mexico City local newspaper. Diego Rivera was a nobody in the high-pressure Parisian world of fine art, patronage and financial success – and he knew it. He needed credentials and recognition from more than the provincial governor of Veracruz. He also needed constant pats on the back to buy up his confidence. His image of himself as a Mexican bumpkin lost in the halls of culture européenne continued to haunt him. He had reached a point in his technique where he could paint in any manner he chose, paint like any artist he chose; any artist but himself. He had been abroad for four years and while he had grown considerably into his twenty-four years, he was still homesick. The centenary of the 1810 Mexican Revolution demanded a celebration, and Porfirio Díaz intended to impress his foreign investors and the wealthy criolos who kept him in office. Besides the inevitable speeches, bullfights, fireworks and marching bands, the arts were to be celebrated with orchestras, operas and displays of original Mexican art. Diego had received enthusiastic permission from Governor Dehesa to return home with his latest work. With his paintings accepted by the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, he might even expect a warm welcome from his President. And there was the foreign press to consider. While he had earlier planned this return to Mexico without a thought, now he had Angelina and their developing relationship on the boil. They were deeply involved, but both understood the pressures and realities of their situation. They needed to keep their stipends alive without additional obligations, both financial and emotional. Neither knew if their autocratic governments might be toppled by internal or external strife at any time and their bursaries discontinued. Being the emotionally stronger of the two and the more pragmatic, Angelina suggested that they spend a year away from each other in their respective home cities. Diego could re-establish himself as the hometown artist who “made good” in Europe, 36. Diego Rivera, Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1925.
while she explained him to her Russian brothers. After endearing pledges of love and loyalty she boarded a train heading north, while
Red chalk and pastel, 64.5 x 50 cm.
Diego’s railway carriage rolled down the tracks towards Brittany and the sea. He needed some
Vicky and Marcos Micha Collection,
painting and solitude before the ocean voyage bore the conquering hero home, thankfully
Mexico City.
carrying his shield and not on it.
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¡ Vuelva a México ! Homecoming In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Erasmus (1466-1536) Diego Rivera’s return to Mexico in 1910 began a year during which his cast-iron layers of denial began to rust. He spent the rest of his life living as the person created by his own damage control. On October 2nd, 1910, he came down the steamship gangplank at the port of Veracruz wearing a broad grin for his waiting father and his sister María. Under his arms were rolls of canvases, the fruits of his grand tour of Paris, Spain and Belgium. Alongside his family stood representatives of the Society of Mexican Painters and Sculptors and, with shutters clicking and notepads poised, members of the press edged forward. He represented not only his own success in the European salons, but also a triumph of the Porfiriota regime. Diego Rivera, the newspapers would proclaim, was the new poster child for the efforts of President Porfirio Díaz to bring European culture and values to Mexico. To further stamp the imprimatur of government approval on his exhibition, the president’s wife, Carmen (Carmelita) Romero Rubio de Díaz, handsome and regal at a youthful forty-five to her husband’s eighty plus years, would open Diego’s exhibition on November 20th. This was an unbelievable honour. The venue was to be his old school, the Academy at San Carlos. The prodigal had returned. Exhibition walls were cleared – for his immediate convenience – of paintings by a ragged coterie of young Mexican artists belonging to the Savia Moderna art movement which opposed shipping Mexico’s art talent to Europe. Gerardo Murillo, the shady “Dr Atl”, had created the exhibition to further his own nihilist agenda and as a further prod to the Díaz regime. The press and anyone with political ambitions had avoided the show. Diego managed to glimpse some of the work before it was removed, then was introduced to a student exhibitor who seemed to simmer with an indefinable zeal. José Clemente Orozco shook Rivera’s hand and then a younger student stepped forward. Diego told Angelina in a letter that the paintings of David Alfaro Siqueiros showed obvious talent. At the academy, Diego had unloaded two etchings, eight drawings and thirty-five oil paintings, plus the paintings he had retrieved on loan from his patron, Don Dehesa, at Jalapa, the capital of Veracruz. There was much work to do re-stretching and re-framing all the work from Europe, which bore titles such as The Valley of Ambles, The Quiet Hour, Reflections and The Breton Girl, painted in the style of the Flemish Masters in Brittany before his departure for Mexico. His show created a virtual history of nineteenth-century art from El Greco to Puvis de Chavanne.
37. Diego Rivera,
Not represented were works done in the manner of Cézanne, Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Pisarro,
Head of “Hope” (study for the mural of
Seurat, or the experiments of Braque and Picasso. The Flemish Masters were there as were the
the Anfiteatro Bolívar), 1923.
gauzy ephemera and allegorical subtexts of the salon academicians that had gained him
Red chalk and pastel on blue-grey paper,
recognition in the dusty exhibition halls of Paris. To the Mexican élite, whispering in French
highlighted in white, 63 x 48.5 cm.
and sipping from demitasses, the exhibit’s result was an affirmation that their backward nation
Vicky and Marcos Micha Collection,
was closing in on everything that was excellent on the European continent.
Mexico City.
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Jean Charlot (1897-1979) wrote of this period later. He had been a former Ecole des beauxarts student in Paris and was of French, Mexican and Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side. He embraced his Mexican heritage and worked in Mexico during the 1920s, sketching for architects digging in the Mayan ruins. He later became a fresco muralist. Of Diego Rivera, Charlot wrote: “In 1910, the painter was a fledgling academic master, a docile retriever, bringing back from Europe the artistic booty that his aging protector, Don Teodoro Dehesa, rightist governor of Veracruz had paid him to fetch.”12 Even as Diego greeted begowned and bejewelled guests at the grand opening of his show, Mexican art critics and a few international colleagues with Mexican investments choked back adjectives such as “bland,” “derivative” and the career killer, “lacking in originality”, to bring out “superb technique” and “a promising talent”. Grinning and glad-handing, Rivera watched Doña Carmelita Díaz write a cheque for six of his paintings to be sent to her house and seven more for the president’s palace. The sycophants of the social set elbowed their way into line to follow the example set by Doña Díaz. With his stipend from Don Dehesa secured plus this windfall, Diego had finally realised some significant income from his paintings – even if they did look like other artists’ work. Two days earlier, on November 18th, 1910, only sixty miles from Mexico City, for an entire day the thunder of gunfire had rolled over the dusty hillsides surrounding the equally dusty town of Puebla. When the siege lifted, a band of Maderistas surrendered to a company of Díaz soldiers. Three of the Revolutionary band lay dead. On November 19th, Francisco Madero, the son of a rich family and bitter foe of President Díaz, rode south across the United States border in the company of well-armed men. Silently they crossed the stretch of desert ground that separated the two countries; spurs jingled, brass cartridges were ready in cross-belts and blue steel gun barrels flashed in the sun. They rode for a day then camped in a friendly village, waiting to be met by friends. The next morning, November 20th, Madero proclaimed that the Mexican Revolution had begun. President Díaz declined to attend Diego’s opening because across Mexico bands of unskilled and illiterate peons and valued farm worker campesinos were mounting up and gathering in small bands that merged into armies. Pancho Villa, a one-time bandit, rode with Pascual Orozco, a Díaz army officer from the northern state of Chihuahua. Emiliano Zapata brought his mounted army up from the south toward Morelos, only a few miles from Mexico City. In the city, Diego Rivera counted his money and his good fortune. As long as Porfirio Díaz remained president of Mexico, Rivera’s financial future was assured. The show had been a success and he had any number of commissions waiting for him. He could buy a ranch in the country and a studio in the city where he and Angelina could paint and live quietly, or party and travel around the world with their friends. Mexico City had become a party town and Diego threw himself into the celebrations. He had shaved his straggly moustache, but kept the beard to maintain his 38. Diego Rivera,
masculine gravitas. He became the guest of honour everywhere he walked through the door.
Portrait of Ruth Rivera, 1949.
In the countryside, the Mexican army had been mobilised to combat the small posses of
Oil on canvas, 199 x 100 cm.
revolutionaries before they could grow into larger bands. Díaz’ tough shock troops, the Rurales,
Juan Coronel Rivera Collection,
burned towns where sympathisers were found. More and more peons, armed with nothing
Mexico City.
more than sticks and machetes, flocked to Pancho Villa’s and Zapata’s growing guerrilla forces.
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39. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1918. Oil on canvas, 116 x 146 cm. Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
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Diego’s show was extended to December 20th, and then the Academy de San Carlos was cleaned out. Thirteen of the thirty-five paintings were sold, bringing the artist 4,000 pesos. He saw to it that borrowed paintings were returned to Don Dehesa in Jalapa, purchases were wrapped and delivered to Doña Carmelita Díaz, and the rest stored. After all the weeks of being feted in Mexico City, being the toast of the town, the conquering hero, he could no longer stay there. He knew he had to return to Paris and meet up with Angelina again, this time with some money in his pockets. He gathered his bags and his paints, said his goodbyes and left Mexico City on January 3rd, 1910 – not for Paris, but, according to a letter sent to Angelina in March, for a small village two hours away by train named Amecameca. There he remained, painting landscapes, taking stock of his “success” and yearning for Angeline. All around him the Revolution gained strength. Peons ambushed and hacked to pieces platoons of Rurales for their weapons and ammunition. Armouries were looted. Small boys fired long rifles as they ran against the bayonets and artillery of Díaz’ regular army. Dabbing away in Amecameca, Rivera feared that the awkward imposition of the Revolution might interfere with the postal service, and his endearments might not reach his “Angel” in far off St Petersburg. Having the documented evidence of Rivera’s movements and associations during this 1910 to 1911 period, the self-portrait he painted of the “revolutionary” and “patriot” Diego Rivera years later during this explosive time in Mexico’s history makes for wonderful fiction. In later years when he had once again become the artistic symbol of Mexico and needed to show his street credentials to the latest regime, his part in the Mexican Revolution between 1911 and 1920 became a lusty tale of adventure. Beginning with his arrival in Mexico City for the exhibition of his work, the event became cloaked in mystical portent. First he claimed that his mother had not learned of his arrival in Mexico City. He wanted to “surprise” his emotionally fragile mother after four years absence. While she gushed tears and flung open her arms at his triumphant arrival, the reunion came to a sudden halt at the appearance of the mystical old crone, the Indian nurse to whom he’d been fobbed off to be healed as a child. She had dreamed of his arrival and walked for eight days to greet him. “Twice as tall and twice as beautiful as my real mother”, she and Diego confronted each other in the family house. Diego made his way upstairs to his former room and there, Blackie, his faithful dog, now crippled with age, greeted him. The aged mutt dragged himself up onto Diego’s lap, licked his master’s hand – and contentedly died. It seemed as though a guiding hand of mystical protection keeping him out of the army’s gun sights and busy firing squads now ruled his life. Finding time while preparing his show, Diego plotted to assassinate Porfirio Díaz with a bomb concealed in his large sombrero. Unfortunately, a general and fellow plotter arrived on time for their lunch date to seal the deal, and dug into the frijoles. Diego arrived late to see the general thrashing out the last minutes of his life on the cantina floor after a generous poisoning by Díaz’ secret police. Being late saved Rivera’s life. He adopted that for future appointments. The bomb components then migrated in his paint box to his exhibition, timed to detonate
40. Diego Rivera, Woman with a Red Shawl, 1920.
as the President admired Diego’s paintings. When the President’s comely wife showed up at
Oil on canvas, 80 x 75 cm.
the grand opening instead, the plot, like the bomb, fizzled out.
Private collection, Mexico City.
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With his zeal to fight for the proletariat against the imperialists and capitalists unfulfilled, Diego saddled up and spent six months galloping into battle at the side of Emiliano Zapata and his southern army. Diego’s speciality was blowing trains off their tracks with explosives, but without harming a single passenger. However, as bullets whistled above the battle, Diego’s friends tore him from Zapata’s side and told the painter to leave Mexico or end up facing a Díaz firing squad as his name was on the presidential death list. Regretting his departure from the class war of the peasants, he fled to Jalapa and bid a tearful farewell to his old patron, Don Dehesa. While there, waiting for the packet to France, revolutionary insurgents surrounded the capital. Diego served his patron one last time acting as a negotiator between the Don and the revolutionaries until he was certain Dehesa’s life would be spared. Even his departure from his native land brought down the fury and mystical hand of the gods as the wheezing steamship Alfonso XIII battled its way through an Atlantic storm. In his overheated imagination, which benefited from numerous re-tellings of the story, Diego supposedly took command of the cargo hold where, with whips and a pistol, he forced the cringing crew to shift cargo and maintain the ship’s even keel until they were safe. Back to reality, the only thing actually gaining an even keel was Diego Rivera’s self analysis of his level of talent and potential ability to change direction. While parked safely behind his easel in Amecameca peering at the volcano Popocatépetl, Rivera came to some half-baked decisions that Angelina had been right to dislike The Breton Girl painting done in the Flemish manner and his other work done in other styles. Looking at the sweeping snow-capped volcanic mountain range spread before him, the sun-drenched colours of the fresh spring foliage at his feet, crowns of yellow flowers that capped the cacti of the high desert, he knew where he had to find this new direction for his art. He packed his paints and headed back to his hostel where he prepared to leave for Paris.
1
Diego Rivera (with Gladys March), My Art, My Life – an Autobiography, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1990 (original publication by Citadel Press, New York, 1960) pp.3-4
2
Patrick Marnham, Dreaming with His Eyes Open – A Life of Diego Rivera, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998, p.29
3
Henry T. Stein, PhD, Was Adler influenced by Froebel?, Alfred Adler Institute of San Francisco, 1997
4
Diego Rivera, p.11
5
Ibid., p.11
6
Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio and Aesthetics, Plus+ Magazine, http://plus.maths.org/index
7
Diego Rivera, op. cit., pp.20-21
Adoration of the Virgin, 1912-1913.
8
Patrick Marnham, op. cit., p.55
Oil and encaustic on canvas,
9
Diego Rivera, op. cit., quoted by Patrick Marnham, Dreaming With His Eyes Open – A Life of Diego Rivera, p.61
150 x 120 cm.
10
Diego Rivera, op. cit., p.34
María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection,
11
Angelina Beloff, Memorias
New York.
12
Jean Charlot, Mexican Mural Renaissance, Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1920-1925, p.121
41. Diego Rivera,
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His New Exil to Europe or His Artistic Quest The Eight Year Search – 1911-1919
A
ngelina Beloff should have known better. When Diego said in a telegram that he had docked in Spain, he didn’t mean that he intended to rush to the next ship bound for Le Havre. In his mind, it meant that he had arrived in Spain, and it was time to visit
old friends, take a tour of the Prado, and down a couple of casks of fine sherry during evenings in Madrid’s nightspots. Angelina had rented a studio near the Montparnasse Metro station at 52 avenue du Maine, and sat down to wait. The wait extended into anxiety, until one day he calmly strolled in and told her of the great time he’d had in Madrid. There was no apology or remorse but she was so happy to see him that their life together picked up where it had left off, and their pact to marry resurfaced. There is no public record of an official civil or church wedding, and Diego always claimed their union was of the so-called “common-law” type. Whatever the mechanics of their relationship, it began in happiness for them both. Angelina had rented the studio next to the Académie Russe for the hoard of young Russian artists who desired art training. She talked to them in Russian, taught a few classes, and enjoyed their company when Diego was deep into his work. He finished two paintings of the volcano Iztaccihuatl and sent them off to the Salon d’automne. They were promptly ignored. There was a buzz in the air still reverberating from the spring Salon des Indépendants he had just missed because of his sojourn in Amecameca. Cubism was being challenged and defended in every café on the Left Bank. Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon and André Lhote had exhibited Cubism in the Salon d’automne, while another band led by Albert GIeizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Robert Delaunay had dominated Les Indépendants.
Neither Braque nor Picasso had entered either salon, but they were still considered the pioneers of the form. “There are considerable differences in nuance between Braque and Picasso on one the hand and the other artists on the other,” wrote Tamon Miki of Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art. “…but each artist sought through his own individual method for a new order in plastic art, by departing from traditional visual senses, and by overlapping planes, piling and dividing them into massive, multi-surfaced fragments.”
13
With a harrumph, Rivera collected his volcano pictures, stuffed them into storage (where they were eventually lost) and left Paris with Angelina for Spain and its Mexico-like scenery.
42. Diego Rivera, The Eiffel Tower, 1914. Oil on canvas, 115 x 92 cm. Private collection.
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He trudged up into the Catalan mountains and began dabbing away in the Pointillist style – at least more modern than the Flemish Masters. After two months of eyestrain while emulating the coloured dots of Georges Seurat who had been dead for twenty years, Rivera came back to Paris and sent off two canvases to the spring Salon. They hung there like the museum pieces they were, and again he was roundly ignored. Diego Rivera became the artist who never encountered a style that he wouldn’t try. It is not difficult to imagine the cold panic that must have begun chilling his heart as he flailed about, an antique before his time, seemingly doomed to a trivial footnote in the history of art. The pavement cafés of the Left Bank turned into his moveable office where he became a conteur – a storyteller. He held court among the painters, dilettantes, hustlers and poseurs who built up their stack of saucers on the outdoor tables listening to his stories of plunging into hordes of Díaz’ troops alongside Zapata and hiding bombs in his sombrero and paint-box. But as he played the fool, he also listened. His academy-sodden imagination began to stir as painters rhapsodised on the theories of Cubism – both freestyle and analytical, pre, post, proto and synthetic. They spoke of Mondrian and his apparent summing up of this faceting of nature into total abstraction – the logical conclusion. And though Rivera admired the Dutchman, he was still drawn to the familiar friend Ángel Zárraga, and Angelina Beloff studied El Greco’s Mannerist landscapes and elongated character studies. In The Old Ones Rivera stretches the old men and places them against a background that folds up behind their El Greco-esque figures, bringing characters in the distance and buildings along the crest of a hill into the same picture plane, compressing the natural into an unnatural space. This painting and another, View of Toledo, are huge, six by seven feet in size. Could he have been thinking of the canvas wall murals of Puvis de Chavannes in the Pantheon rotunda? This meddling with spatial relationships led to other experiments. He and Angelina began trying different media besides linseed oil, looking for tactile solutions. A mix of lemon resin, essence of lavender and beeswax produced a particularly heady parfum graisseux with which to mix their paints. There was a frantic air among the bohemians of Montparnasse as the once stabile world of simple painters, filters of the world around them, became a chaotic repository for the transmogrification of that world. The art-buying public had been challenged by the artists to mind-meld with the creators and peel back layers of manipulation to discover some “truth” buried in paragraph four of the latest manifesto. Rivera biographer Bertram Wolfe described this shift to the abstract revealed in the “Isms of art”: “As we look back at these movements, we can begin to see Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, and all the other schools of Abstraction and formal experiment in modern art as contrary eddies in a common current. Together they mark the culmination of a long process 43. Diego Rivera, Still Life with an Anise Bottle or Spanish Still Life, 1918.
of growing isolation of art from society; the result of art’s having been forced increasingly to turn in upon itself.”14 Back in Mexico, on November 11th, 1912 Francisco Madero had replaced the decamped
Oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm.
president, Porfirio Díaz. The new regime saw no reason to cut off Mexican artists from their
Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato.
patrons and government bursaries, so Diego’s stipend was safe. Another benefit of the end of
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the Revolution was the expansion of Diego’s social circle to include the strange Dr Atl, the dandified Roberto Montenegro from San Carlos Academy days, and an artist-intellectual clothes horse who made Montenegro look like last week’s laundry, Adolfo Best Maugarde. While Diego struggled with his isolation from both the young lions of the Montparnasse avant-garde and the old toothless lions of the fly-blown Salons, at least he could speak a little Mexican with his compadres. As Rivera struggled to make his academy-trained mind embrace the reality-splintering concepts of Cubism, on February 19th, 1913, General Victoriano Huerta staged a coup and sent the trusting intellectual Madero to prison. The general proclaimed himself President of Mexico with the support of United States ambassador and fellow alcoholic, Henry Lane Wilson. Supporting Huerta (called El Chacal – “the Jackal” by the Mexican campesinos and peons who knew him best), Lane sought to steer Mexico back to the days of Díaz when international big business had a free hand in the impoverished country. On February 22nd, Madero was being transferred from one prison to another when one of his guards pumped a revolver full of lead into the former president. On the same day – Washington’s Birthday – American President Woodrow Wilson and Mexican President Huerta toasted George Washington in the White House. During the time that Diego Rivera remained in Paris and travelled in Italy, his homeland once again went up in flames and was riddled with violence. The combined armies of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza opposed Huerta’s government. Villa fought to avenge Madero and to become the next president, Zapata led an agrarian revolt of the campesinos, and Carranza claimed he fought to create a democratic Mexico. During the ten years that followed the assassination of Madero – the Decada de Dolores (the Decade of Sorrow) – all three of Mexico’s legendary champions were assassinated. The last was the retired Pancho Villa, machine-gunned in an ambush in 1923. Villa’s death was still years in the future as Diego rendered pencil sketches using Cubist fractured planes. He created Toledo landscapes with sliced hillsides Cézannesque trees and jumbled houses. At last, he painted Man with a Cigarette, a Cubist portrait, and surrendered his talent to the Cubists’ faceted world. Where the Impressionists distanced themselves from the stuffy studios of the allegorical realists and rigours of the Salon to flee outside in the light and let it soak into their canvases, so did the Cubists return indoors. Where paintings once reflected real life and the colours of the seasons in prismatic palettes, now the canvases drained away their colour and lived only with line, form and texture. Views of real life were replaced with earth colours and objects pasted in place. People existed as symbols of people possessing their identities only in the assembly of the sum total of their parts. People and objects were parsed like sentences and left in that state, not recombined, when the mystery of their elements was understood and returned to a unified whole. Canvases turned out by the Cubists were curious puzzles to be decoded:
44. Diego Rivera, Still Life, 1913.
“Is it a person, or is it a thing?”
Oil on canvas, 84 x 65 cm.
“I see a hand!”
The State Hermitage Museum,
“Ah!”
St Petersburg.
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45. Diego Rivera, Still Life, 1915. Oil on canvas, 50 x 61 cm. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.
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Abroad, no sooner had the Mexican Revolution seemed settled than the “war to end all wars’’ began with the assassination of a tin-pot archduke by a lunatic. Art seemed to follow suit with the fragmentation of everything that was not being blown to bits by artillery. With the death of Madero in the back seat of a police car, Rivera’s stipend vanished. The beginning of the October Revolution in Russia caused Angelina Beloff’s government allowance to dry up. While she could teach in order to survive, Diego had to sell his paintings. Suddenly faced with no income, he had to fall back on his incredible endurance and ability to quickly tie onto Cubism, le commerce du jour. Diego sought out the most prominent Cubist art dealer, Léonce Rosenberg. To keep his financial pot boiling, the latest (if a bit tardy) Cubist artist began collecting junk for still-lifes: playing cards, musical instruments, lengths of cloth, patterns and textures, old photos, new fruit, ancient bread loaves, sheet music, an alarm clock and, for a touch of home, an old serape shawl. He also dragged his friends and fellow artists into portrait poses. Moving back and forth between Spain and Paris between 1913 and 1917, the Diego Rivera Painting Engine was in full production. If this sounds crassly profit-oriented to the exclusion of art quality and creative expression, the Cubists had worked out that dichotomy as well. Much of Cubism was governed by geometric formulae, specific spatial relationships and mathematical theories. Carrying these precise concepts forward, the Cubists and Cubist art dealers worked out a simple formula for determining the value of each painting. Every card-carrying Cubist painter was placed in a code book and assigned a number that reflected his “personal factorial value”. Each artist had a different number based on a mutually agreed-upon subjective judgment of his sales potential. To determine the price of a painting, it was measured in square centimetres and determined to be of a particular size, then that size was multiplied by the artist’s “factorial value” number and – voilà! – the price resulted. For example, according to Rosenberg, Rivera’s paintings were usually a size “60”. That would be a portrait about 1.27 metres by 97 centimetres. For this, Rivera received 250 francs. According to Rosenberg, to keep one jump ahead of the debtors’ prison, Diego “…did about five major paintings a month for me, not including sketches, pastels and watercolours. He was always one of my most prolific painters.”15 Considering his “Cubist period” lasted about five years, Diego cranked out several hundred “major paintings” and sold them by the metre like cloth to make up a pair of trousers. As if weight might also add to the paintings’ “value”, Diego began mixing sand in his paints 46. Juan Gris,
and carved away with thick impasto to create physical textures on the canvas besides the usual
Figure of a Woman, 1917.
Cubist collage effects, employing found objects pasted in place. Being a late-comer, he was
Oil on canvas, 116 x 73 cm.
obsessed with making a contribution to Cubism, not merely copying (as was his forté) the
Private collection.
methodology. To that end, his interpretation of fragmenting the central object from various angles then hacking the fragments into geometric shapes which he flattened on the background
47. Diego Rivera, The Anise Bottle, 1915. Oil on canvas, 69.7 x 64.7 cm. Private collection.
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– as did his acquaintance, Modigliani – ended up with a recognisable image. The subject was also recognisable in his portraits, instead of being transmogrified into a new shape or theme. As a second-generation Cubist, Rivera needed an acceptable quirk to set him apart, and his use of colour in place of sombre earth tones became that vision unique. At one point in 1914,
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Picasso and Rivera met at the maestro’s studio. Diego was awestruck at the quantity of Picasso’s paintings scattered around the walls. They had lunch and then dinner, and finally Picasso came to see Diego’s work. He approved of what he saw and made Rivera part of his circle. This opened up Diego’s world to visits by Picasso’s friends Juan Gris and Guillaume Apollinaire, the Symbolist poet. The maestro’s imprimatur was invaluable to Diego’s success and acceptance by the Parisian painting community. This colourful “ornamental Cubism” seemed to bear out Picasso’s often quoted “Somebody does it first and then somebody else does it pretty.” It was not long before Diego plunged into the formal orthodoxy of Cubism, with its debates and manifestos setting down rigorous sets of aesthetic rules. To create some of his works (at the speed needed to pay the rent and eat) he devised an optical device he used to help view faceted images of his subjects. He always kept it hidden so no-one would steal the idea. A new circle of friends called the Section d’Or drew him in, introducing him to the personalities and art of Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger and Albert Gleizes. They were believers in an updated compositional crutch originally determined by the classically-trained painters of the academy, based on ideal proportion and a linear sectioning of the canvas. Later, Diego would use this “Golden Section” method of working out his fresco compositions. Back home, Adeline and his friend Ortiz Zárate brought Diego into the company of many Russians, both students at the Académie Russe and intellectuals who had found a little slice of Mother Russia in the school and its neighbourhood. Painters such as Chaim Soutine and Marc Chagall were often joined by the sculptor Jaques Lipchitz. Iiya Ehrenburg, a deathlythin poet, ended up in one of Diegqueiroso’s Cubist portraits. Cheap wine and strong coffee flowed copiously as Cubism and other -isms were the subjects of heated debate seasoned with Marxism.
48. Diego Rivera, Still Life with Green House, 1917.
While Diego claimed earlier familiarity with Marx, it is doubtful if his youthful skimming of literature and social tracts ever retained the content. As he had attached himself to Cubist
Oil on canvas, 61 x 46 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
theories, so he also absorbed kernels of Marxist dogma. At home in Mexico there was bloody revolution. In Imperial Russia there was revolutionary turmoil as the Czar’s army prepared to
49. Pablo Picasso,
mobilise to fight the sabre-rattling imperialist Germans. Everywhere, men and women took
Composition with a Bunch of Grapes
sides and passionately defended their decisions to the death. While this doctrinaire
and a Sliced Pear, 1914.
confrontation found its voice in street riots, labour strikes and ringing rhetoric, Diego fretted
Collage on paper mounted on
about reaction to his first – and only – one-man show in Paris. Twenty-five of his works
cardboard, gouache, size paint, lead
looked down from the walls of Berthe Weill’s gallery.
pencil and sawdust, 67.6 x 57.2 cm.
He was ebullient: “Everything about the movement fascinated and intrigued me. It was a revolutionary movement, questioning everything that had been said and done in art.”
16
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
As the revolution in Mexico continued when Zapata repudiated Huerta’s presidency and continued the fight, Diego visited his artist friends crammed together in La Ruche – the
50. Diego Rivera,
“Beehive”. There, in this circular three-storey building that housed in its warren of small,
Still Life with Lemons, 1916.
cheap studios the best of the Parisian art world, Diego spun his tales of derring-do with the
Oil on canvas, 81.5 x 65 cm.
Zapatistas. He fought at their side, blew up trains – just the baggage cars, not the passengers
Private collection.
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– and was a trusted spy in the court of the hated Díaz. And all was done in the service of the downtrodden peons. The poet Ilya Grigorevich Ehrenburg wrote of Rivera after spending considerable time in his company at the Café Rotonde: “Diego was a man of emotions and if sometimes he carried to absurdity the principles he cherished, it was only because the engine was powerful and there were no brakes.” Rivera showed no intention of putting on brakes when facing his easel. The Cubists were a close-knit group and their adherence to Cubist dogma, theories and immutable 51. Diego Rivera,
mathematical formulae tended to create a “sameness” in their work from artist to artist.
The Meager Table, 1917.
Unsponsored for the first time, Diego was no different, especially in his free-floating existence.
Oil on panel, 60 x 67 cm.
He needed product on walls, but regardless of his love of myth-making and tall tales, he also
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
had a sense of honour and a belief that he was in pursuit of a higher achievement, a personal and unique creativity. But avoiding the influence and inspiration of his contemporaries during
52. Georges Braque, Fruit Dish and Glass, 1912.
that fevered wartime period in Paris between 1914 and 1918 was impossible. As he clung to maintaining the tenuous identity of his portrait sitters, a discipline from his
Glued paper and charcoal, 62 x 46 cm.
student days, he wandered among the Cubist variations. In the 1915 Portrait of Madame
Private collection.
Marcoussis, Rivera uses the palette favoured by analytical Cubism in this work done in the
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manner of the synthetic Cubism favoured by Juan Gris. Yet, he maintains his own slash of signature colour in the yellow book held by his model against an intricate gold embroidery. His painting, The Architect makes use of Juan Gris’ ability to organise the multiplicity of elements, but borrows Braque’s love of simulated wood grains – a trick Braque learned when he used to paint houses – and a stencilled signature. Diego Rivera had immersed himself in Cubist theology, but even as he described this period decades later, his words to author Florence Arquin, in 1954, reflect the kernel of denial he must have felt: “I have always been a Realist, even when I was working with the Cubists. That is why in Paris they used to call me the Courbet of Cubism. I believe this movement to be the most important single achievement in the plastic arts since the Renaissance. I also believe that my Cubist paintings are my most Mexican. Inside them are plastic qualities – certain specific ways of expressing proportion and space, certain special and personal theories and practices in the use of colour – that are my own invention and belong to me.”17 In the spring of 1916 he showed his work with post-Impressionists and Cubists in Marius de Zayas’s Modern Gallery at 500 Fifth Avenue in New York. De Zayas was a fellow Mexican and caricature artist who was a colleague of Alfred Stieglitz and had helped to organise exhibitions at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery for many years. Later, in October, Zayas mounted a second show “Exhibition of Paintings by Diego M. Rivera and Mexican Pre-Conquest Art”. The interval between these shows was celebrated with two events: the birth of Diego and Beloff’s child, Diego Jr, and the death of Porfirio Díaz, still in exile in Paris. Rivera’s marathon work for dealer Léonce Rosenberg led to a two year contract of turning blank canvas into francs. To keep going, Diego attempted to dig below the superficial theories of composition, palette and textures to enter the realm of “classical” Cubism championed by his new friend and inspiration source, Juan Gris, and became part of the circle that included Lipschitz, Metzinger and Lhote. This path led to scientific directions ending in deep metaphysical discussions at Henri Matisse’s studio. The comparison of these discussions to the old folk-tales and Indian mysteries of his childhood must have intrigued Rivera as he
53. Diego Rivera,
pressed ahead shovelling more sand and gravel into his paints, possibly seeking some sort of
The Mathematician, c. 1918.
balance with the earth and its reality.
Oil on canvas, 115.5 x 80.5 cm.
The spring of 1917 witnessed a severe fracture in the heretofore tightly bonded Cubist
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
camp. The war in France had whittled away at the art colony. Braque marched off in 1914 with the 224th Infantry Regiment and came back with a Croix de guerre, a Légion d’honneur and a
54. Diego Rivera,
head wound that terminated his painting for two years. Léger painted camouflage and dodged
Portrait of the Painter Zinoviev, 1913.
around the battlefield with a stretcher, but was gassed and cut loose from the army with a deep
Oil on canvas, 97.5 x 79 cm.
hacking cough. As Apollinaire penned an inspired bit of verse while supporting his pad on the
Private collection.
breech of a cannon, he received a debilitating head wound near Champagne in 1916. A hole was trepanned in his head with an augur to ease pressure on his brain and he returned peering
55. Diego Rivera,
out from a cocoon of bandages. Apollinaire never recovered enough to stave off the ravages of
Portrait of Kawashima and Fujita, 1914.
the 1918 influenza epidemic and died. Taking Apollinaire’s place as the critic/spokesman for
Oil and collage on canvas, 78.5 x 74 cm.
the artist colony was the poet and aesthete Paul Reverdy. In his magazine Nord-Sud he wrote
Private collection.
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a scathing attack on Cubist portrait painters, particularly attacking those who had tagged onto Cubism after the pioneers like Picasso and Braque had laid the groundwork. Among the victims of his nasty rant was Diego Rivera. Shortly afterwards, Diego’s dealer, Rosenberg, threw a dinner party for his contract painters. Rosenberg and Reverdy were friends, so the critic showed up at the party and brought his big mouth with him. After the meal at the Lapérouse Restaurant, the artists kept 56. Diego Rivera,
the party going by strolling to Lhote’s studio. Feeling the effects of his vin ordinaire, Reverdy
Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla), 1915.
launched into a verbal attack on the Cubist hangers-on. Unable to bear the abuse any longer
Oil on canvas, 144 x 123 cm.
– and perhaps believing his own press as defender of the downtrodden – Diego stepped up
Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City.
and slapped the critic. Shrieking, Reverdy grabbed handfuls of Rivera’s hair. Diego bellowed
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and punched Reverdy in the mouth. The other artists, in various states of inebriation, piled on. Crockery shattered, a window broke, sending shards into the street below, but eventually exhaustion ended the fray. Diego offered an apologetic hand to Riverdy, who snubbed it. The Writer Max Jacob, standing nearby, shrugged. “The rancour of poets is enduring.” he said. Following what became L’Affaire Rivera, Rosenberg dumped Rivera as a contract painter and pulled all his paintings off the market. The other artists turned their backs on Diego, and Reverdy wrote a satirical sketch about his encounter with an un-named “Indian Savage”,
57. Diego Rivera,
leaving out the slap and the poke in the mouth. The tall fat Mexican with the big eyes and tall
Portrait of Martín Luís Guzmán, 1915.
tales was out in the cold with no dealer, no friendly critic – and at home things were even
Oil on canvas, 72.3 x 59.3 cm.
worse. Diego had met another woman.
Fundación Cultural Televisa, Mexico City.
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He and Angelina were living in a small studio apartment at 26, rue du Départ. Much of the gaiety had left Montparnasse as the men had marched off to die in the trenches or return with missing limbs, blind, hacking up phlegm from gas attacks, or just having had their joie de vivre stamped out of them. Those who had been turned down for service in the French army, such as Diego (flat feet) and Modigliani (alcoholism), were bad company. As his friendships with the painters dried up, he sought more often the company of Angelina’s Russian friends and artists. Among them was Marevna Vorobov, twelve years younger than Angelina and with a spitfire temper and a sensuality that appealed to Diego. In 1916 Beloff went into the hospital to have their first baby, Dieguito (Diego Jr). In her absence Marevna joined Diego in the apartment for torrid sessions of lovemaking and became his mistress. Crushed by Rivera’s deceit, Beloff took the child with her to live in a small unheated apartment above the rooms of María Blanchard, who helped with the baby when she could. Diego gave Angelina 100 francs a month, barely starvation money. Due to poor nutrition, Dieguito was rarely in good health. Diego never let up with his painting and soon grew tired of the younger Marevna’s demands and the short time he could spend with his tiny son. After seven months he broke with her and, in typical Rivera fashion, his story of the break-up became a melodrama. “Before we parted, however,” he explained, “Marevna asked for one last tryst…As I was leaving her hotel room, intending to return to Angelina, Marevna embraced me. A knife was hidden in her sleeve, and as I kissed her for the last time, she carved a wide gash in the back of my neck… As I lay on the floor unconscious, Marevna cut her throat. Neither of us died however. A few days later, Marevna was again sitting at the café tables with a bandage around her neck, which, the war having just ended, was quite in fashion.”18 Marevna Vorobov did stalk Diego and Angelina as they struggled to raise their son. And 58. Diego Rivera,
Diego, a chronic cheat, did sneak off to partake of Marevna’s charms. Eventually Marevna’s
Portrait of M. A. Voloshin in an
pregnancy became obvious, and in 1918 she gave birth to a daughter, Marika. Diego never
Armchair, 1916.
acknowledged the child as his. Meanwhile, little Dieguito struggled through the harsh
Oil on panel, 50.2 x 30.5 cm.
winter of 1917-18, but without money for medicine or good food, Angelina and Diego
House and Museum of M. A. Voloshin,
could not prevent his condition from becoming worse. He caught bronchitis, and when the
Koktebel.
influenza epidemic that killed Guillaume Apollinaire swept through Paris, it also claimed the weak little boy.
59. Diego Rivera,
After spending the five years between 1913 and 1917 as a Cubist, Diego Rivera disavowed
Portrait of a Woman, Mrs. Zetlin, 1916.
all connection with formal Cubism. He had embraced it and then had it snatched away by
Gouache on paper, 16 x 13 cm.
the dealer who had bought Diego’s paintings by the metre-length of paint-covered canvas.
Claude and Pierre Ferrand-Eynard
Diego had offered his friendship and stories to these Cubist painters who now cut him on
Collection, Paris.
the street and left their tables at the Rotonde when he approached. He had created hundreds of Cubist paintings that held their own alongside the best work of the others and added his
60. Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, 1937. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Musée Picasso, Paris.
84
own unique signature to their fading epoch. At its end, his poverty helped to cause the death of his only son. Near the conclusion of his Paris days, Rivera still had his tall stories, but had no style yet to call his own, and no money. He had made some new Russian friends, but now he wanted
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to go home. The Revolution was winding down in Mexico. The Great War had ended in France and a new revolution was just getting started in Russia. In Germany, food riots and political chaos had erupted everywhere. The British and the Irish were at each other’s throats. Everywhere peons – the ordinary working people – were caught between the politicians and the generals, and were dying or mourning their dead.
The Revelation of Italian Frescos – 1920-1921 With his romantic, spartan life as the bohemian painter aligned with right-thinking comrades creating the new art of Cubism now in shards at his feet, Rivera must have felt the cold chill of failure trickling down his spine. He saw the has-beens and pretenders sucking up cheap brandy and raw wine at the cafés. He could smell the stink of dead dreams sticking to their clothes. He had been stripped of everything but the two resources that had never yet failed him: his mastery of the medium and his ruthless single-mindedness. Beloff recalled in her memoirs a moment that struck her just before the end. She and Rivera were leaving an exhibition of Cubism at Rosenberg’s gallery, and Diego paused on the street looking at the outdoor displays of fruit and vegetables of every kind on the pavement in front of a huge market. “Look at them!” Diego exclaimed. “What a marvel. And we are making such trivialities!” They moved to a building far from Montparnasse on the Champs de Mars, rue Desaix, where his studio was atop six flights of stairs, and their apartment was below on the third floor. In renouncing Cubism, he returned to his Fauve palette of blazing colours. Having learned to appreciate the Cubist dynamic of folding space and manipulating perspective, he began to paint in the manner of Cézanne. His pencil drawings reverted to the delicate, true line of Ingres while clinging to the spatial relationships of Cézanne. After years of copying anyone and everyone, all these tools were instantly available to him. Much of this return to Fauve and Cézannesque experimentation came at the suggestion of Elie Faure, a doctor and art historian who, back in April 1916, had sponsored an art
61. Diego Rivera,
exhibition called Les Constructeurs in which Diego participated. Faure’s encyclopaedic
Woman at Well, 1913.
knowledge of art history and willingness to share it with Diego as mentor and lifelong friend
Oil on canvas.
did much to shape Rivera’s mature style. They spent considerable time together in deep
Museo Nacional de Antropologia,
aesthetic discussion as Faure propounded his theories of art and the obligation of the artist –
Mexico City.
tinged with no small helpings of Marxist philosophy. “Art is the appeal to the instinct of communion in men,” Faure said, “We recognise one
62. Paolo Uccello,
another by the echoes it awakens in us… They have told you that the artist is sufficient unto
Niccolo Mauruzi da Tolentino at the
himself. This is not true. The artist who believes it is not an artist…. When he feels living
Battle of San Romano also known as The
within him the earth and space, all that moves and all that lives, even all that seems dead –
Battle of San Romano, 1438-1440.
even to the tissue of the stones – how could it be that he should not feel the life of the
Egg tempera with walnut oil and linseed
emotions, passions, sufferings of those who are made as he is? His art reveals to the men of
oil on poplar, 181.6 x 320 cm.
today, the solidarity of their effort.”19
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
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Much of Diego’s enthusiasm for fresco was awakened by these conversations that suggested the latent power in the exhibition of inspirational and monumental art in public spaces. The artist’s ability to reveal the beauty in an object made by man or nature is also able to reveal and uplift the spirit of men like him. Life on the world stage was playing right into this definition of the artist as visual enabler of the people’s spirit. On April 10th, 1919 Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary leader and mestizo son of a peasant sharecropper, was lured to a meeting with Colonel Jesús Guajardo, a supposed defector to the Zapatistas. Federal soldiers ambushed Zapata and shot him to pieces in the town of Chinameca at ten past two in the afternoon. Rivera had used Zapata in his own mythology. He identified with the peasant leader and his cry of “Tierra y Libertad!“ – Land and Liberty. For the people of Mexico, Zapata the champion of the peons became Zapata the legend that would never die – a martyr. The dictator, Carranza, was doomed. Within a year, General Álvaro Obregón marched into Mexico City at the head of an army of Zapatistas and became the leader of the seventy-third government in the long bloody battle for Mexico’s independence. Under Obregón real agrarian reforms were enacted, and he brought with him people who understood the need for reestablishing Mexican culture. Among these cultural revivalists was Jose Vasconcelos, named Rector of the University of Mexico and head of the new Ministry of Education in Obregon’s cabinet. One of the reforms he demanded was a return of Mexico’s great art of wall decoration and its artists. Through the offices of Mexican ambassador to France, Alberto Pani, word of Vasconcelos’ plans for reviving Mexican fresco painting reached the ears of Diego Rivera. Hearing that his school rival Roberto Montenegro was packing up his paints in Spain for a return to the homeland, Diego became desperate to leave France. He totalled up his assets and liabilities and figured that if he could peddle a few paintings to earn his passage and expenses, he could return home immediately. Vasconcelos bought into the idea. Only two liabilities interfered with Diego’s scheme: one was his complete ignorance of fresco painting, and the other was Angelina Beloff. Rivera’s ruthless single-mindedness had placed their relationship on the debit side of the ledger. His emotional commitments had taken too many hits from the betrayal of his so-called Cubist friends. The fire in his romance with Beloff had cooled. Diego’s cerebral sensitivity confined itself to the time he spent facing his easel, no longer in discourse with the Russian girl six years his senior. By now Rivera’s work had come under the influence of Auguste Renoir and the artist’s voluptuous use of colour, together with the Rubenesque fullness of his figures who explored everyday events in French life. This infatuation became a hallmark of his own work for the 63. José Clemente Orozco, The Trench, 1926. Fresco.
next thirty years. Pani had arranged a $1,000 scholarship for Diego to study the art of fresco in Italy. Beloff’s companionship during the trip was not part of the deal. Even as he prepared to leave for Italy, he came down with a case of the grippe – influenza
Escuela Nacional Preparatoria,
of the respiratory tract, highly contagious, causing chills, fever and muscular pain. Beloff
Mexico City.
nursed him back to health.
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“What could I do?” she wrote later. “I still loved him.” To help cast the die, the young David Siqueiros arrived in Paris and sought out Rivera. Siqueiros had always been a firebrand who snatched up a rifle or a slogan for Mexico. He wrote: “That meeting, which I consider transcendental, represented the contact between an important period of European formalism, the post-Cezanne, and the aspirations of the young Mexican painters who participated actively in the revolution and were partisans of a new social art.”20 In January 1920, Diego Rivera set off by train from the Gare de Lyon to Milan, armed with sketchbooks and a head full of guilt from (in reality) having missed doing his part in the Mexican Revolution. His meeting with the fiery Siqueiros must have opened that wound. He felt guilty about cutting Angelina out of his life after being party to losing their infant son. He had denied paternity to his daughter Marika. His reputation in Paris was in tatters since L’Affaire Rivera and his abrupt departure from the Cubists. Diego’s long discussions with Faure, his historic and stylistic mentor, his listening to the Russian émigrés and art students’ stories of the Russian revolution in his apartment building and witnessing the deprivations visited on the French people during the war left him searching for a philosophy on which to base his work. As he dozed in the third-class carriage rolling through the mountains of Switzerland, he must have felt creatively adrift. He commanded a virtual catalogue of painting styles, wielding them until his original reason for becoming an artist had been lost in the cacophony of manifestos, pronouncements, declarations and, finally, desperation to discover his own true voice. Whenever possible he used the train as his overnight hotel, sleeping on the way to his next destination to save money. In this way, he began his travels down Italy’s boot. In Florence, the huge scale of Paolo Uccello’s tempera The Battle of San Romano at the Uffizi Gallery drew him to make detail sketches of its execution, exaggerating the great war horses and the bulk of the armoured knights and their power. This single panel of a larger work suggested the possibilities of fresco becoming as much a part of the architecture it enhanced as the walls or pillars that supported the structure. In Padua he discovered Giotto and that master’s ability to root his subject matter in the reality of earthly details, wasting no space in service to the idea being expressed. Giotto
64. David Alfaro Siqueiros,
had also mastered the gesture, a human touch that gave his figures – no matter how
From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to
idealised in religious iconography – the feeling that they had just been caught by a candid
the Revolution – The Revolutionaries,
photographer. This same rooting in reality of idealised religious dogma to help relate the
1957-1965.
subject matter to the common experiences of the fresco’s viewers was repeated in Verona.
Acrylic on plywood.
Here, seeing the Virgin and Child with St. Catherine in a Rose Garden by Michelino
Vestíbulo de la Revolución, Museo
da Besozzo, Rivera noted:
Nacional de Historia, Castillo de
“St Catherine seemingly feeds a bird while receiving from an angel the palm of martyrdom.”
Chapultepec, Mexico City.
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Rivera studied how the fresco masters used landscape not just as background, but as an integral element of the overall design and setting of the story. He was intrigued by the ways in which Piero della Francesca, Giotto and Botticelli used their fresco panels to work in architectural details like windows, stairs and pillars, and bring the existing architecture into the composition instead of treating it as an intrusion. Could Rivera, at this time, have seen the comparison between these Italian religious painters’ ability to make the miracles and mysteries of scripture plausible by including familiar objects and details of everyday life with the recounting of the Mexican revolution and the fruits of its victory with symbols the simple workers and peons could understand? If this was his own personal epiphany, the discovery must have been intoxicating. In the temples of Rome and the private houses of Pompeii the walls described both the demands of religious practice and the daily life, toils and recreations of a people long gone. Mexico had such a legacy deeply rooted in the pagan rites of the Indian pyramid builders. Their rituals and metaphysical mysteries still defied “civilisation” in many parts of Mexico, adding flavour and exotic touches to government-sponsored Christianity. For a period of seventeen months, Rivera prowled through Italy filling sketchbooks with hundreds of drawings. It was his longest period without producing a single major painting. For all his mastery of painting techniques, he still lacked the one he needed. Soon after arriving back in Paris in May 1921, he purchased a book by Paul Baudoin on the art of fresco. Packing all his clothes, rolled canvases and sketchbooks, he and Angelina boarded a train for Le Havre at the Gare Saint-Lazare. While waiting for the steamship to Veracruz, Diego sadly explained how there was no money for two fares to Mexico, and that he would send for her as soon as he had established himself – which would be soon, he was certain. The money for her fare would arrive and they would be reunited. Angelina listened patiently with the wistful acceptance that she would never see him again, and as he went on he became a smaller and smaller part of her life until when he kissed her goodbye, he was hardly there at all.
65. Diego Rivera,
13
Tamon Miki, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, October 2 – November 14, 1976
14
Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, Stein & Day, New York, 1963, paperback edition, 1969, p.81
15
Patrick Marnham, op. cit.
16
Ibid.
17
Florence Arquin, Diego Rivera – the Shaping of an Artist 1889-1921, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1971, pp.87-88
The Distribution of the Arms, 1928. Fresco, 203 x 398 cm.
18
Diego Rivera, op. cit., p.69
South wall, Patio de Las Fiestas,
19
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., – reconstruction of a conversation between Elie Faure and Diego Rivera based on the
Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City.
96
writings and memories of Elie Faure, 1936, p.110 20
Erico Verissimo, Mexico, Dolphin Books, Orion Press, New York, 1962, p.280
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Between Painting and Politics
Mexican Muralists
D
iego Rivera arrived in Mexico City primed and ready to begin painting on walls. His mentor and the overseer of the stipend that had financed his departure from Paris, Jose Vasconcelos, wanted to see him as soon as he arrived. Vasconcelos had been
given authority by President Obregon to do whatever was necessary to revitalise Mexican culture and Mexican pride in their country. After decades of having European values held out as an ideal to which all Mexicans aspired, the reversal to a home-grown culture dredged up from an almost extinct Indian pre-history seemed a formidable comedown. But one aspect, the tradition of wall painting and decoration of public buildings, would hopefully provide an awakening to an exclusively Mexican culture. Diego had seventeen months of research in Italy behind him to help launch this new vision for his homeland. He was promptly put to work as “Director of Propaganda Trains” in a country where artillery, machine guns and dynamite had wiped out most of Mexico’s locomotives and freight cars. Before the bewildered artist could determine his duties, the government said, “never mind” and made him “Art Adviser to the Department of Publications”. Wanting to be a player, Diego set about with ideas for books. The bemused staff nodded politely until Vasconcelos yanked Rivera out of that job too and took him and other artists and poets on a tour of the Yucatan peninsula. Mostly, José kept an eye on Diego. The artist emerged from the history refresher trip to the jungle and pyramids with many full sketchbooks and an appearance of great enthusiasm. It was a hard and squinty eye that held Diego Rivera in sharp focus. In the government’s view, he had fled revolution in Mexico for safety in Spain and Paris. No-one was buying the “explosives in his sombrero” story. He had to re-invent himself yet again. He had also lost points by making a detour to Italy at the Department of Education’s expense. Regardless of his frugal spending, Vasconcelos needed reassurance that Rivera’s Italian mural education junket was worth the pesos expended. He also had concerns about style, and Rivera’s Picasso-Cubist
66. Diego Rivera,
abstractions. As if rubbing salt into the wound, the director established Diego’s studio in a
Proletarian Unity (panel nineteen of
building upon which Diego’s life-long rival, Roberto Montenegro was creating a government-
Portrait of America, a series of twenty-
commissioned fresco.
one portable frescoes painted for the
All around Mexico City artists were perched on scaffolding in front of building walls,
New Workers School), 1933.
dabbing paint onto fresh plaster. Diego wondered how long this purgatory could last before
Fresco, 161.9 x 201.3 cm.
he went out of his mind. Finally, grudgingly, Vasconcelos gave Diego a wall of his own.
Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan.
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The Anfiteatro Bolívar was a concert performance space in the National Preparatory School in Mexico City, dating from the Porfirian Epoch. Diego’s wall was 23ft 3 in high and 40ft wide. In the centre was an arch that formed a niche housing an organ and its bench. To help him in the collective mural creation effort were experienced artists including Jean Charlot, Xavier Guerrero, Amado de la Cueva and Carlos Mérida. He also chose to forego using the medium he had studied in Italy – true fresco – to create the images by mixing paints with melted wax that bonded the image to the wall. As he worked, his assistants mixed the paint with the wax medium and used blow torches to keep the wall warm while Diego stroked away over his drawings. He had earlier experimented with this method, called “encaustic”, removing the possibility of failure in his first commission. What he produced was something else again. The Creation was a pair of Italianesque groupings – complete with Giotto’s gold haloes – all with Mexican and Indian faces. He used friends and acquaintances for models, making the groups a who’s who of Mexico City’s artistic community. One young girl in particular would rise to public attention: posing for the figure Prudence, María Dolores Asunsolo became Dolores Del Rio, a reigning beauty of motion pictures. These figures, some nude, are symbolic, representing Knowledge, Fable, Prudence, Justice and Strength across from Dance, Song, Music and Comedy. All of the characters seem caught up in a pained rapture. The centre of the wall above the arch is half of a star-filled lapis-blue sphere radiating golden light upon the groups with three specific rays ending in human hands making the two-fingered Christian sign of “Father-Mother”. Beneath the sphere peeping out from the back of the niche is the figure of the Pantocrator, a Greek term referring to Jesus Christ as the all-powerful ruler. He rises from a tree of life described in Mexican folklore. The tree’s leaves are decorated with the heads of domestic and jungle animals like Christmas tree ornaments. The fact that Diego was groping along a path between Christianity and Indian animism in his symbolism is evidenced by a quick trip he made back into the jungle for more research as the mural progressed. This excursion resulted in the jarring difference between the primitive energy of the niche painting and the smarmy religiosity of its flanking groups. Except for this glimpse of the hyper-energy in the Pantocrator’s Niche, of the kind that Rivera orchestrated with great vigour in his later fresco compositions, The Creation was dreadful. The last thing Rivera wanted to do was challenge Vasconcelos’ grand vision of a Mexican cultural heritage arising from its Indian roots. Rivera also wanted to show how much he had learned from his Italian studies and how well it translated into a Mexican idiom. He had to re-establish his figurative skills that were completely Picasso-free of any obvious Cubist or abstract elements. The Creation was painted for the boss, designed to reassure Vasconcelos 67. Diego Rivera, The Foundry: Emptying the Crucible,
and rededicate Diego’s commitment to the director’s Grand Vision. Something happened while Diego worked on the National Preparatory School mural that
1923.
eventually changed his entire life. One day he was sketching in his second floor studio when a
Fresco, 438 x 316 cm.
married friend, the Mexican singer Concha Michel, entered and began a flirty exchange that
Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de
suggested Diego was nothing but a shameless puto – a male prostitute. He admitted it. She
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
suggested that to keep him from chasing her, at which she would probably leave her husband
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and run off with Diego, but she had brought a friend who wanted to meet him. With a flourish, she opened the door and called in Lupe Marín from Guadalajara. Diego described her: “A strange and marvellous looking creature, nearly six feet tall, appeared. She was blackhaired, yet her hair looked more like that of a chestnut mare than a woman. Her green eyes were so transparent she seemed to be blind. Her face was an Indian’s, the mouth with its full powerful lips open, the corners drooping like those of a tiger. The teeth showed sparkling and regular: animal teeth set in coral as one sees in old idols. Held at her breast, her extraordinary hands had the beauty of tree roots or eagle talons. She was round-shouldered, yet slim and strong and tapering with long muscular legs that made you think of the legs of a wild filly.”21 Lupe glanced at his drawing, spotted a bowl of fruit and asked if she could have some. Transfixed, Diego invited her to eat all the fruit she wanted. Marín gorged down the fruit, asked for some more, ate all that as well and admitted she had not eaten anything for two days. Diego began to sketch her. Concha Michel discreetly left the studio. Diego Rivera and Lupe Marín soon devoured each other, and in June they were married in a Guadalajara church. They set up housekeeping at 12 Mixcalco Street in the old quarter of Mexico City. She posed nude for the figure representing Strength in the lower left corner of the mural and for two other figures. As he worked on the scaffolding in the auditorium, she brought him lunch and helped him eat it. This steamy possessive relationship helped set up a life-changing event in Diego’s life. Another model for the mural, specifically for the figure of Erotic Poetry, was the mistress of the shadowy anarchist free-thinker, Dr Atl. Atl had given the darkly-beautiful Carmen Mondragon the name Nahui Olin, taken from the Indian legends of the creation and end of the world. If Gerardo Murillo’s nickname was, as we explained, the fourth sun’s name, Mondragon’s pseudonym was the fifth and final sun, Sun of Earthquake, which was very fitting. She was another fierce and vivacious creature of Mexico City’s bohemian culture. A poet, naïve artist and champion of Mexican women’s independence, she managed to pose for and sexually plunder most of the artists in the community. Diego, despite the suspicious and jealous glowers of Lupe Marín, was equally helpless, lost in the heady charms of his latest model. It was during a particularly feverish tête-à-tête in the school auditorium that a shrill and laughing voice called out: “On guard, Diego! Here comes Lupe!” He glanced around and saw no-one. But at the next moment Lupe Marín arrived with Diego’s lunch at a more workmanlike scene of artist sketching and model posing. At another time, when he had finished lunch in the hall and succumbed to Lupe’s carnal demands, that same voice suddenly hailed: “On guard, Diego! Nahui is coming!”
68. Diego Rivera, Creation, 1922-1923. Encaustic and gold leaf, 708 x 1219 cm. Anfiteatro Bolívar, Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Mexico City.
Again, Diego could not find the owner of the piping laughing voice. But one evening while he was painting on the scaffolding and Lupe was weaving at her loom down below, the door
69. Diego Rivera,
opened and a slender twelve-year-old girl entered the auditorium. She wore the student
New World Schoolteacher, 1928.
uniform of the Preparatory School and looked up at Diego with challenging dark eyes.
Fresco, 219 x 770 cm.
“Would it cause you any annoyance if I watched you at work?” she asked.
Staircase, Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de
“No, young lady, I would be charmed.” he answered.
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
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70. José Clemente Orozco, American Civilisation – Anglo-America (detail), 1932. Fresco. Baker Library, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth.
Despite some insulting remarks from Lupe, the girl stayed for three hours. Later, Diego wrote, “A year later I learned that she was the hidden owner of the voice
71. José Clemente Orozco, American Civilisation – Latin America (detail), 1932.
which had come from behind the pillar and that her name was Frida Kahlo. But I had no idea that she would one day become my wife.”22 For better or worse, Diego completed the mural towards the end of 1922. Mexico City’s
Fresco.
cultural élite, intellectuals, professors and those who aspired to such titles, who had sneaked
Baker Library, Dartmouth College,
peeks at it in various stages, were in full cry wherever they gathered. At a dinner party one
Dartmouth.
evening at the home of the director of the Preparatoria, the following comments were
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volunteered (according to his daughter, Elena Lombardo Toledano, as told to Bertram Wolfe, Rivera’s contemporary and biographer): “Stupendous!” “An excess of genius!” “If we could, we would order the wall whitewashed.” “He has the right to succeed by virtue of quantity, but certainly not by virtue of quality.” “I would rather sweep the streets than paint like that.” “In time they will come to admire him as we admire the great painters of the Renaissance.” “Diego paints ugly because he is ugly.” “He is a corrupter of art!”23 Rivera, for all his melodramatic buffoonery, his womanising and growing political involvement with the Communist Party, which had found a foothold in Mexico, did not delude himself about his art. The Anfiteatro Bolívar mural in the Preparatory School was a means to an end, a curtain-raiser, if he had judged correctly. He had crammed many of Vasconcelos’ half-baked philosophical concepts into the work along with a figurative style that steered clear of anything resembling abstraction. Diego Rivera had redirected his life so many times and had absorbed so many cultural traumas that had reshaped his art, he was now shrewd enough to see where his future led. The fates had continually pointed him back to Mexico. To succeed in Mexico he had to embrace art for the common people, art that taught through recognisable images, art that became part of the architecture symbolising the merger of government, its history, the natural abundance of the land and the will of the people. He embraced an art form that was the product of a collective of talents. All this came together at a point in history where Diego Rivera stood commanding the tools and the imagination to bring this proletariat form of storytelling into fruition. He faced only one obstacle. Diego had seen the greatest frescoes in Western art during his journey through Italy. He had read books about the creation of frescoes. He had watched his
72. Diego Rivera,
fellow Mexican artists, including the great Siqueiros and Orozco working on frescoes. As he
The Embrace, 1923.
had mastered El Greco, the post-Impressionists, the Fauves and various flavours of Cubism,
Fresco, 478 x 183 cm.
now he faced the many challenges of fresco.
East wall, Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de
The fresco painter is the general of a team and must first organise the project. The strategic
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
goal is filling walls with painted stories that, taken as a whole, tell one large inspirational concept. First, the order of battle must be decided. The story is most important and must be
73. Diego Rivera,
visualised in sketches which relate to the wall surfaces it will decorate. With the story in hand
Entering the Mine, 1923.
there are many critical questions. Which surfaces that will require scaffolding to support the
Fresco, 474 x 350 cm.
preparation team and artist should be painted first? Where will the plaster be mixed and the
Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de
colours ground? Where will the paper cartoons be drawn before their lines are transferred to
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
the wall? Considering transportation, how will fresh plaster and mixed paints be conveyed to the preparation team and artist high up on the wall? All these elements must be worked out before the blank wall can be faced. Fresco painting is an ancient art dating back to tomb and temple decoration in the times before western civilisation brought the art into the public buildings and private houses of the Romans.
74. José Clemente Orozco, Social Revolution, 1926. Fresco. Escuela Industrial de Orizaba, Orizaba.
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The paints are ground from their mineral bases on location: azurite, carmine, charcoal black, indigo, madder-lake. red ochre, ultramarine, umber, white lead, verdigris and others. The artist must use very specific recipes for each colour so that as he applies them over several square feet of wall they remain constant in their hue and value. The very term fresco comes from the Italian meaning “fresh.” Fresco is a time sensitive art. It is the only painting art where the medium becomes one with its ground. Fresh plaster is mixed combining slaked lime with sand or marble dust. Since sand can contain impurities, Rivera preferred marble dust mixed two parts to one part with the lime. Mexico’s water hardly met purity standards at that time, so distilled water had to be used. The preparation team then applied the first coat of plaster, usually toughened with animal or vegetable fibres, to the wall section to a depth of about half an inch. After drying and scratching the surface with grooves to provide “tooth”, the arriciato or “brown” coat comes next, applied thickly over the first coat. Finally, the intonaco, or third “finish” coat is smoothly laid on only in the area where the artist will paint that day. He has about eight hours to complete the painting onto this final damp coat before it dries too much to absorb any more pigment. Creating the images to be painted is accomplished by sketching on large sheets of heavy paper generating a “cartoon” in the exact size the final image will appear on the wall. Using black or red crayon, a cartoon section is drawn while referring to a smaller sketch of the entire wall. Then, using a tool that resembles a rowled spur on a riding boot, perforations are punched into the paper following the drawn lines. The artist holds the cartoon in place against the wet plaster “finish-coated” wall and dusts the paper with a chalk-impregnated pad. The dust passes through the perforations in the paper to the wall beneath. Diego followed the chalk lines on the plaster wall with a brush charged with blue paint and then began to work with the mixed colours needed that day. This co-ordination was as important as the creation of the original concept, and speed of 75. Diego Rivera,
execution was critical. Reversing the order of application used by a painter in oils, Rivera
Exit from the Mine, 1923.
began with the lightest colours and worked backwards to the darker side of the palette. Only
Fresco, 478 x 215 cm.
as the wall dried could the true colour be seen and much depended on humidity, which
Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de
controlled the speed of drying. As he began the tedious learning process of shifting from
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
encaustic to fresco, Diego sometimes hurled himself at a finished section of wall – an entire day’s work – hacking at it with a trowel, weeping and raging in frustration.
76. Diego Rivera,
Ahead he faced the greatest challenge of his creative life. He had persuaded, cajoled and
Surface Miners, 1923.
baited Vasconcelos to award him an amazing opportunity. The Ministry of Education in
Fresco, 426 x 210 cm.
Mexico City offered 128 panels, amounting to 17,000 square feet, covering three floors of
Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de
open loggias. He began work on March 23rd, 1923. For Diego Rivera, the job was all or
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
nothing. It could make him Numero Uno, first among muralists in Mexico, or, if he failed, just another fat Mexican storyteller, amusing anyone who stayed to listen while he pulled his
77. Diego Rivera, Figures at the Market with a Scale, 1923.
dusty stories of what had never been from a bottomless jar of pulque. An irony is the peasant status of fresco as an artistic medium; it is only water and earth.
Fresco, 105 x 300 cm.
One of his assistants, the pure-blood Indian Xavier Guerrero, had taught himself the art of
Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de
fresco as a teenager. Being an itinerant fresco painter was equivalent of the travelling
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
photographer, carrying his equipment from village to village on the back of a donkey to make
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family portraits of the living, and memory pictures of the dead for a few pesos. Xavier had earned some money painting landscapes and religious frescoes in homes and advertising on the walls of pulquerias before he took up the rifle at the age of sixteen and marched off with Zapata in the revolution. He had impressed Roberto Montenegro when he came to Mexico City at the age of twenty-one and took charge of the preparation processes of the mural in the Church of St Peter and St Paul. The zeal and energy of men such as Guererro and Siqueiros matched that of many young Mexican men who had fought in the revolution and were now adrift. Mexico itself seemed to be searching for a guiding philosophy, but its leadership was wary of outside influences. To the north, the United States was governed as a republic based on the principles of democracy. But in Moscow the propaganda machine was tub-thumping a message of Communist successes following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. After a hundred years of class oppression at the hands of foreign governments and exploitation by capitalist corporations, restless Mexican men and women readily bought into the ideal of the workers’ brotherhood and equal shares for all promised by the Communists. Why couldn’t the triumph of selfless dedication to a common vision inspire Mexico’s workers and artists as part of a worldwide revolution? Diego Rivera had been drenched in Communist ideology while living in Paris. In Montparnasse voicing Communist dogma had been deliciously rebellious, and in the artistic soirées and cafés of Mexico City its appeal was no less popular. However, in an unstable Mexico still feeling its way into independence, the hardcore Bolsheviks saw the possibility of an actual takeover, in order to become a strong political reality on the very border of the imperialist United States. In reaching out to the artists, writers and poets – the most independent-thinking group in the Mexican population – to help educate the populace to their heritage and new future, Obregon’s government found itself on a slippery ideological slope as, one by one, its artistic messengers embraced the Communist line. Rivera had become member 992 of the Communist Party in late 1922. Where he had previously avoided participation in the birth of independent Mexico, now he recognised the 78. Diego Rivera,
workers’ struggle as the only path for all Mexicans to achieve a class-free society. Labouring
The Burning of the Revolutionary, 1926.
at fresco painting with his collective of assistants, was he any less a worker? He certainly was
Fresco.
no bourgeois living off the sweat of others. Diego took home about $2.00 a day after expenses
North wall, Patio del Trabajo,
and paying his preparation team. To make ends meet as Lupe started their family with
Secretaría de Educación Pública,
daughters Lupe in 1924 and Ruth in 1926, Diego turned his sketches and paintings for the
Mexico City.
murals into easel paintings for sale to the Norteamericanos.. This practice eventually became at odds with party ideologues who condemned easel painting as pandering to the dollars of
79. Diego Rivera, Tropical Mexico and the God Xochipilli
the rich bourgeoisie. With Lupe alongside him as both hostess and enthusiastic participant, his home became a
and his Votaries, 1926.
gathering place for the members of the new Mexican Communist Party, and he assumed the
Fresco.
position of leader, mentor and its Most Visible Big Noise at staged workers’ rallies. The
North wall, Patio del Trabajo,
Kuomintern in Moscow sent them funds to help infiltrate Mexican trade unions, but their
Secretaría de Educación Pública,
numbers never exceeded 1,500, according to observations by biographer and fellow
Mexico City.
Communist, Bert Wolfe.24
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Just about the time that the artists and other intellectuals were hunting for solidarity, the Obregon government began its first steps to stability and become the “Government of the Revolution”. Further, the international Communist effort to sweep into positions of power in other European countries had fizzled out as the Party went down to electoral defeat in Germany, Italy and Hungary. Post-war Europe was putting its house back in order. There was news leaking out of the new Soviet Union about peasant and food riots, famine and mass executions. In the United States “The Red Scare” swept across the country during the 1920s, as anyone vaguely resembling “Bolshies” or “Reds” was systematically hounded from homes and jobs and shipped back overseas by a zealous new enforcer, J. Edgar Hoover. The International Workers of the World (IWW or “Wobblies”) came under attack for their strident demands for workers’ rights, and the American Legion had been formed in 1919 specifically to “…perpetuate a one hundred per cent Americanism.” The patriotic buzzword at the time became “Leave the Reds to the Legion”, as incidents of vigilante justice against suspected Communists occurred across the country.25 So while the rest of the western world was doing its best to obliterate the empty promises of Communism within their borders, the artists of Mexico showed what they were made of by forming the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters, Sculptors and Allied Trades, called El Sindicato by most members. It was their duty to “…transform the world…don overalls, climb the scaffolding, engage in collective action, reassert its craftsmanship, take sides in the class struggle! Were they not building trades workers – like plasterers, stonecutters, glaziers, cement pourers?...”26 Leading this charge was the union’s executive committee, and Diego Rivera, Alfaro Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero filled three of its chairs. Squaring their shoulders for a long hard sell to the Mexican people, they created a mouthpiece for their manifestos and pronouncements. It was a giant newspaper called El Machete. Its logo, which reached across the top of the entire front page, was a 16.5-inch long machete, five inches wide, printed in black and overprinted in red. Below it, the paper’s motto read: “The Machete serves to cut the cane, To open paths in shadowed woods To decapitate serpents, to cut down weeds, And to humble the pride of the impious rich.” 80. General view of the east and north walls
Rivera, Siqueiros and Guerrero were the editors. It was a large newspaper illustrated with
of the Patio del Trabajo.
woodcuts carved by Guerrero and Siqueiros and offered chatty articles on Communism, art,
Secretaría de Educación Pública,
popular songs and poetry, and the occasional barking manifesto. It had two main flaws. First,
Mexico City.
the cost was ten centavos at a time when peons and farm hands – those most dissatisfied – took home only about thirty centavos a day. The second flaw was that which Diego’s father
81. Diego Rivera,
had experienced when he wrote angry letters to the local newspaper in the early 1900s,
Friday of Sorrows on the Canal of Santa
demanding government reforms: his largest audience base couldn’t read. Fortunately, the
Anita, 1923-1924.
artists who paid their membership dues also subscribed, as did the police, government name-
Fresco, 456 x 356 cm.
takers and the land owners who were the newspaper’s targets, if only to keep track of who was
Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de
who when the arrests began.
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
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David Siqueiros was the firebrand General Secretary of the union. His manifestos rang with revolutionary fervour. He was more talker than painter, eventually abandoning his mural, partially finished, at the Preparatoria to organise workers in the nearby mines. Guerrero, the Indian nicknamed El Perico – the Parrot – because he rarely spoke, tried his hand at organising the peones. His strong silent demeanour earned their respect, but the “silent” part also earned their confusion, not knowing quite what he was getting at. José Clemente Orozco never joined the union and remained a lone wolf among the artists. His mural work also displayed flaws of technique despite its story-telling power. Jean Charlot, the Catholic Frenchman who fought for France in the Great War, brought his trace of Mexican blood with him to Mexico City to produce small personal artworks and some fresco panels, and assisted Diego in both Mexico and later in the United States. Carlos Mérida, while he joined in with the others, was a Guatemalan who favoured abstract art. Two women belonged to the crowd: Nahui Olin was the perfect exotic camp-follower, and her polar opposite, Carmen Foncerrada, was a frail, quiet painter of quaint Mexican scenes. There were many members of both the Mexican Communist Party and El Sindicato that wandered in, hung around out of curiosity, and then left. The painters and sculptors union boasted its “solidarity” but was crippled by in-fighting to get the best commissions, jealousy, wages, royalties and the usual friction points among egotistical creative artists. Also, the likely purchasers of their work refused to recognise union demands, saying the money they were going to spend on the artists’ decorative art work could be spent on other, more practical things. Adios, muchachos. Only Diego remained and stayed with the Party on and off over the years. For someone who could sense the direction of the wind and make sharp course corrections in his career, this stubborn inability to steer away from Marxist-Leninist and, even Stalinist, ideologies remains a mystery. He seemed to thrive on the attendant controversy as he thrived on the attentions of beautiful, outrageous women. Diego Rivera was an entrepreneurial capitalist at heart. Ultimately the demise of El Sindicato landed at Diego’s doorstep as his notoriety and the volume of work he was awarded seemed to prove that some artists were more equal than others. He also became known for his acceptance of leadership or administrative positions and then wandering off without performing any actual tasks. His constant contact with the affairs of government did allow him constantly to test the direction of the political winds. When a rift opened between President Obregon and José Vasconcelos, Rivera inclined toward the primary source of his pay cheques, the Obregon administration and the offices of J. M. Puig Casauranc, Minister of Education. He convinced the minister that regardless of the political climate, the fresco mural cycles must continue to move forward. 82. Diego Rivera,
This was not an easy sell considering the machine-gun ambush assassination of former
Emiliano Zapata (Martyr Emiliano
general Pancho Villa in Parral, Chihuahua on June 20th, 1923. Other Mexican generals who
Zapata), 1928.
felt they had not received their fair share of the land and cash due to them began muttering
Fresco, 204 x 132 cm.
about revolt, which kept the reinforced loyal army in the field. This mobilisation cost pesos,
North wall, Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría
and to conserve as much money as possible in the treasury many of the mural artists were cut
de Educación Pública, Mexico City.
loose. Those who were not dismissed because of budget problems were shown the door when
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Obregon completed his term of office in 1924. All, that is, except the politically connected and adept Diego Rivera, who finally achieved his status as the Numero Uno mural painter in Mexico. At least for the time being. The Ministry of Education building ressembled a cloister for nuns rather than a government administration centre. As Diego later described: “It (the Ministry) is a huge rectangle of stone and masonry three blocks long and three storeys high. It is divided into two unequal halves, the larger which I called the Court of Fiestas and the smaller the Court of Labour, according to the murals I painted on their walls. “I arranged my work as follows: on the ground floor of the Court of Labour I painted frescoes of industrial and agricultural labour; on the mezzanine level, frescoes of scientific activities; and on the upper floor level, frescoes representing the arts – sculpture, dance, music, poetry, folk epic and theatre.” In the larger Court of the Fiestas, Rivera followed a similar routine. “…on the ground level, frescoes of great mass folk festivals; on the mezzanine level, frescoes of predominantly intellectual importance and on the top floor, the Great Song Frescoes based of the folk music of the people, music which expressed the people’s will and revolutionary wishes from the time of the country’s independence to the revolution.” The Ministry’s three stories enclosed a large open courtyard in three levels of loggias. Office doors opened onto these shaded loggias and the walls between these doors and the ceilings above them comprised the spaces for Rivera’s murals. He took into consideration the distribution of light into this courtyard and how it might affect his colours. “I studied the quality and intensity of the sunlight which hit a particular wall…Like the building itself, my colours were heavier, solider (sic), and darker at the base than they were as the structure rose toward the luminescent sky.” Viewed from the paved courtyard, the loggias were behind baluster railings supported by faux columns, and above an arched arcade not unlike the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. They formed a perfect classical showcase for Diego’s progression of Mexican history. By this time Diego had become so besotted with the plight of the common workers and the strident Marxist message to throw off their chains that he used this first major commission as his first Communist pulpit. The story was simple enough. Beneath the arched arcades of the
83. Diego Rivera,
first floor of the Court of Labour, Mexican peons trudge from happy agrarian lives living off
Ribbon Dance, 1923-1924.
the fruits of their labours to becoming serfs descending into dark silver mines to fatten
Fresco, 468 x 363 cm.
foreigners’ purses. They suffer every kind of indignity and are searched when they emerge,
Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de
with one miner standing with his arms outstretched like Christ on the cross as a soldier
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
searches his pockets. On part of the panel Rivera could not resist hammering his point home with a poem from the anti-establishment writer Carlos Guitiérrez Cruz:
84. Diego Rivera, Day of the Dead – The Offering,
Comrade miner,
1923-1924.
Bent under the weight of the earth,
Fresco, 415 x 237 cm.
Your hand errs
Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de
When it extracts metal for money.
Educación Pública Mexico City.
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Make daggers With all the metals, And thus, You will see That the metals After all Are for you. This call to violence pushed the normally patient and accommodating Vasconcelos over the edge. He was beset on all sides as right-wing students attacked and mutilated the murals painted at the Preparatory School. The press attacked the entire project. In fear of their lives, artists arrived at their murals with pistols shoved in their waistbands. Obregon pleaded with the local press to forget about the mural painters and pay attention to the fact that there were gangs running rampant under warlord-like former generals trying to overthrow the government. Vasconcelos had never been a supporter of Obregon, but here – with his Ministry of Education Murals on the line – he begged Rivera to chisel this riot-mongering poem off the mural panel. Diego once again sensed he had better stick to the history of Mexico for now and leave the political proselytising to less obvious symbolism and to happier times at the conclusion of the story. He carved the offensive verse off the wall, but copied the lines onto a piece of paper, rolled it up into a tube that went into a small glass vial which he plastered into the wall. The verse is still entombed there today. He worked hard, treading that edge between history and propaganda. His later writings about the murals are dense with Marxist ideology used to explain Mexican concepts of revolution. But nothing can take away the exuberance of his work and the feel for the land and customs of the people transferred to the walls by a Mexican who was back home at last. The amazing part of his work at the Ministry of Education is that he was learning the craft of fresco-painting as he created the murals. His work at the Preparatory School auditorium had been executed in hot wax encaustic, a totally different medium. Now Rivera had to create his own procedures and pace with his preparation crew as he proceeded with the commission. 85. Diego Rivera,
The day before, his crew laid on three to four coats of plaster that was made from lime burned
Night of the Rich, 1928.
over a wood fire to remove carbon dioxide, then stored in rubber bags for three months to keep
Fresco, 205 x 157 cm.
the lime from absorbing any carbon dioxide from the air. The pure lime was then “slaked” by
Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de
adding water to become calcium hydroxide. To this was added marble dust (sand had too many
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
impurities), and became the fresco plaster. The final coat of plaster was added late at night or early the next day when he was ready to paint. Full size sketches were transferred to the wall
86. Diego Rivera,
(as explained earlier) and he began painting by outlining everything in grey. From then on the
Wall Street Banquet, 1928.
process was non-stop, applying pigments which had been ground by an assistant in distilled
Fresco, 205 x 155 cm.
water until he was finished with that day’s work and left the plaster to harden.
North wall, Patio de Las Fiestas,
“At the end of a day’s work,” Rivera wrote, “I stand back a fair distance to study and
Secretaría de Educación Pública,
criticise what I have just done. If, as sometimes happens, I am dissatisfied, I have the whole
Mexico City.
area cleaned and a new coat of lime laid on. Then I redo the work the next day.”27
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As Diego laboured Lupe supported him, but always, just below the surface, jealousy
87. Diego Rivera,
simmered into molten anger that occasionally burst upon him. At a birthday party she
Our Bread, 1928.
had arranged for Diego she flashed scalding imprecations all over a Cuban girl who
Fresco, 204 x 158 cm.
had posed for Diego and with whom he had had an affair. Lupe was normally tolerant
Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de
of Diego’s meaningless peccadilloes, but this Caribbean sweetheart became a threat in
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
an instant. She snatched from his hands drawings he had made of the girl and ripped them to bits. She then decided the girl would look better bald. As horrified guests
88. Diego Rivera,
looked on, Lupe reduced the girl to howling hysteria a handful of hair at a time.
Night of the Poor, 1926.
Leaving the girl, Lupe then turned on Diego, punching him with her fists. He defended
Fresco, 206 x 159 cm.
himself and soon the guests flooded out into the streets at the party’s premature but
Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de
exciting conclusion.
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
The battle did not finish there. Lupe continued to run her mouth until Diego’s vast patience expired. He proceeded to pound her and drag her around the bedroom by her hair.
89. Diego Rivera,
Sobbing and bruised, she sought shelter at three in the morning with Bert Wolfe and his wife
The Learned, 1926.
in their hotel room. The next day, feeling remorseful, Lupe dressed in her best and walked to
Fresco, 207 x 153 cm.
the nearest National pawn shop where she purchased a Colt.44 calibre revolver in used but
Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de
good condition and gave it to Diego as a make-up gift.
Educación Pública, Mexico City.
28
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90. Diego Rivera, The Market, 1923-1924. Fresco. North wall, Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City.
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They quarrelled frequently. Mostly about how little time Diego had for her between long hours on the scaffolding, or at Communist Party meetings where some of his wages went to 91. Diego Rivera,
Party activities or into the pockets of out-of-work bums. Unfortunately, at the same time, Lupe
The Celebration of the Land Distribution,
came home one day to find Diego entwined with her younger sister who was freshly arrived
1923-1924.
from Guadalajara. After putting her foot through a few of his paintings, Lupe snatched up the
Fresco.
Colt revolver, cocked it and threatened to blow off his right arm at the shoulder.
South wall, Patio de Las Fiestas,
Instead she stuffed some clothes in a small suitcase, snatched up her dazed little sister and
Secretaría de Educación Pública,
marched off to Guadalajara. Diego, of course, was desolate without her and wandered the
Mexico City.
streets in a fog of recrimination, wasting away to a wraith of about 250 pounds. Eventually she returned and, in his joy, he bought her a silk dress and a very ugly but resplendent hat
92. Diego Rivera, The Celebration of the First of May,
with a large pink plume. She wore the queenly vestments as a sign of moral victory. Despite all the distractions in his life, work on the Ministry of Education murals continued
1923-1924.
at a relentless pace. It seemed as though all the copying of other styles during his career –
Fresco.
Renoir, Gauguin, El Greco, the Cubists and Giotto – finally proved valuable in creating the
West wall, Patio de Las Fiestas,
distinctive style of Diego Rivera in fresco. All his portraits, caricatures of friends, studying the
Secretaría de Educación Pública,
mechanics of the “Golden Section” composition aid and creating a story sense out of his own
Mexico City.
mythical life came to his aid as he faced the fresco panels. The scaffolding in front of the
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panels became his home where he worked, ate and often slept – at one point falling asleep, rolling off the scaffold and plummeting to the concrete below. The plastering crew found him unconscious. When they carried him home, Lupe just curled her lip in his direction and said, “Throw him on the couch in the corner. I’ll tend to him when I have finished my dinner.” She
93. Diego Rivera,
had assumed he had been favouring his new model, Tina Modotti. Only after a doctor
The Burning of the Judases, 1923-1924.
pronounced Diego’s skull was cracked did Lupe pay him any attention.
Fresco, 430 x 383 cm.
Tina Modotti arrived in Mexico in 1923 on the arm of the American photographer, Edward
Patio de Las Fiestas,
Weston. He had been a very successful and fashionable portrait photographer, producing
Secretaría de Educación Pública,
gauzy soft-focus platinum images of movie stars of the silent films, and of rich celebrities who
Mexico City.
could afford his prices. One day, he chucked it all after discovering the sheer beauty of nature and man-made objects seen in preternaturally sharp focus on 8 x 10 inch sheets of film.
94. Diego Rivera,
Naturally, his income took a nosedive. Tina had left her native Italy in 1913 for San Francisco
Day of the Dead – City Celebration,
and the Italian theatre there. Following a failed marriage to the poet-painter Roubaixde l’Abrie
1923-1924.
Richey, she wandered into the wilds of the Los Angeles bohemian community. Her brush with
Fresco, 417 x 375 cm.
that fast set brought her into contact with Weston. Even though he was married with two half-
Patio de Las Fiestas,
grown boys, Brett and Chandler, Tina’s rejection of the monogamous sexual mores of the time
Secretaría de Educación Pública,
seemed like a good idea to him.
Mexico City.
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In 1922, she journeyed down to Mexico with her former husband in a coffin for burial. She discovered the Mexican Renaissance, the muralists just getting started and the even more free and open bohemian life spiced with the occasional Communist march or riot. She hurried back to California and convinced Weston to leave his wife and boys and follow her back to this utopian lifestyle. He would teach her photography and they would make art and love together. This he did, and in 1923, he and Tina plunged into the swirl of artists, intellectuals and hangers-on. One couple in particular caught their attention, Dr Atl and Nahui Olin, who led them into a nest of artists; among these were the people living at a building owned by the painter and sculptor Germán Cueto on Mixcalco Street near the Merced Market. In 1922, as part of the Syndicato, Cueto had created an artists’ co-operative featuring an open courtyard faced by the building’s apartments. The renters included Diego and Lupe. While Edward laboured over his first exhibit of photographs, he and Tina visited Mixcalco Street often, stopping frequently at the Rivera home, where Lupe prepared traditional hot chocolate at six o’clock. While Lupe was tall and full-figured with an animal appeal, Tina was rather small with the face of an angelic schoolgirl. Her appetites, however, were far from small, and soon the home she shared with Weston on Coahuia Street became known for its parties – many of them requiring costumes. Weston, a short wiry little man with a moustache and a very high forehead, preferred digging into Tina’s closet and parading around in women’s clothes.29 Whatever Weston’s peculiarities, he was also a truly gifted photographer and spent time teaching Tina his craft of exposing film and printing exquisite images. She responded to his tuition and frequently borrowed either his hand-held 3¼ x 4¼ inch Graflex camera, or the large Korona view camera to take photographs of life and objects around them. Eventually she was hired to photograph Diego’s murals in the Ministry of Education as they were in progress, then the finished work. It was not long before she had exhibitions of her own photographs that rivalled Weston’s images. Soon her attentions to Diego would rival those of the dangerous Lupe Marín. But the women in Diego’s life in 1924 could not know how instrumental they would be in changing his life’s direction in only four short years.
Fame, Diego and Frida The murals – combining the 128 panels in the Ministry of Education with those on the walls of the Chapingo Chapel – a later commission – would take years to finish. With the government’s meddling and growing frustration with Diego’s not-so-subtle intrusion of Communist symbolism into his version of Mexican history, the difficulty of the task was compounded. For example, as Obregon confronted a rebellion from his former Minister of the Treasury,
95. José Clemente Orozco, American Civilisation – The Gods of the Modern World, 1932.
Adolfo de la Huerta, the President cast about for ready places to find more cash to support his
Fresco.
army. On December 5th, 1923 Diego received an “audit” of his mural project from the
Baker Library, Dartmouth College,
Controller’s Office. In the opinion of Obregon’s accountants the fresco project was way over
Dartmouth.
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budget and had to be cancelled. The maths employed in this audit – to make any sense at all – required at least 465 days to pass between March 23 and November 30, 1923. It claimed Diego was 18,001 pesos over the value of his contract, which was only 8,000 in total.30 Perhaps still grumbling over the days when his paintings sold by the square metre as dictated by his Paris agent, Diego threw himself at the Controller with a counter-audit that was equally worthless. One value that came from this exchange of bad maths was a true measurement of the work accomplished by Rivera over a period of eight months. He and his preparation crew covered 326,45 square metres (3,500 sq. ft) of wall area. This included time out for sketching trips into the desert in search of specific native flora and fauna. Another bit of information that emerged was the size of Rivera’s crew – two masons, three labourers, three decorators and two assistants – who earned a total of 30 pesos a day. Including paying his crew and all daily expenses, the primero fresco painter of Mexico took home to his pregnant wife about 20 pesos, or about US$10 a day. He was hardly living off the fat of the land, and from his point of view the removal of the rich man’s chains promised by Communism looked pretty good. As with the auditorium murals, he fell back on turning mural sketches into paintings, or framing studies for sale to North Americans across the border and Mexican grandees who had survived the cycle of revolutions with their deep pockets intact. It seemed that Marx’s Communism had to be supplemented by a bit of entrepreneurial capitalism in order to keep the wolf from the door. His acceptance of a commission to work on the Chapingo Chapel of the National School of Agriculture came in the autumn of 1924. Diego’s keen sense of self-preservation provided the reasoning to add this burden to his already overloaded schedule. Obregon went out of office in the election. The former president’s successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, was, like the assassinated Zapata before him, a strong supporter of agrarian reform. This chapel was part of the Hacienda de San Jacinto, a self-sufficient complex that had served as a weekend retreat for an official of Porfirio Díaz’ government. It had been restored to its former glory in 1900 by the notable Mexican architect Antonio Rivas Mercado, who coincidently designed the neoclassical, neo-Moorish travesty, the Teatro Hidalgo in Guanajuato, Diego Rivera’s home town. The chapel stands in its own grounds separate from the main school complex, and offered 96. José Clemente Orozco,
Rivera excellent opportunities for story-telling fresco from its large back wall to intimate
Man of Fire, 1938-1939.
spaces beneath the side arches and in the stairway, all protected from the weather. In total
Fresco.
there was about 1,500 square feet of space for his work beneath the barrel-vaulted ceiling.
Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara.
This type of structure cannot support large windows, so four circular windows high up admitted light and – to Diego – were perfect for framing with sunbursts and suggesting
97. José Clemente Orozco,
orifices for sexual references.
The Spanish Conquest of Mexico –
Adding the Chapingo chapel to his workload required a forty-mile daily journey from
Portrait of Cortés – The Franciscan,
Mexico City by car or by a narrow-gauge railway line with rickety wooden coaches. His work
1938-1939.
was divided into three days at the Ministry of Education then three days at Chapingo.
Fresco.
Considering each day was long and exhausting for Diego and his preparation crew, the results
Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara.
were brilliant and supported the genius that took its own time to evolve.
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Two mural programmes comprised the Agriculture University project: the entrance corridor, a stairwell and a second floor foyer outside the Rector’s office. The chapel faced the campus grounds and had its own entrance. It was formerly the Jesuit Convent of San Jacinto, a seventeenth-century religious community with land tilled by Indians overseen by the Jesuits. Spain expelled the Jesuits in the eighteenth century, and the land became the Hacienda de San Jacinto, a residence of the Mexican president Manuel Gonzalez. The story told by the murals was of this evolution of the land and the people it supported. Devices employed by the Italian muralists familiar to Diego were used to show opposite points of view such as Good Government showing thriving people and well-managed land to benefit all. Bad Government, facing that panel, displays desolation and dissolution as foreign tanks and ships bombard a despoiled coastal landscape. The chapel with its Moorish exterior bell-tower circled by wrought iron railings, tiered like a layered wedding cake with clovershaped windows circling beneath the tower’s ornamental crenellated rampart, brought redemption and victory to the common man. Diego’s own words serve best to describe his plan for this space: “The Chapingo frescoes are essentially a song of the land, its profundity, beauty, richness and sadness. The dominant tones are violet, green, red and orange. After it was done, I also designed the carvings for the two wooden doors at the entrance to the chapel. In the entrance hall, I depicted the four seasons of the year, the recurrent cycle in the life of the land. In the chapel itself, I represented the processes of natural evolution. The bottom wall is dominated by a large female nude, one of several symbolising ‘The Fertile Land’.”31 One panel, titled The Liberated Land, virtually explodes off the wall beneath the half-circular vaulted ceiling ribs rendered in faux scarlet marble inlaid with gold. Between the framing ribs, panels filled with symbolic characters are linked geometrically like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel in Rome. But the centrepiece is the huge pregnant nude of Guadalupe Marín. Her green cat’s eyes are so clear that she appears almost blind. In one of her huge hands rests a small plant with its leaves unfolding. She reclines above symbols of the rich earth and nature’s winds that provide not only food, but ore and flame to create steel for industry. Further nudes represent the Mexican people who receive these gifts. More panels march down the side walls and above 98. Diego Rivera, Subterranean Forces, 1926-1927. Fresco, 355 x 555 cm.
them sunbursts frame the round windows, and the bodies of Mexico’s revolutionary martyrs lie beneath the earth fertilising the green corn that feeds the people. Of course, Diego asked Tina Modotti to pose for the sketches he would use to create some
Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo,
of the murals’ mythical characters and symbols. The idea of Diego sketching Tina in the nude
Chapingo.
bothered Weston, who loaned Diego some nude photos he had taken of her on the roof. This “solution” did not prevent Rivera from enjoying some mutual seduction with Modotti under
99. Diego Rivera, Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs
the hard eye of Lupe Marín. By 1925, Tina Modotti had begun making the journey to the Chapingo Chapel on the little
Fertilising the Earth, 1926-1927.
narrow-gauge railway. She posed for a nude representing the “Virgin Earth” and another titled
Fresco, 244 x 491 cm.
“Germination”. What also germinated was the affair between Tina and Diego, much like
Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo,
Diego’s fling with Nahui Olin at the Preparatory School Auditorium murals. While the
Chapingo.
pregnant Lupe frequently flashed and exploded all over Diego, Tina was also drawn to a
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member of Rivera’s wall preparation crew, the taciturn, black-haired Xavier Guerrero. Their friendship remained essentially platonic, but when combined with the influence of Rivera and her other friend Alfaro Siqueiros in 1927, the naïve Italian girl’s political sensibilities marched into the Communist Party full of enthusiasm from her trio of mentors. Through it all Diego painted the frescoes and endured Lupe’s rages over money. One day for lunch she served him a plate of broken pre-Columbian idol fragments. He’d bought the Indian artifacts even when there was no money for food. With his height, his girth and his big hat, he was always instantly recognisable and now the murals made him a celebrity as panel by panel they displayed his genius. They also displayed naked ladies, notably his conquests, which raised the value of his notoriety among his non-artist/intellectual friends. Not everyone loved Diego’s work, and there were howls of indignation from government officials wanting to slop whitewash over the offending images. Only articles in the foreign press extolling the murals and Rivera’s genius kept the vandals at bay, but some local critics still ground their teeth. Alvaro Pruneda attended the opening of the stairway mural at the 100. Diego Rivera, Formation of Revolutionary Leadership,
Ministry of Education. “The obsession of Rivera in these frescoes is the feminine nude. It seems as if he has not
1926-1927.
only selected from various horrible women the most repugnant lines and colourings, and not
Fresco, 354 x 555 cm.
even satisfied with that, purposely limited himself to the least suggestive and most wooden
Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo,
forms. …Various nudes of women drag themselves on high over a sky, dirty in prelude to a
Chapingo.
storm, which profoundly wound the aesthetic sense and the gentle and sweet impression
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which is left in our spirit by the ideal delicacy of our beautiful women. I could not contain my indignation…I did not want to suffer more. With bowed head I continued my climb, but – oh wonder! – on the last step I had to stop, attracted by an impression still more disagreeable. The self portrait of the painter forms part of a group of workers and adopts the sad situation of an imbecile.”32 Nahui, Lupe, Tina: they were spread across the walls of Mexico City and its suburbs, larger than life, nude portraits on view for every envious clerk in the Ministry of Education, every visitor to the Chapingo chapel. High up in the chapel’s barrel vault, Tina squats between porthole windows – entries to the earth’s uterus – arms outstretched at the convergence of two fiery birth canals where fire-baptized nymphs swept past crouching gods of Subterranean Forces. As the Virgin Earth, she curls upon a rock, black hair obscuring her eyes, she cradles a small green plant in her hand as her other arm lies along the curve of her voluptuous hip. All are Tina, for everyone to appreciate. Sadly for Diego’s women, his commitment to a stable relationship was much less than to his belief in Marxist Communism and its implied greater good. He threaded its catechism into his imagery. Mexican officials trying to consolidate their power base and
101. Diego Rivera,
deal with the United States as a possibly beneficent neighbour to the north largely left him
The Agitator, 1926.
to his work. In the international press praise for the execution and creative energy of
Fresco.
Rivera’s work seemed to outweigh his strident portrayal of Mexican history as yet another
Chapel (west wall), Universidad
socialist triumph.
Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo.
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102. Diego Rivera, The Partition of the Land, 1924. Fresco. Administrative Building (second floor), Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo.
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103. Diego Rivera, Alliance of the Peasant and the Industrial Worker, 1924. Fresco. North wall, administrative building (second floor foyer), Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo.
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Louis Gillet, Conservateur of the Château de Chaâlis, wrote of the Chapingo murals in his very respectable Histoire de l’Art: “…This is a work of which one will seek in vain for an equivalent, not only in the rest of America, but also in Europe and in Russia. Chance has caused to reveal itself in Mexico the first of the great works of art born from Socialist and agrarian materialism. The author himself has hammered out for this purpose a personal dialect: one recognises in his pictures the complete collection of natural types, the broad flat faces of the Indians, the conical cranium and the beak of the Aztec, the mask, composite and troubled, of the Mestizo. Sometimes in certain types of bourgœis, the painting of the rich and the idle, he does not hesitate to use the procedures of the pamphleteer, of certain election-poster satire. But the emotion overflows, an irresistible seduction sweeps criticism off its feet; on that drawing which overwhelms you, an admirable rainbow of colours, a play of all violets, oranges, tender greens, rose of fire, unfolds its scarf of delights, all the voluptuous gamut of the light of Mexico.” With these murals, Diego Rivera successfully merged two views of the Mexican peasant in relation to the land. First, the peasant fits into the natural order of being part of nature, part of a social order with his working of the land to realise its bounty. Second, the peasant has the power to change the social order and co-opt the natural order into subservience to the interests of the Mexican nation. Conquest, establishment and revolution become a cycle, pitting rich and poor in constant competition for stewardship of both the land and the social order. Diego achieved illustration of this concept in an art form used to convey the tenets and myths of theology for the adoration of saints and demonising of sinners. His personal icons
104. Diego Rivera,
of the striving worker and political theologian working to free the worker from the heel of the
View of chapel showing The Liberated
capitalist oppressor were perfectly in tune with this doctoring of Mexican history.
Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by
With the completion of the Chapingo murals and most of the Ministry of Education project,
Man (on last wall), 1926-1927.
Diego had achieved his victory in his own homeland. The murals’ message seemed to hang by
Fresco, 692 x 598 cm.
a thread, sustained only by the world outside the shaky ultra-sensitive Mexican government
Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo,
forever seeking both legitimacy and approval as a mature and tolerant partner for sustaining
Chapingo.
trade alliances. But for Diego, his mantra of Communist ideology was becoming but thin comfort, supported only by the haranguing rhetoric of local commissars. He needed to see the
105. Diego Rivera,
actuality of Marxist-Leninism. In August 1927, the pigment was barely dry on the last panel of
Revelation of the Path, 1926.
the Chapingo commission when Rivera packed a bag and headed for the Soviet Union.
Fresco.
Invited as guest painter to help celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of the October Revolution by the president of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, Edo Fimmen, Diego would
Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo.
be the star of the Mexican delegation. All he had to do was pay his own way from Mexico to the Russian border and from there on in, he was the guest of the Soviet Union, headed by the
106. Diego Rivera,
beneficent Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, now called Josef Stalin, the “Man of Steel.” Once in
The Land’s Bounty Rightfully Possessed,
Moscow, Diego’s programme would be overseen by People’s Commissar Anatoly Vasylievich
1926.
Lunacharsky, the Soviet government’s first Commissar of Education and Enlightenment.
Fresco.
Diego saw a chance to see the fruits of Communism first hand and to get away from the fire-breathing Lupe. Fortunately this separation was expedited by an acquaintance,
Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo.
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the handsome young poet Jorge Cuesta, who one day confessed in tears his undying love for Lupe. Diego leaped at this good fortune and, having grown tired of Lupe’s mood swings, lack of respect and occasional punch in the mouth, he grandly gave consent to Jorge to court Marín. He did his best to warn the poet that Lupe could be judgmental and a bit feisty, but Cuesta plunged ahead with his campaign to win her hand. Jorge and Lupe were married after Diego left for the Soviet Union. She gave Cuesta a son, but Jorge’s fragile mental balance eventually became unhinged and the poet who wrote, The Street of Love (La Calle del Amor) lopped off his own and his son’s penis. Cuesta was locked up in a mental institution, where he managed to hang himself with his knotted bed sheets on August 13th 1942, at the age of thirty-nine. Lupe wrote a novel titled La Unica about her life with Diego and Cuesta using thinly disguised counterparts. After living with Diego for seven years, her last words to him as his train pulled out of the station were a comment on Soviet women: “Go to hell with your big-breasted girls!”33 Diego paused in Berlin on his way to Moscow. He was interviewed by his host, Willi Muenzenberg, for a later book, Das Werk Diego Riveras, published by Neuer Deutscher Verlag. Rivera was aware of the building political crisis in Germany between the Weimar Government, the Communists and the growing constituency of the National Socialist or Nazi Party. Many of the Communist friends he made in Berlin vanished along with Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals as the Nazis assumed power in the 1930s. None of them had taken Adolf Hitler seriously. After crossing Russia to arrive at the ice-slicked station platform, what piled out of the train was a hung-over liquor-fuelled mix of textile workers, railway workers, an incoherent four-foot tall Moroccan sultan named Abdel Krim, Czech working girls, glazed South Americans, crumpled revolutionaries from a variety of republics, Henri Barbusse – the former neo-Symbolist poet, neo-naturalist novelist and committed pacifist Communist – and Theodore Dreiser, coming from his best-selling novel, An America Tragedy, as a journalist in search of the “real unofficial Russia”. Greeting them with wide open arms was a “high Soviet official” named Petrovsky. The jolly mob followed their host towards the city proper, waving and acknowledging the cheers of their Soviet fellows as snow began drifting down. They trudged past banners proclaiming the strenuously-stretched metaphor: “The Unions are the locomotives moving the train of the revolution. The correct revolutionary theory is the steel track.” Rivera represented Communist Mexico – a very possible political outcome in the eyes of the Soviet Union. Befitting his position as a now-famous artist and an equally well-known 107. Diego Rivera,
Communist, he received deferential treatment. He was seated near Stalin at the welcoming
The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces
meeting in the Central Committee hall and made sketches of the dictator as Stalin put on his
Controlled by Man, 1926-1927.
benevolent face, punctuated by a crash of his fist on the table. As the meeting was gavelled to
Fresco, 692 x 598 cm.
a close, Stalin signed one of Diego’s sketches for the Mexican delegation.
Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo.
154
Rivera witnessed mass movements of people and soldiers, spoke with young Russian artists – remembering some of the Russian he’d learned with Angelina Beloff in Paris –
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and preached the gospel of muralism as the people’s art. Along with the artists of the Octobre Group, he denounced abstract and modernistic art and joined with them speaking against the formulaic inflexibility of Socialist Realism. These impugned Social Realist academics owed their favoured positions to the monolithic Party, and refuted his demands that the artist dictate his mural’s content, not some central committee. And everywhere he went, every drawing he made that went into four notebooks of sketches, every watercolour, every word he said was documented by smiling, nodding members of the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, the G.P.U., representing that fist Stalin had crashed down upon the table. As Diego was feted and fawned over, as he spoke to artist groups and showed photographs of his wall murals. the Russian artists saw in him a messenger who could provide these new tools to the service of Communism on a grand scale. Lunacharsky drew up a contract: “We hereby certify that the Government of the U.S.S.R. has decided to give a commission to Comrade Diego Rivera to make a fresco of large size according to his own selection. The order is regarded at the same time as a favour on the part of the Mexican people’s art of Rivera and if a favourable result comes of this experiment, the government looks forward to having Rivera prepare serious work for the decoration of the new V. I. Lenin Library at present under construction in Moscow.” While his lectures fired up the young artists, he was regarded with cool and measured consideration by the old hands who had been elevated in Party status to preside over the State’s concept of acceptable Socialist Realism art. When Rivera asked after Russian modern or Cubist artists he had known in Paris, they had become non-persons, obliterated by the State. He lectured about the ineffectiveness of easel painting and the nature of its product confined to those few bourgœis who could afford them and then be hung where those same few could enjoy them. Murals were the true People’s Art, painted where all could see them – “and learn from them”, added the Commissar of Education and Enlightenment. When he suggested the artists should look to their icon painters – peasant craftsmen – he
108. Diego Rivera,
was accused of supporting the Church. Suddenly helpers for the mural project were harder to
Portrait of Lupe Marín, 1938.
find and materials failed to materialise. He was rapidly becoming persona non grata in the
Oil on canvas, 171.3 x 122.3 cm.
Soviet art world. While his stay in the Soviet Union had been open-ended, the Latin-American
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.
Secretariat in the Kuomintern (Soviet Congress) requested that Diego take leave of absence “for a few months” back in Mexico. Shortly after the May Day parade through Red Square,
109. Diego Rivera,
Lunacharsky confided that the mural deal was not going to happen. Doors were closing and,
Portrait of Guadalupe, 1926.
for his own safety, Diego had to leave the Soviet Union.
Oil on canvas, 67.3 x 56.5 cm.
Feeling the pressure, Rivera packed his bag and decamped for the long train ride and boat
Private collection.
trip back to where he was appreciated – or at least tolerated. Of course he had picked up a Russian girlfriend while in Moscow and she arrived at his flat just thirty minutes after he left. She wrote to him: “It seems to me that I have some reason to believe that you left with a bad taste in your
110. Diego Rivera, Self-Portrait, 1941. Oil on canvas, 61 x 43 cm.
mouth, with sadness and resentment… I am sure that such feelings were and are without
Smith College Museum of Art,
foundation… I embrace you with immense affection.”
Northampton.
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Diego made the best out of being bounced from the Soviet Union after eight months as a star attraction. Only later, in 1932, did he speak frankly about the state of Soviet art and how it was crippled by Communist bureaucracy. In his mind and through his art and actions, he had totally seized upon Communist ideology as the only path to realise the promise of the Mexican Revolution and triumph of the working man whom he – as a self-styled “people’s artist” – represented. He had to believe in the basic tenets of Communism, because pursuing the visualisation of that belief as a gimmick, as his personal iconography, while ignoring Stalin’s brutal regime during the 1930s was terrible marketing. The Great Depression that swept across the capitalist world between 1929 and 1940 only reinforced the impression of a frail framework that supported international economies. When he returned to Mexico City, acquaintances noticed something had gone out of his work. It was as if the eight months spent in the Soviet Union had hardened his interpretation of Mexican life. The suggested themes in the Courts of Fiestas and Labour in the Ministry courtyard became the enforced themes of the upper loggias. The last frescoes had become strident and lost the warmth of the earlier works. Concerning Communism, he spent the rest of his life in a sort of sad denial. What might have come of his work had he not been caught up in the metaphysics of Communism as applied to real life? Diego settled in to finish the murals on the top floor of the Ministry of Education. At least, when he faced a new section of fresh plaster, there was continuity to his days. All around him, everything else was changing. Former president Obregon had been gunned down by an assassin and the political air in Mexico City was charged with danger. Diego now carried Lupe’s gift, the big Colt revolver, with him every day. Edward Weston, the photographer, had returned to California, leaving his protégé Tina Modott, behind. She had become a fine photographer, a social butterfly with her parties and a dedicated Communist. She walked on the arm of Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban exile who had fled the repressive regime of Gerardo Merchado. Tina worked with him on assignments from El Machete and was obsessively in love with the handsome young man. Diego became a fixture once again in bohemian Mexico, where he kept a number of eager women on a string. At one of Modotti’s parties amid drunken guests, loud conversations and swirling music competing with a scratchy Victrola, he drew his revolver and silenced the phonograph with a single booming shot. Witnessing this display was a petite young girl who walked with a stiff gait but spoke like a man and flashed an engaging smile. She had been a student at the Preparatory School and had survived a terrible tram accident which had left her a permanent cripple, sustained only by long periods of bed rest and fitted plaster corsets. She also had a gift for painting. Her name was Frida Kahlo. They met each other again later on, when Diego worked on his fresco for the Ministry of 111. Frida Kahlo,
Education. Indeed, according to both Diego’s later writings and her diary, she marched into
Diego and Frida, 1929-1944 (II), 1944.
the courtyard of the Ministry of Education where Diego was at work on scaffolding in the
Oil on hardboard, 13 x 8 cm.
third-floor loggia and called out,
Private collection.
160
“Oiga, Diego, baje usted!” (Hey, Diego, come down here!)
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Nobody shouted orders at Diego Rivera – especially a woman. He looked down from his perch and saw a girl he remembered from Modotti’s party. Her hair was cut like a boy’s and she looked up at him from beneath brows that almost met above her nose. She wore a blue and white school uniform with her hair plaited into long braids. In one hand, her weight rested on a cane, in the other she carried a painting held so he could not see it. “Come down,” she commanded. “I want to show you something.” He glanced back at the drying plaster and decided a few minutes’ break would not hurt. With an effort, he heaved his bulk off the scaffolding and clambered down two flights of stairs. When, at last he towered in front of her, she began speaking without polite preliminaries as though she had rehearsed the speech many times. “I haven’t come here to flirt, even though you are a notorious ladies’ man. Some of your good friends have advised me not to put too much stock in what you say. They say that if it’s a girl who asks your opinion and she’s not an absolute horror, you are ready to gush all over her. I just want to show you my pictures. If you find them interesting, tell me; if not tell me anyway because then I will find something else to do to help support my family.” Diego shrugged and wiped his hands on the plaster-smeared apron flowing down from beneath his armpits and took the painting from her. It was a self-portrait. He looked from it to her and back to it. She pointed with the cane and he saw three more leaning against a pillar. Diego raised an eyebrow at her disrespectful imposition, but he examined the other three paintings. Finally he came back to the self-portrait in his hand. “First of all,” he said, “I like the self-portrait. That is original. The other three seem to have been influenced by things you must have seen somewhere. Go home and paint another picture. Next Sunday I’ll come and tell you what I think about it.” Frida finished her diary entry: “He did just that and concluded that I was talented.” 34 Diego’s courtship of Frida Kahlo began with the day he journeyed to 126 Avenida Londres in Coyoacán and the blue house – La Casa Azul – where she lived with her devout and dour mother Matilde – a mestiza – her younger sister Christina and her father Guillermo, a wellknown photographer. He arrived to see her paintings and found her in a tree looking at him like a curious owl. He helped her down carefully because he had heard from Tina Modotti the story of Frida’s horrific accident. She and her teenage boyfriend had been riding in a flimsy wooden bus when it collided with a tramcar and was forced into a wall. The bus’ wooden sides crushed inward on Frida and the other passengers. When the crushing, rolling, shearing pieces of wood and steel finally halted in a pile of debris, her clothes had been ripped off, her pelvis crushed, legs snapped in many places, arm broken and, most hideous of all, a steel railing had come loose and thrust through her abdomen to emerge from her vagina. A bag of gold dust used for gilding statues which had been carried by a passenger had broken and coated her mauled body. The final indignity she had endured was when a would-be rescuer seized the piercing
112. Frida Kahlo,
length of railing and with a lunge, yanked it free of her body. It was said by witnesses that the
Postcard to Diego Rivera, 1944.
pitch and volume of her scream drowned out the siren of the arriving ambulance.
Xavier Guzmán Urbiola Collection.
163
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For the next few years she had been bed-ridden for long periods of time, went through numerous operations and endured many fitted plaster corsets, growing larger as she grew into a young woman. To pass the time while recovering, she asked for her paints and had a mirror erected above her against the bed canopy frame so she could see herself. A lifetime of self portraits would document the triumphs and anguish of her coming years as artist, muse, combatant, lover, critic, fellow traveller and chronicler of her and Diego’s incredible odyssey. Diego had also heard from Lombardo Toledano, former director of the National Preparatory School, that Frida had been disciplined many times, often wore men’s clothes and was ringleader of a gang of rich boys called the Cachuchas after the hats they wore. These were the same louts from conservative homes who ravaged the murals of Sequieros and Orozco. One of the mob’s leaders, Alejandro Gómez Arias, became her lover when she was barely a teenager. While she was bedridden after her brutal accident his parents shipped him off to Europe to study rather than let him marry “below himself.” He accepted their decision without looking back. Her nickname, even before the bus accident, had been “peg leg” because of a bout of childhood polio she had survived, walking with iron braces which made one leg shorter than the other, for which she wore a compensating shoe. From each crushing setback she had become stronger, more self-confident, but hardly marriage material for the rich young boys going into law or medicine or even the trades. Frida had been the son her father never had. When he was a photographer for the Díaz government, providing the progressive image of Mexico to investors in the United States, she had led a pampered upper middle-class life. Her eccentricities, learning to box and wrestle and speak her mind, were tolerated. When Díaz fled the country, Kahlo’s job went with him. He found a low-level job as a clerk, and made portraits to earn extra money. It was her father who gave her a set of watercolours and brushes when she was a child and who took her with him when he went out with his camera to photograph portrait commissions, weddings and funerals. And it was she who knelt next to him, thrusting a stick between his teeth as he laid thrashing on the ground in the throes of an occasional grand mal seizure. They shared each other’s victories and defeats, and he was there for her until the end of his days. “She is a devil!” Guillermo confided in a whisper to Diego when the painter came courting to La Casa Azul. “I know it,” Diego answered. “Well, I’ve warned you,” her father said, turned and left Diego in the courtyard. Frida was eighteen and Diego forty-three. Diego describes their nuptials at Coyoacán on August 21st 1929: “The wedding was performed in the town’s ancient city hall by the mayor, a prominent pulque dealer. At first the mayor wanted to marry us in the meeting room of the Municipal Council. ’This marriage is an historical event,’ he argued. The Kahlos, however, persuaded him that a legislative chamber 113. Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait: “Very Ugly”, 1933.
was not a fitting place for a wedding. Our witnesses were Panchito, the hairdresser, Dr Coronado, a homeopathic doctor, and old
Fresco, 27.4 x 22.2 cm.
Judge Mondragon of Coyoacán. The judge, a heavy bearded man had been a schoolmate of
Private collection.
mine at the Fine Arts School.
164
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In the middle of the service, Don Guillermo Kahlo got up and declared, ‘Gentlemen, is it not true that we’re play-acting?’ Frida’s father found our marriage very amusing. At the wedding party afterward (in La Casa Azul), Lupe turned up as one of the guests. Jealous as always, she made a scene, berated Frida and then stamped out of the house.” 35 Lupe’s arrival at the wedding was the result of Frida’s invitation, responding to a note sent by Lupe expressing her “broadminded” wish to attend. Lupe acted very gaily during the reception at the Kahlo house, but then changed her spots. She suddenly reached down and hoisted up Frida’s skirt. “You see these sticks? There are the legs Diego has now instead of mine!” Later, Lupe Marín and Frida became friends and even pen-pals. In one letter written in 1933, Lupe confided, “I must tell you, Frida, I do not like Angelina Beloff at all. I think she is good because she hasn’t enough imagination to be bad; she is a person who has nothing in common with me nor does she interest me in the slightest. I can’t understand how Diego ever lived with her… You know that everything depends upon the crystal through which one looks.” While Diego and Frida were living in New York, Lupe passed through and they invited her to share their apartment. According to Bertram Wolfe who stopped by their apartment on 13th Street, “I…can testify that this peculiar ménage à trois of the painter, his past wife and his present one was amiable… Three years later, I had a still more curious experience, when I visited Diego’s sister-in-law, Christina, and found there Frida, Lupe and Angelina Beloff, and a fourth woman who had been briefly his sweetheart. I don’t know what occasion brought them together, but hearing that I was working on his biography they joined in dispassionately dissecting the painter as husband, friend and lover.”36
21
Diego Rivera, op. cit., p.74
22
Ibid., pp.75-76
23
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., p.139
24
Ibid., p.150
25
www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/redscare.html
26
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., p.151
27
Diego Rivera, op. cit., pp.79-81
28
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., pp.186-187
29
Nancy Newhall (Ed), Daybooks of Edward Weston, Horizon Press, New York, 1961
30
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., pp.197-201
31
Diego Rivera, op. cit., pp.82-83
32
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., pp.204-205
33
Guadalupe Marín, La Unica, Mexico City, 1938
Portrait of Engineer Marte R. Gómez,
34
Raquel Tibol, Frida Kahlo An Open Life, tr. Elinor Randall, University of New Mexico Press, 1993, p.66
1944.
35
Diego Rivera, op. cit., pp.104-105
Oil on hardboard, 32.5 x 26.5 cm.
36
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., pp.250-251
Private collection.
114. Frida Kahlo,
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I
n order to keep his new wife and send money to help with his three children – one with Angelina and two with Lupe – plus pay for materials to keep his flow of easel paintings and sketches moving northward to sell, Diego needed commissions. He had the work on
the walls of the National Palace which would occupy him in bursts of effort over a period of twenty years. But frescoes for the Mexican government, as shown earlier, paid poorly considering his time and expenses. They were largely for public relations and marketing. He had learned his fresco craft on the Ministry of Education walls, perfected his use of colour and design in the Chapingo Chapel, and was now producing another parade of historic events in the Palace. He must have felt as though he was virtually giving away this new creative command he had worked so long to achieve. At this point, his once supporting belief system was yanked from beneath his feet. The raging ideologues of the Mexican Communist Party had worked themselves up to a fit over his ratifying the Calles government by decorating its walls and – curse him – accepting money for the job. He was a collaborator. He sold easel paintings to rich American millionaires. He had been seen with government officials in social situations. He had sold out to capitalism! Diego pleaded his innocence. When Tina Modotti’s lover and Cuban exile Antonio Mella was gunned down in the street by a Cuban assassin, Diego came to Tina’s assistance. She had been accused of complicity in the murder plot and Diego’s support for her figured heavily in her acquittal. But the smear campaign against him continued. In March 1929 these furious little men, still shaking their fists at the heavens, hatched a plot to support some renegade generals in an overthrow of the Calles regime. The more sober heads in the Party demurred. This intra-party fuss caused a split, making the organisation vulnerable. When the generals’ plan was discovered, they were marched off to various firing squads. The Calles government declared the Communist Party illegal and began scooping up the more rabid members for a one way trip to the dank cells of the Islas Marías Federal Prison, known since its creation in 1905 for its violence and forced labour. The newspaper El Machete was closed down and its presses demolished. While Communists of all stripes fled in all directions, one of the last nasty acts they performed before bolting out of the back door was
115. Diego Rivera,
to kick Diego Rivera out of the Mexican Communist Party just three weeks after he married
Edsel B. Ford, 1932.
Frida. Done in the heat of betrayal, that expulsion also took Diego off the government list of
Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 125.1 cm.
those fleeing into the hills.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
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As former-Communist Rivera began work on the National Palace murals, his Party friends considered him a traitor. Included among them was Tina Modotti, whom he had helped save in the Mella murder trial. This once-charming butterfly of Mexico City’s easy-living bohemian set who had flitted from man to man, party to party, stood on the threshold of becoming a great camera artist but instead became a grim, hard-eyed, Communist Party functionary. She ended up dying alone of pneumonia in the back seat of a taxi. Diego claimed the Party was correct in expelling him. But then he slid into a nervous breakdown, relying on Frida’s tender care to see him through. His desperation to be readmitted agonised through three applications for reinstatement – all turned down. Though he considered himself still a Communist, his readmission to the Party was only granted in 1955, two years after Stalin’s death. Looking upon Diego’s now former Communist status, the Calles government apparently lost their focus and assumed that being expelled from the party shut off Communist ideology like turning a tap shut off the water. In an act of egregious folly, Diego Rivera was appointed Director of the San Carlos Academy of Art, twenty-five years after being expelled from that institution. With no revolution to call his own, Diego set out to shake up the teaching of art in Mexico. In March 1929, he handed the curriculum, the staff and the methods used to teach over the students and asked them to vote. The entrenched professors thought they had gone mad. The asylum was being run by the lunatics. In full egalitarian fervour, Diego threw open the Academy doors to craftsmen – glass blowers, engravers and foundry workers – and merged artist and artisan into a single entity called the “Union Workers in the Plastic Arts”. A three-year curriculum would be offered at night so the students could spend days toiling in the factories with skilled craftsmen. Saturdays and Sundays were not allowed to lie fallow and featured required lectures on aesthetics and plastic arts applications. Architects would study furniture design – and build the pieces – tile making, carpentry and decorative arts. After eight or nine years of study and work day and night, the advanced student would dedicate three hours a day to a monumental work for the government. By the end of this ordeal, Diego wanted to produce Über-Artists 116. Diego Rivera, The Battle of the Aztecs and Spaniards, 1930.
capable of tackling any project from designing a building to creating a mural to fashioning a monumental sculpture. The second major explosion following savage attacks by the professoriate over being rated
Fresco.
by their students, came from a clash of class and values between the architects and the artists.
Loggia, Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca.
The young artists were mostly poor and idealistic, seeking new and modern forms reflecting the modern schools blossoming in Europe and the United States. This vocal but scruffy lot
117. Diego Rivera,
came up hard against the architects who were, for the most part, from rich families, well-
The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos
connected politically in order to obtain commissions, and archly conservative. They were often
– The Enslavement of the Indians –
the contractors who built the buildings, slapping various approved styles together, stirring their
The Construction of the Cortés Palace,
pot with combinations of Oriental, Baroque, Moorish, Roman and Queen Anne into a single
1929-1930.
structure. The resulting stew gave Mexico City and its environs a Fantasyland aspect.
Fresco. Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca.
170
In his own hammer-handed way Diego was attempting to cross-train artists to appreciate each facet of plastic expression, in a way which is today considered quite normal and productive.
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In 1929, however, it was heretical. The architects in particular spat invective at Diego, forcing him – by claiming he was a millionaire — to declare his minuscule pay for working on two sets of government mural projects simultaneously. They called him a hypocrite for professing Communism while selling his canvases and sketches to wealthy collectors. Diego Rivera Wants to be the Mussolini of the Artists, cried one newspaper headline.37 Worst of all, they chided his work on the Palace walls. Even the Communists joined in the chorus. The “People’s Painter” became the “Painter of Palaces”. Taking a cue from the idiocy demonstrated by the Calles government in granting Rivera’s directorship believing him to be an instant “ex-Communist”, to the International Communist Party that expulsion rendered him an “ex-Revolutionary Artist” as well. Bert Wolfe, Rivera’s friend and Communist biographer, noted an article from The New Masses of February 1932 as “proof” of Diego’s fall from grace: “The original design for the mural in the National Palace showing Mexico as a gigantic woman holding a worker and peasant in her arms was altered. For the worker and the peasant, no doubt a painful sight to government officials who pass the mural every day, were substituted harmless natural objects such as grapes and mangoes.” Diego’s experiment in art instruction collapsed around him as daily battles between artists and architects increased in blood-letting as verbal insults escalated into fists and sticks. The Ministry of Education sacked him from the directorship on May 10th 1930. He was saddened that the People’s Artist had been denied his input into creating the next generation of artists and desperately-needed architects, but by then his creative juices were on full boil again. Earlier, back in September 1929, as the Stock Market in the United States began its belly-up downward slide into oblivion, Diego had received a proposition that jump-started his financial and creative future. After coming out of his rejection from the Communist Party, he listened to a presentation by Dwight Morrow, the United States ambassador to Mexico. Morrow had won his spurs in negotiations and relations with the Mexican government since being shipped south by President Coolidge. His personal friendship with Calles and his firm diplomacy had improved relations between the two countries and encouraged cultural exchanges, including visits by headliners in the States on goodwill tours. A scrappy young pilot named Charles Lindbergh, who had just flown the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis monoplane, stopped by, met ambassador Morrow’s daughter, Anne, and eventually married her. Morrow’s presentation offered to pay Diego – from the ambassador’s own pocket – to paint a mural in what had been the palace of Mexican conqueror Hernán Cortéz in Cuernavaca. The project was a gesture from the government of the United States, showing appreciation of Mexico’s long history. Curiously, having been expelled from the Party meant that Diego was no longer bound to the Party Line and was free to interpret this project without any political preconceptions or Communist subtext wheedling its way into the imagery. For his murals Diego was offered the incredible sum of $12,000 to cover his salary,
118. Diego Rivera, The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – The Conversion of the Indians,
materials and the pay of his preparation crew. The attractive offer also allowed Diego to keep
1929-1930.
his pre-marital promise to Frida that he would pay off the mortgage on her father’s house
Fresco.
which was on the seller’s block.
Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca.
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To accomplish this mural commission he had to placate the Calles government, showing he was not abandoning the Palace Murals, which he had just begun, for the American project. He would – as he had done with the Chapingo Chapel – divide his time between the two projects. His Herculean work ethic stood him well with the administration, and he was allowed to proceed. For his theme, Diego chose the history of the region around Cuernavaca dating back to the Indian cultures’ shock at the invasion of the Spanish Conquistadores, through the development of the land for its sugar and crops including corruption of the Indians’ native religion by cruel Catholic priests and subjugation of the native population as slave labour. His story would be spread across sixteen panels, ending with the revolution of the so-called agrarian hero Emiliano Zapata in the modern era. The space was a long second-floor loggia facing the eastern sunrise, with five arch window niches along the west wall and entrances on the north and south walls. A ribbed, slightly arched ceiling covered the space and was supported by a central dividing pillar. The panels occupied the upper two-thirds of the surfaces and beneath each were smaller rectangular panels of faux carving using monochrome black and grey line paintings in raw plaster called grisailles (from the French gris, meaning “grey”). This technique can be seen in Italian frescoes such as the sixteenth-century Baptism of Christ by Andrea del Sarto in the Chiostro dello Scalzo in Florence. This relatively small space was a reflection of hours and hours spent in research for the sheer volume of costumes and individual details, of architecture, methods of building and demolition, the passage of armies and the distribution of action from foreground to background. The effect is stunning when it is understood that every brushstroke came from the mind of one man. While the muralists of antiquity were often motivated by the glory they saw in the works and stories of God, the godless Diego derived an equal rapture from the potential of a single human being. Where often the faces of the oppressors and overseers are cartoonish in their cruelty, the animals wear human expressions, and mobs often move as one with an implacable lock-step resolve, his audience looking back at us from the walls, the peasants and workers themselves. As he worked, each day Frida brought him lunch and stayed awhile to chat. Mirroring Diego’s love of native culture, her life had begun to change from tomboy terror to “Mexicanismo” – pride in being Mexican, apart from European and North American influences. She dressed in the costume of the Tehuantepec Isthmus, tricked out with silver and jade jewellery and ribbons woven into her plaited hair. Her skirts were decorated, as were the rebozos she wore across her shoulders. Diego delighted in the fact of her Mexican identity and her cheery demeanour, and yet she lost none of her sharp intellect and frank judgments 119. Diego Rivera, The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos
when he requested them. But, underneath, there was edgy fear. Frida was pregnant and the doctors had told her giving birth would be an impossibility
– Crossing the Barranca, 1929-1930.
because of her pelvic injuries. But she ignored them. Three months into her pregnancy, she
Fresco.
suffered a miscarriage. Its effect was devastating, but no less crushing than discovering Diego had
Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca.
been having an affair with one of the preparation crew assistants. The warnings of Lupe Marín,
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120. Diego Rivera, Pre-Hispanic and Colonial MexicoThe Conquest or The Arrival of Hernán Cortés in Veracruz, 1957. Fresco. Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
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Tina Modotti and even Nahui Olin must have mocked her self image. All of them had been burned by Rivera’s congenital infidelity. He could no more refuse a quick squeeze of intercourse than he could stop painting. But, like a small boy apologising for eating cookies before dinner, he cursed his weakness and returned to her grudging forgiveness. Besides, he had a surprise for her. They were going to San Francisco. By 1930 it would have cost him his life to be or have been a Communist in Mexico. The big Colt revolver was a burden to carry around all day, but it was known that he had a reputation for hauling it out of a pocket or his waistband at the drop of an insult or whenever a group of strangers approached too closely. The Cuernavaca murals were almost finished and so was Diego’s bank account. He had made a gift of a house to the American architect William Spratling, who had brought him to the notice of ambassador Morrow. On top of that, the walls of the Cortés Palace needed repair before he could begin the frescoes. That cost him another 8,000 pesos. During the project, he and Frida lived, his assistants were paid and materials purchased using the balance of 15,000 pesos for seven months. His copious pockets were empty when America called. Diego Rivera’s ticket of admission to the United States was actually punched back in 1926 when the sculptor Ralph Stackpole – who had known Diego in Paris – returned from Mexico City with two Rivera paintings. Stackpole, a muralist, sculptor, etcher and art instructor was a champion of social realism in the United States and eventually worked for Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in the Fine Arts. He gave one of Rivera’s paintings – a woman holding an infant – to William Gerstel, president of the San Francisco Art Commission. Gerstel disliked the rather drab painting but hung it on a wall in his studio anyway next to a Matisse out of respect for Stackpole. Day after day it hung there until, as Gerstel wrote: “To my surprise, I could not take my eyes off of it and in the course of a few days, my reaction to the picture changed completely…I began to feel what I had taken for a crude daub had more power and beauty than any of my pictures. Without having seen Rivera’s murals, I began to share Stackpole’s excited enthusiasm. When he began to tell me of those walls in Mexico, I agreed with him that we must try to arrange for the Mexican to paint in San Francisco.” Gerstel came up with $1,500 for Rivera to paint 120 square feet of the California School of Fine Arts, a small commission. Stackpole, meanwhile had been beating the bushes for more Rivera patrons when he received a commission to work with other artists on decorations for the new Stock Exchange Tower located at 155 Sansome Street, which had been designed by noted San Francisco architects Miller & Pflueger under the direction of Timothy L. Pflueger.38 Stackpole was responsible for the two monumental sculptures named Agriculture, represented by feminine figures, and Industry, represented by masculine figures, that flank its entrance. Pflueger, swept up in Stackpole’s enthusiastic rhetoric for Rivera, offered a wall and a fee of $2,500. Of course, the ecstatic opinions of a few art collectors and curators had nothing to do with
121. Diego Rivera, The Totonac Civilisation, 1950.
the beleaguered Federal Immigration Service. President Hoover had sent down the word – with
Fresco, 492 x 527 cm.
the population at 123 million and unemployment at four million and climbing steadily –
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
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to scoop up all undocumented aliens, including thousands of Mexicans, and show them the door. This mass eviction also included anyone having even a nodding acquaintance with a “Red”. Stalin was very busy in the Soviet Union using up copious amounts of ammunition to weed out undesirables. Those who had fled the Siberian work camps and unmarked graves for the United States now found themselves herded onto anything that would float and sailing back to the embrace of Mother Russia or its satellites. The “Red Scare” was very real and “American jobs for Americans” meant business. Now up to the front door came this portly Mexican and his tiny wife – both scarlet to the core – ready to take art jobs away from American artists. Their request to enter the U.S. was met with a resounding NO! Fortunately a quiet, elderly insurance tycoon, Mr Albert Bender, who also happened to be a patron of the arts, was familiar with Diego’s work and put in a good word through his innumerable friends to the immigration people guarding the door. The Riveras were whisked inside and immediately lionised by San Francisco’s art society. The pair of godless Communists disarmed the media and set out on a round of welcoming parties. Stackpole gave over his large studio at 716 Montgomery Street to Diego and Frida, as both working and living space for the duration. The high loft walls allowed Diego to hang his full-size cartoons before transfer to the plastered surface. Art and social organisations opened their treasuries to Diego if he would speak to them. He spoke mostly French – a fairly common language with America’s upper crust. Frida managed to get her tongue around some English. She maintained her gaudy Mexican costumes and jingle of layered jewellery. Not all of the Riveras’ welcome was cordial, however. Many American painters protested against the importation of “foreign” artists. While they recognised Diego’s abilities, they preferred he keep his skills south of the border. Without seeing any of Diego’s original works, the sculptor Lorado Taft proclaimed: “Art, of course, should be simplified, but from what I have seen of Rivera’s works he has carried the simplicity to naïveté, almost childishness. I have seen only reproductions of several of his paintings, and I do not care for them.”39 American muralist and painter of western landscapes, Maynard Dixon said: “The Stock Exchange could look the world over without finding a man more inappropriate for the part than Rivera. He is a professed Communist and has publicly caricatured American financial institutions. I believe he is the greatest living artist in the world and we would do well to have an example of his work in a public building in San Francisco. But he is not the man for the Stock Exchange Building.”40 So Diego, the world’s most famous muralist and most famous Communist west of the Soviet Union, began wooing the American art world between his colleagues’ outbursts of redfaced rage and grudging recognition of his abilities. His growing fame north of the Mexican border had already resulted in the Fine Arts Gold Medal presented in 1929 by the American 122. Diego Rivera,
Institute of Architects as accepted by James Monroe Hewlett, President of the Architectural
The Great City of Tenochtitlán, 1945.
League of New York, the Society of Mural Painters and a member of the National Academy of
Fresco, 492 x 971 cm.
Design. An excerpt of Hewlett’s speech when the medal was presented in Diego’s absence was
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
sent along with the award. In part, it read:
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“Mr. Rivera’s work seems to embody an appreciation of the wall surface as the theme of his decoration which has hardly been surpassed since the days of Giotto.”41 His first one-man show in America came at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor while galleries around the state hunted up anything with his name on it to hang on their walls. Art doyens sought out Diego and Frida for galas and the newspapers followed in their wake. Frida at first enjoyed the attention, even though she was, for the most part, overlooked in the crush around Diego. Soon she began absenting herself as Diego began work, preferring to shop with her friend, a member of Diego’s entourage of assistants, 123. Diego Rivera,
Lucille Blanch. As he vanished into the chaos of hard work and adoration, she began
The Aztec World (detail), 1929.
entering the realm of Fantastic Realism beginning with an oil painting of the famous
Fresco.
Californian botanist, Luther Burbank. She showed him growing from the trunk of a tree that
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
is nourished by a corpse.
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Most “Gringos” in “Gringolandia” failed to meet her expectations, such as the wealthy women who treated her as if she was some sort of mascot yet seemed to be delighted to be seen in Frida’s company. She referred to their doughy faces as looking like “unbaked biscuits”. The harsh dichotomy between the wealthy San Francisco art patrons and the working poor, the jobless, the victims of the Great Depression that had just begun to grind down America’s financial underpinnings, only served to harden the 24-year-old girl’s political beliefs. The exception to her distaste for Californians was Dr Leo Eloesser, a physician who gave her a thorough physical examination in 1930. He discovered Frida’s spine was congenitally
124. Diego Rivera,
crooked – scoliosis – and lacked one vertebra. Her right foot, crushed in the bus accident
The History of Mexico – The World of
years earlier, now caused her considerable pain from stretched tendons requiring an
Today and Tomorrow, 1929-1935.
orthopaedic shoe. Frida repaid Eloesser with an oil portrait of him standing next to a
Fresco.
schooner-rigged sailing boat. They became lifelong friends.
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
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125. Diego Rivera, History of Mexico: From the Conquest to the Future, 1929-1930. Fresco, 749 x 885 cm. West and north walls, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.
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Her one enjoyment, besides shopping in Chinatown, was the shock value of her presence, jingle-jangling around town in her Tehuana dresses and jewellery. At this time Frida discovered Diego’s latest dalliance with the model for his nude centrepiece, the Earth Mother “Califia”, appearing in the Luncheon Club’s stairway mural. She was Helen Wills Moody, the American tennis star. Frida began her own sexual dalliance with Christina Hastings, the wife of one of Diego’s assistants, who also had time on her hands. The lesbian affair resulted in a pencil portrait of her lover titled Lady Christina Hastings. So while Diego and his wife heated up separate sets of sheets, his San Francisco frescoes rushed across the commissioned walls of the City by the Bay. The stairway between the tenth-floor lounge and the eleventh-floor dining room of the Pacific Stock Exchange Luncheon Club represented not only the bounty of California’s fertile land and sea, but man’s exploitation of its richness to achieve progress. Looming up from this farrago of natural gifts and enterprising Californians was the giant figure of “Califia”. She was bare-shouldered and her right hand literally peeled up the layers of earth to reveal miners digging at that earth’s core. Luther Burbank plucked at the stamen of a plant next to placer miners panning for gold. A lumberjack rested against a tree-stump as machine designer and user conferred across a blueprint. Fruit and vegetables tumbled from their rows as oil-derricks and refineries clogged the ocean’s coastline. At the centre, a boy held a model aeroplane resembling Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis (built by Ryan Aircraft in California) and looked upward towards the future. Where the wall met the ceiling, “Califia” was shown in flight, diagonally across the space. This nude recalled the similar treatment of a conference room in Mexico commissioned in 1929 as Diego worked on both the National Palace and Cuernavaca murals simultaneously. There he parodied salon nudes of the French realists, “purifying” them in natural surroundings. The severity of the Art Déco architecture became both humanised and steeped in accessible mythology as the nudes clutched handfuls of natural plants, reclined across panels and, above the conference table, flew across the firmament. The Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia meeting must have been indeed distracting to the government attendees. For those who lunched at the Pacific Stock Exchange, however, the insistent stare of Califia must have reminded them of who and what they represented as they climbed the stairs carrying their cocktails to their meal of prime rib. California also became the goal and anticipated haven of the ruined and homeless of the Great Dustbowl streaming west in search of jobs picking fruit, building dams, anything to feed their families. The state-established draconian border controls tried to keep California from being overwhelmed by the tide. The Great Depression swirled around the country’s stock exchanges, which seemed helpless to move beyond their own self-interests. After finishing the Pacific Stock Exchange mural, Diego and Frida were the guests of Mrs Sigmund Stern at her home. While there, Diego painted a 1.6 x 2.6 metre quaint and homey
126. Diego Rivera,
fresco mural on a galvanised steel base, allowing it to be portable. The scene depicted the Stern
Allegory of California, 1931.
family children, the estate gardener’s child and workers tending the rich orchard of blossoming
Fresco, 43.82 m².
almond trees. A tractor represented modern farming along with symbols of the past.
Pacific Stock Exchange, San Francisco.
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Moved to Stern Hall, part of the University of California campus at Berkeley, the small mural also represented a period of quiet for the harried Riveras in 1931. What remained of the California commissions was the small wall section for the San Francisco Art Institute. However, the new President of Mexico, Ortiz Rubio, another former general and an engineer who respected timetables and contracts, demanded that Diego return and finish the National Palace murals. William Gerstle, the main backer of the San Francisco work, dug in his heels. Various embassy representatives went to work until it was decided to let Diego finish his US commissions before returning to Mexico. The expected mural was to represent the construction of a multi-storey piece of modern architecture showing the co-operative trades and professions required for the task. But the space only offered 120 square feet. Using a loophole in his contract stipulating his length of stay, Diego chose a larger wall ten times as big. Instead of the grandiose architecture teamwork project, he substituted the theme of painting a fresco, showing all aspects of its creation as a centrepiece to flanking panels carrying the client’s theme. For an art school wall, the subject organisation worked and he proceeded, breaking the wall section down into the triptych shape favoured in the thirteenth century, using the supports of the scaffolding to divide the subject matter. Rising behind all three panels – further divided into eight parts – was another looming figure, this time a “worker-engineer,” the centre of all the accumulated building tasks and taking the place of the Christ figure that appeared in so many Italian religious frescoes. The depiction of fresco painting process took up the central panel, with Rivera seated on a cross-walk of the scaffolding, his back to the viewers. He holds a palette and brush to indicate his identity as the creator. Assistants labour with the plaster and other preparation as Rivera waits. On the right side, a woman draughtsman works at a drawing board with other engineers, as above her steel girders rise with the help of iron-workers. The other flanking panel revealed industrial machinery and workers Portraits of donors were included among the figures as were images of his assistants. He had become a master of the political gesture, recognising its importance to his continued patronage. Rivera’s perspective and vanishing point were keyed to a viewer looking up at the work, and the construction details in the wood of the scaffold support columns gave the work a trompe-l’œil effect. His research of all the processes on display is obvious. His characters seem to inhabit a real world in each of the panels as opposed to the fantasy world invoked in the Stock Exchange. The United States, bursting with mechanical and engineering vigour even in the middle of a financial depression, seemed to energise Rivera’s love of machines, preparing him for his greatest industrial masterpiece to come. The finished work raised eyebrows only because Rivera presented his buttocks to the audience, which seemed to be an insult. The looming “engineer” archetype being rendered in 127. Victor Arnautoff, City Life (left half), 1934. Fresco. Coit Tower, San Francisco.
190
fresco does wear a tiny hammer and sickle pin on his pocket, but considering what would come later, this small touch of Communism was allowed to pass. Begun in April and finished in June 1931, the Art School mural marked the profitable end of the Riveras’ first visit to the United States. They returned to Mexico so that Frida could
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once again breathe in the dusty air of her hometown, so Diego could reload their bank account and so the President could once again see the National Palace murals continue to make their way up the central staircase. After the warm charm of the California murals, Diego put on his hobnail boots, his Marxist “class struggle” rhetoric, and created this claustrophobic preachy pastiche on palace property. Once again, the sheer effort that went into this visualisation of Mexico’s history from simple Indians patting tortillas to video game violence was extraordinary, but superb execution and eighteen-hour work days do not guarantee great art. Even more surprising is the fact that it is still there. The heresy of slopping whitewash over a piece by Diego Rivera – regardless of its naïveté and political pot banging – speaks well for the artist’s prestige and his value to the government as an economic asset. At a time when Communists were hunted for sport in 128. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (South wall, detail), 1932-1933.
Mexico and the United States, Rivera’s survival can only be explained by his trade. He was only a painter. But as he laboured on the staircase mural, his thoughts must have drifted from time to time
Fresco, 1310 x 2040 cm.
to his next trip to the United States, and the long journey to Detroit, Michigan, the steel-fuelled
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
heart of the American industrial Midwest. While working at the Pacific Stock Exchange,
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Rivera had met William Valentiner, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Valentiner had become aware of Rivera’s reputation as a muralist, and the artist’s work at the Stock Exchange motivated him to seek an introduction through Diego’s model, Helen Wills Moody. She had met the Institute director at a fund-raiser in 1928 and put together a reception for him when he visited California. Of course, the Riveras were also on the invitation list. An enthusiastic bond was immediately forged between the two men as Rivera went on about his wish to see the fabled Detroit, where cars were created directly from the red iron ore of Minnesota’s Mesabi Range. Valentiner was effusive in his desire to have the work of the world’s greatest muralist on the walls of his Institute of Arts. Valentiner hurried back to Detroit and met the Arts Commission, in order to bring Rivera to their city and decorate two walls of the Institute of Arts’ central courtyard. It was Rivera’s “social sense” in his art that appealed to the industrialists who had built the city’s vast industrial complex and automobile industry. As the Great Depression deepened, that industrial complex needed public exposure and display of its reliance on the skills of the American worker. With jobs disappearing as companies closed their doors, automobile sales had begun to plummet. Ford saw sales dropping from 1,261,053 cars sold in 1930 to 626,579 cars moved in 1931.42
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Ford would never again dominate the new car market. Though awash in red ink, to sweeten the pot Edsel Ford stepped forward with $10,000 to help pay for the two walls. While negotiations were afoot in Detroit, wheels within wheels had been turning in New York City. John D. Rockefeller Jr had been promoting an organisation to encourage relations with the people of Mexico through cultural exchanges. This came to be known as the Mexican Arts Association, and one of its founding members was Mrs Frances Flynn Paine, an art dealer and art consultant to the Rockefellers. The secretary of the association was publisher Frank Crowninshield, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art. The fledgling museum needed another major show to follow its recent Henri Matisse exhibition. Oblivious to the conversations that were fashioning his future, Diego was once again labouring away day and night on the Palace murals. At the same time he spent some of the money he had brought back from California on a pair of houses to be designed and built by architect-painter Juan O’Gorman in the San Ángel section of Mexico City: a large one for himself and a smaller one for Frida, connected by a second floor footbridge between them. He also came up with enough money to pay off her father’s mortgage on la Casa Azul, the old family homestead. Frida never tired of rewarding him for his acts of kindness. Life was very good for Diego Rivera, but one morning it got even better. Mrs Frances Flynn Paine paid him a visit at his scaffolding and offered him a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In the spirit of improving Mexican-American relations, not to mention relations with his bank manager, he accepted. It is not difficult to imagine the emotions that must have visited him that warm July evening in 1931. He had arrived at the pinnacle of his profession while still young enough to revel in self-satisfaction, not to mention the adulation and the admiration of his peers. After years of searching, enduring harsh criticism and ridicule, virtually studying the history of western art to discover his own vision, he had stumbled onto a medium as old as the Egyptians and made it his own. And he also had Frida, stalwart Frida, who stood by him like a rock, who dazzled the wealthy plutocrats with her sharp-edged vivacity, or became the life and soul of any party. As dusk disappeared beneath the vault of stars, he must have shivered with pleasure. Diego, Frida and the assistant who had been with him many years, Alva de la Canal, all in the care of Mrs Paine, arrived in New York City on November 13th, 1932 aboard the steamship Morro Castle. Not wanting to waste any time on the way over, Diego had prevailed on Captain Robert Wilmot to make available a space on board to use as a painting studio. With the show opening in little more than a month, there was no time to waste. Almost immediately, the memories of sunny California and its pristine posterity gave way to the harsh realities of the Great Depression. Representing the collapse of the capitalist system, soup lines and squalour spilled over onto the New York sidewalks. Diego and Frida had to feel some
129. Diego Rivera,
vindication of their Marxist beliefs as reckless greed tore apart this society based on the
Detroit Industry (South wall) –
accumulation of wealth at the expense of the workers’ brotherhood. New York in 1931 was
The Stamping Press, 1932-1933.
one of the more visible walking wounded, being, as it was, the financial centre of the country.
Fresco.
People were literally starving to death. Former executives sold apples on street corners.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
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Ruined businessmen shot themselves in public lavatories or launched themselves from their tower offices, plummeting past the storeys that had marked their ascendancy to end up as two inches of type on the obituaries page of the New York Times. The once-scenic Central Park had become an open air hostel for the homeless. Furniture piled on the pavements in front of brownstones emptied by eviction notices. Frida in particular was appalled by these sights, 130. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (South wall) –
deepening in her cynicism about the American way of life. Arriving a month before the opening of the show required Diego to create “moveable
Pharmaceutics and Surgery, 1932-1933.
frescoes” on steel frames not unlike the small one he had created in California for Mrs
Fresco.
Sigmund Stern’s dining room wall. These “frames”, designed to demonstrate his fresco
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
technique, were huge, measuring six by eight feet and weighing over three hundred pounds
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131. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (South wall) – Commercial Chemical Operations and
each. With Clifford Wight, Lucienne Bloch and Canal helping him, he launched into his
Sulphur and Potash, 1932-1933.
painting marathon of fifteen-hour days to create seven of these new works.
Fresco.
Four of the murals were adaptations from his panels in Mexico. The remaining three came
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
from construction scenes around Manhattan. To avoid transportation headaches, Mrs Paine had made arrangements for a work space in
132. Diego Rivera,
MoMA’s building. Besides working on the portable murals, Diego helped arrange eighty-nine
Detroit Industry (North wall) –
drawings, studies, pastels and watercolours created for other murals and fifty-six easel
Production of Automobile Exterior and
paintings. MoMA had no walls to call its own in 1931, but rented rooms in the Heckscher
Final Assembly, 1932-1933.
Building ten floors above Fifth Avenue at number 730. This was the Museum’s fourteenth
Fresco.
exhibition and only its second one-man show, and Diego’s drawing power broke all previous
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
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133. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (North wall) – Manufacture of Poisonous Gas Bombs Gas and Cells Suffocated by Poisonous Gas, 1932-1933. Fresco, 257.8 x 213.4 cm (upper panel); 68 x 185.4 cm (lower panel). The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
200
attendance records, with 57,000 visitors over thirty days. The reviews cheered him, as did the frantic social whirl. While Frida enjoyed some of the socialising in California, she hated it in New York. In a letter to Dr Eloesser she commented: “This upper class is disgusting and I’m furious at all these rich people here, having seen thousands of people in abject squalour.”43 If Frida gained any value from the New York trip besides a lesson in social studies and the American class structure, she was exposed to the latest developments in art. Besides the
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134. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (North wall) – Vaccination and Healthy Human Embryo, 1932-1933. Fresco, 257.8 x 213.4 cm (upper panel); 132.7 x 1371.6 cm (lower panel). The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
135. Diego Rivera,
MoMA’s own collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art had opened in 1931, housing
Detroit Industry (North wall) –
over seven hundred works from the collection of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Down the
Production and Manufacture of Engine
street, within its marble-column façade, the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed works
and Transmission, 1932-1933.
from virtually every genre. She had a chance to see original works by Picasso, Braque,
Fresco, upper register,
Surrealists, Expressionists and the dreamscapes of De Chirico. She saw where her own
269.2 x 1371.6 cm (middle register);
narcissistically-fevered dreams daubed onto tin panels fitted in the evolving world of
68.0 x 185.4 cm (main panel);
contemporary expression. She found she was not alone and not the first to translate her most
539.8 x 1371.6 cm.
deeply felt pain and insecurities into paint.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
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Many of the reviews of Diego’s show were unkind: his portable frescoes did not reflect his best work nor technique. He considered the steel-frame plaster paintings suitable for Americans considering the short shelf life of American architecture. These frescoes could be moved from building to building, staying ahead of the wrecker’s ball. His topics like Pneumatic Drilling and Electric Welding were benign enough, but Frozen Assets (a reporter’s jibe that stuck) caused a fuss. It depicted an acre of shrouded corpses in a prison-like compound guarded by police and a fenced gate beneath a growing Manhattan skyline. Its rendering gave the picture a cartoon-like atmosphere as though on a page of the New Yorker magazine. The viewer looks below the composition in vain for the punchline, the joke. There is none, and being reminded about the Depression’s toll by this foreigner upset some sensitive New Yorkers. The picture caused just enough controversy to inflate the attendance numbers a bit more, making everyone happy. During their stay in Manhattan, Frida spent much time on Diego’s arm being shuffled about from one reception to another. She was referred to as “shy” by the press and it was also noted that she “also did some painting on her own”. However, no-one seemed anxious to see her work. As his show in New York wound down, Diego’s mind shifted to the commission awaiting him in Detroit. He had received a letter from Dr Valentiner stating the usual funding shortfall 136. Diego Rivera,
and promising only $10,000 for two walls, each covering 50 square yards, or $100 a square
The Red Race, 1932.
yard. They were anxious for him to see the space and discuss the possible themes, involving
Brown and red pigment with charcoal
history of Detroit or their industrial roots. He lit up when he saw the $10,000 fee and thought
over light charcoal, 270 x 585 cm.
of his days spent painting for the few pesos offered by the Mexican government. Diego’s
Private collection.
Communist-shaped values of workers’ toil belonging to the people must have been severely tested. But not for long. He bustled Frida onto a train and they headed for Motor City.
137. Diego Rivera,
The Detroit Institute of Arts was much smaller in 1932 than it is today with two new wings
The Black Race, 1932.
added. But its entrance was no less elegant, mounting a staircase to the Great Hall with its
Brown and red pigment with charcoal
vaulted ceiling and half-circular windows lacking only stained glass to complete the feeling of
over light charcoal, 264 x 582 cm.
a cathedral. Through an arched doorway at the end of the hall the visitor glimpses Grecian
Private collection.
columns that form part of the exit to a hall and staircase at the far end of the “Garden Courtyard”. There is no other hint of the hall until the visitor steps from the shadowed
138. Diego Rivera, The White Race, 1932.
doorway into the space, much like a bull entering the arena for the first time. It is not hard to imagine Diego turning round in circles, seeing the long north and south
Brown and red pigment with charcoal
walls, the east and west walls with their square and arched columnar cut-outs, and the empty
over light charcoal, 271 x 584 cm.
frieze strip circling the courtyard. Everywhere there were surfaces to be covered and linked
Private collection.
together into stories. Above the courtyard a glass ceiling flooded the space with natural light, but held back the toxic atmosphere that roiled in the sky above the giant River Rouge steel
139. Diego Rivera,
plant and the other smokestack industries that put America on wheels. Diego immediately
The Yellow Race, 1932.
wanted to paint the short walls at either end. One can see him gesturing and enthusiastically
Brown and red pigment with charcoal
rattling on in Spanish to Frida and his uncomprehending but delighted hosts. “Had the ceiling
over light charcoal, 269 x 582 cm.
not been glass,” Bert Wolfe wrote of the Detroit venture: “Diego would have painted that too.”
Private collection.
As it was, the first sketches moved Edsel Ford to such a degree that his purse opened and the
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promised fee rose from $10,000 to $25,000 with the Institute of Arts chipping in to pay the plasterers and the cost of materials. For Diego, this was indeed a windfall. For Edsel Ford, and the other industrialists backing the venture, it was money well spent. Union recruiting and strikes against the automobile makers had created ugly confrontations. An unarmed crowd had recently marched from Detroit’s city limits to the Ford River Rouge plant gates. The vocal crowd had brought out city police with tear gas, firemen with high pressure hoses, and Henry Ford’s own goon squad of strike breakers. What began with the opposing lines shouting at each other soon escalated into sticks and stones, and ended with a charge by company toughs blazing away with pistols and shotguns until five workers were killed and twenty carried away wounded. Besides these marches by the jobless, Edsel had just opened an assembly plant in Villahermosa, Mexico, giving the perception of sending jobs to cheaper labour below the border as the Detroit jobless tried to feed their kids. Edsel and his father, Henry Ford, who still held the company power, needed a show of good will. Whether 140. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (North wall) – The Red and Black Races and Geological Strata,
Diego was aware of these machinations is not known, but by this time he was no fool when dealing with American movers and shakers. The committee had done everything in their power to prepare for Diego’s work. According
1932-1933.
to instructions sent by Rivera five months earlier, the original plaster on the four walls had
Fresco, 269.2 x 1371.6 cm (upper panel);
been chipped away and a grid of galvanised steel bars secured with expansion bolts was
132.7 x 1371.6 cm (lower panel).
fastened in place on the facing north and south walls to receive the new coats of fresh plaster.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
In the basement, great vats were installed for mixing each of the three grades of plaster to be
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applied in five coats. Each batch of plaster had to age for several weeks and then be kneaded into a stiff dough and transported to the scaffolding to be trowelled into place. With the coats of support plaster applied, the north and south walls were next divided into incised straight and diagonal lines creating Diego’s foolproof Golden Section upon which he built his dense compositions. Separate rooms were set aside for creating the full-size cartoon drawings that would be pinned up against the wall and their lines transferred to the plaster. It was curious how all the strenuous, back-breaking, monotonous plastering and paintgrinding tasks were eagerly sought by his assistants, all of them artists in their own right. Making the journey to where Rivera was working in order to stir plaster or build scaffolding became a pilgrimage to the presence of the master. The pay was often negligible or nothing at all. To be there, to be part of his team, was enough. After his arrival on April 21st 1932, his crew often accompanied him as he toured Detroit, filling endless sketch pages at the area’s industrial plants. Since Diego could not drive, Sanchez Flores did the honours, motoring the raffish crowd through restricted gates like visiting royalty. The only true way to appreciate Diego Rivera’s genius is to stand in front of his fresco mural work. Unlike a painting, a fresco mural stands where it was created as part of the architecture. Where the brush has transferred pigment onto fresh plaster, it is part of the structure down to the molecular level. Regardless of the dynamics of the content, the power of the composition and the luminescence of the colour, each of Rivera’s fresco murals is a series of washes on the flat surface. It is a huge, tightly-controlled watercolour.
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141. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (South wall) – The White and Yellow Races and Geological Strata,1932-1933. Fresco. The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
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When it dried and the result fell short of Rivera’s expectation, he had that section of plaster chipped out and started again. For all this complexity of execution, the process was very natural, using only earth elements. Even Diego’s palette was a simple white china dinner plate with the colours arranged around its circumference. As the wall preparation work and Diego’s sketching continued, Lucienne Bloch, one of Diego’s assistants, and Frida set up the Riveras’ apartment in the Wardell Hotel. On checking in they discovered the hotel did not admit Jews. They declared themselves Jewish and began collecting their luggage to seek other lodging. The hotel performed a rapid about-turn and declared their establishment free of restrictions, whereupon the “Jews” ascended to their apartment. Frida’s long stay in the United States dealing with its culture shock and the aftermath of so many galas and tributes had caused her health to deteriorate. Despite her robust lifestyle and sexual appetites, the surgical piecework that had held her together since her childhood accident caused Frida to careen along a delicate balance just short of disaster. And now, besides discovering a tropical lesion on her toe, she found she was pregnant again. She so wanted to have a baby with Diego, but her chorus of doctors had renounced the idea because of her pelvic injuries’ interference with the womb, the birth canal and virtually every aspect of the pregnancy. If her condition was not precarious enough, she and Lucienne were forced to make a tortuous and long train ride from Detroit to Coyoacán, where Frida’s mother lay dying. Everything conspired against her, and four months into her pregnancy she began to haemorrhage. Hysterical with remorse and pain, Frida was wheeled from her room to the surgery as attendants tried to staunch the blood flow. The male foetus emerged in pieces. She drifted away into a drugged emptiness. Very shortly after the bloody expulsion of her son, Frida sent a message to the Institute courtyard where Diego was working asking him to pick up some illustrated medical books. The doctors at the hospital had refused to give them to her. He obeyed, and as she convalesced she painted two of her most powerful paintings in oil on tin panels: Henry Ford Hospital (or
142. Diego Rivera,
The Flying Bed) and My Birth. They explain far more elegantly the emotions of this girl so
Detroit Industry (East wall), 1932-1933.
scourged by her body and embittered by its failure to obey her maternal needs.
Fresco.
As Frida recovered during the warm summer of July 1932, Diego began to work on the
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
twenty-seven panels, telling his story in three levels up each wall. The first level depicted aspects of the workers’ day – the dynamics of men, women and machines toiling together. Above the
143. Diego Rivera,
workers, the machines hammer and pound and move components from one area to another.
Detroit Industry (East wall) –
Above that comes a paean to the soil and nature’s minerals that fuel the furnaces and shift their
Woman Holding Grains, 1932-1933.
molecular structures to become iron and steel. High up, beneath the roof rafters, comes aviation
Fresco, 257.8 x 213.4 cm.
(Ford Tri-motor aeroplanes) and the military that maintains order among men. Throughout all
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
the walls undulate stratas of soil, assembly-line hooks, loops of rising and falling buckets on conveyor belts describing the endless evolutionary parade from earth to man-made materials.
144. Diego Rivera,
While individual portraits stand out – mostly men wearing suits – the workers pull, heave and
Detroit Industry (East wall) –
thrust together in choreographed unison while behind, around and beneath them, the hive
Woman Holding Fruit, 1932-1933.
functions in a cacophony of concussive choreography. Implacable steel machines drill and punch,
Fresco, 257.8 x 213.4 cm.
screw and grind. Whistles blow, squaring the hours into intervals of work. Day shift leaves,
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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night shift arrives, all hats low, collars high and faces blank. Workers trudge in unison, reach in unison, bend in unison, kneel in unison, all their efforts feed, use and maintain the great engine. Giant figures representing the four races look out from their panels. They are supposedly female but remain sexless as they clutch earth elements in their huge hands. Around these sprawled nudes, other fists reach up from the soil like once-buried dead. From pharmaceuticals to gas bombs used in war, the machines churn on and on. Chemists with high-domed foreheads run experiments through fabulous machines, turning out chemicals to inoculate us while sinister laboratories blend active agents to achieve aerosol assassination. Through it all the machines remain neutral and the men stoic. Every day visitors entered the hall to gaze up at the murals’ progress. And, every day, letters arrived at the Institute Administration Office or in the editorial mailbox at one of the newspapers. Some of the most vigorous comments were delivered by delegations of stalwart union men. On one occasion, as Diego described in his memoirs, the following confrontation took place: A group of about sixty men advanced into the courtyard with almost military bearing. At their head was a gentleman who introduced himself as the chief engineer for the Chrysler Automobile plant, and his fellows were also engineers. Clifford Wight tried to head off what he thought might be their criticism by stating “We are painters, not engineers”, but was cut off with a rude wave of the hand. After introductory remarks, their leader said: “You may wish to correct me by reminding me that Rivera is not an engineer by profession. 145. Diego Rivera,
All right. But this fellow has fused together, in a few feet, sequences of operations which are
Detroit Industry (East wall) – Infant in
actually performed in a distance of at least two miles, and every inch of his work is technically
the Bulb of a Plant, 1932-1933.
correct. That’s what is so amazing!”44
Fresco, 133.4 x 796.3 cm. The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
214
Most were in praise of Diego’s work, but an undercurrent grew as the Great Depression squeezed the city. With every plant that shut down or business that went bankrupt,
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more attention was paid to the “Mexican Communist” painter’s work at the Detroit Institute of Art. At least one art critic from a major Detroit newspaper began a campaign against the murals based on their supposedly sacrilegious content. But for the most part, while Diego painted, Detroit just squirmed. The winter of 1932-1933 was harsh for Detroit. Fifteen thousand workers at the Briggs Manufacturing plant – a supplier to the car companies – went on strike, shutting down production for two months. In February 1933 the Detroit banking system collapsed when loan payments from once-secure companies went uncollected. Companies could not even afford to pay “scab” – non-union – workers to keep mills and assembly lines running. On March 13th 1933, Diego put down his brushes and the work was declared finished. Five days after completion both the Detroit Evening Times and the Detroit News began the tidal wave of invective that engulfed the city as Diego and his entourage bid the Institute of Arts bon voyage and headed east back to New York City. The Detroit News of March 18th, 1933 said in part that the murals were “…coarse in conception… foolishly vulgar…without meaning for the intelligent observer…a slander to Detroit working men…un-American.” In a ringing call to action, the editorial-writer suggested that the offending murals should be whitewashed into oblivion. “Police Guard Rivera’s Murals after Phoned Threat”, boomed a headline. “Priest Calls One Subtle Blasphemy”, boomed another.45 As the Detroit City Council voted to erase the murals, thousands flocked to the Institute of Arts to glimpse the offending work. Valentiner and those administrators who had avoided the axe in recent severe budget cuts from $400,000 (1928) to $40,000, pleaded with curators and directors of other prestigious art museums to write letters of praise for Rivera’s work to the local politicians. Detroit Arts Commissioner Albert Kahn rebutted the protesters:46 “There is nothing new in these attacks by churchmen. Michelangelo portrayed as devils the churchmen who tried to interfere with him when he was doing the Sistine Chapel.
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You can see their portraits today in the Sistine frescoes. Rembrandt was just as guilty of charges of sacrilege as Rivera. But who throws stones at Rembrandt today?” Many churchmen fell silent when the bombastic Fr Charles Coughlin began berating the murals on his radical right-wing radio program. No legitimate religious leader wanted to be associated with the priest. As the controversy boiled and grew, attendance increased at the museum, climbing to 86,000 in the first month. Eventually, Edsel Ford rose to the occasion and placed his personal imprimatur on Diego’s walls, stating: “I admire Diego’s spirit. I really believe he was trying to express his idea of the spirit of Detroit.” Not exactly a ringing declaration, but Ford’s acceptance of the murals helped carry the day, and the fuss finally died down. His motivation to save the murals was only partly fuelled by his love of fine art. Edsel and been privately bankrolling the museum’s functions since the budget cuts. He needed to reinvigorate public interest in the institution and attract a wider, blue-collar audience. Earlier, Ford, his assistant Fred Black and George Pierrot had formed a low-end organisation that allowed working-class museum goers to join the museum for one dollar a year instead of the usual $10 membership dues. With Pierrot’s help, this “People’s Museum Association” had swung into action with meetings after an Episcopal minister had commented that the murals may be sort of blasphemous. The resulting free ink and national headlines put the DIA on the fine arts map. The murals themselves became a political touchstone for the city as they forced confrontation with issues of labour, its birthright and its legacy. As Diego moved toward the age of fifty, his vigorous work regimen began to tell on his physical condition. When Frida returned from dealing with her mother’s death in Mexico, she barely recognised Diego when he met her at the station. His reaction to the fatigue caused by long hours of work was a vegetarian diet that stripped almost one hundred pounds from his frame. Eight months after her disastrous miscarriage and six months after the long train ride to Mexico and back, Frida was physically spent. They were both happy to leave Detroit. Diego was happy with his work, and Frida had plunged into her deepest psyche to dredge up paintings of aborted birth to cleanse herself of the pain but always have the image of her sorrow. They arrived in New York City on March 20th. The trip was the culmination of much negotiation and agonising ego confrontations. The Rockefeller Center was near the end of its construction in New York. The architect for the Rockefellers, Raymond Hood, had created parameters for an heroic mural in the building’s Public Lobby. He put out a business-like RFP (Request for Proposal) to each of three artists: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Diego Rivera. Described in the RFP were the guidelines each artist should follow. For complying with these proposal submissions the artist would be awarded $300. First, the mural would be monochrome in black, white and grey. The scale would require a human on the front plane not 146. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (West wall), 1932-1933. Fresco. The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
216
to exceed 8ft 6in in height. For portability, the mural was to be submitted on canvas covering between 60 and 75 per cent of the surface beneath a stipulated number of varnish coats. Picasso refused to even look at the document – or the person who delivered it. Matisse was polite, explaining his style was at odds with the request. Diego shrugged. “Ten years ago I
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would have accepted your kind invitation with pleasure…” Nelson Rockefeller interceded between Hood and Rivera, asking Diego personally to accept the commission without any competition. Diego was fine with that until he heard that the nine flanking murals painted down the lobby corridors would be created by the Welsh decorative illustrator Frank Brangwyn and academician José María Sert of Spain. Diego revolted again. His objections snowballed, including a request to do the mural in colour instead of monochrome to avoid having the space resemble a large tomb. Finally, the main mural had to be a fresco rather than a painted on canvas. While the architect spluttered, Rockefeller upheld Diego’s “requests.” Titled Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, Diego began the preliminary sketches. His view of the evolving mechanistic world in the hands of the capitalists had culminated in the Detroit Murals with an intermixing of man and machine under the control of the worker. And yet the worker had to become one with the machine to achieve this control and advance the cause of the proletariat. The capitalism that had set the system into motion was now collapsing under the greed of the profit-takers. The powerful Soviet State under Stalin’s rule was busy eating its own children in endless purifications. Trotsky could no longer command any leadership role, and Fascist military rule in Germany under Hitler was gnawing away at Europe. Who was left to be the patriarch of an egalitarian working class? Who was the only remaining ideologue to offer the world its salvation, but the visionary Marxist Vladimir Lenin? Rivera conducted all the negotiations and thematic formation from Detroit in the midst of the turmoil previously described. Regardless, he presented a cogent description of his plan for the Rockefeller Center mural: “In the centre, Man is expressed in his triple aspect – the Peasant who develops from the earth the products which are the origin and base of all the riches of mankind, the Worker of the cities who transforms and distributes the raw materials given by the earth, and the Soldier who, under the Ethical Force that produces martyrs in religions and wars, represents Sacrifice. Man, represented by these three figures, looks with uncertainty but with hope towards a future more complete balance between Technical and Ethical Development of Mankind necessary to a New, more Humane and Logical Order.”
47
Diego turned in his sketch, had it approved by the Rockefellers, and pressed on with the mural
147. Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (West wall) – Steam, 1932-1933.
that rose on the front and side walls of the elevator bank facing the Center’s main entrance. The
Fresco, 518.2 x 169 cm.
entire complex had been undertaken as a means to raise the economy out of the doldrums and
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
stimulate recovery. As he worked, his progress was conveyed to Rockefeller via photographs. Soon, however, the future seemed left in the hands of a “worker-leader” in the lower right
148. Diego Rivera,
quadrant of the composition whose face had been neutral before, but now had become Diego’s
Detroit Industry (West wall) – Electricity,
patriarch of the egalitarian working class, Vladimir Lenin. As more people noticed the
1932-1933.
portrait, the word reached Rockefeller who sent Diego a politely-worded note that boiled
Fresco, 518.2 x 170.2 cm.
down to “Get rid of Lenin”.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
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Diego had to have known that the inclusion of Lenin in the mural would cause a scandal. His own polite refusal stated with almost joking hubris: “…rather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety, but preserving, at least, its integrity.” Having never dealt with men of Rockefeller’s particularly willful stripe, Rivera was surprised when the Rockefeller Center’s Security Police arrived at his scaffolding and gave him and his assistants time to descend with their brushes, trowels and materials. The scaffolding was replaced with poles that supported canvas frames completely covering the work that had been accomplished to date. Diego was led to the work shack on the premises where he was paid in full. He had no further claim on the work. The last of the great industrial barons of the United States had closed the door and turned out the light. The big adventure was ended, but Diego found one final wall to paint for the New Workers School on West 114th St. Because the space was rented, he painted a history of the United States from the colonial period to the 1930s on moveable canvas frames so they could eventually be moved to the school’s new quarters on 33rd Street and finally to the Ladies’ Garment Workers Union resort in Forest Park, Pennsylvania, called Unity Park. By the time the Workers School murals were finished, Frida was frantic to leave New York. 149. Diego Rivera,
Diego had not yet exhausted his love of celebrity and they fought bitterly. Eventually though,
Detroit Industry (West wall) – Aviation,
even his own monumental ego could see he was becoming more of a curiosity and less of a
1932-1933.
righteous artiste at the barricades.
Fresco, 257.8 x 213.4 cm (side panels);
Diego, Frida and their entourage departed by the steamship Oriente for Mexico. In
257.8 x 796.3 cm (middle register).
February 1935, workers were called into the Rockefeller Center Lobby and sledgehammered
The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.
Diego’s half-finished mural into fragments. José Marie Sert accepted a commission to paint a
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monochrome mural – as originally stipulated by Raymond Hood, the architect – into the space. The mural is ignored by millions of visitors each year. Frida provided one last kiss-off to their American Adventure. With her oil paints on a slab of board she painted My Dress is Hanging There. Together with bits of montage cut-outs and mementoes, the work is a composite of their New York experience: sights seen and emotions captured. In the centre, hanging from a metal hanger, is one of her Tehuana dresses above a sepia montage of unemployed men trudging in single file towards a burning temple in the financial district. A plinth rises above them on which is a white porcelain toilet.
37
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., pp.253-260
38
http://www.cityclubsf.com/history.html
39
San Francisco Examiner, November 30, 1930
40
United Press, September 23, 1930
41
www.lehman.edu/publicart/images/icagbutton
42
americanhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_1319.html
43
Hayden Herrera: Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York, 1983, p.113
44
Diego Rivera, op. cit., p.120
45
Linda Bank Downs, Diego Rivera – the Detroit Industrial Murals, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1999, p.174
46
Detroit News, March 22, 1933, article Detroit Put on Art Map by Rivera, asserts Kahn
47
Bertram D. Wolfe, op. cit., p.339 (copied from Diego Rivera, A Retrospective, Founders Society, Detroit Institute of Arts, W. W. Norton & Co., New York)
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A
rrival back in Mexico did not guarantee happiness, as Frida discovered when they moved into their new pair of houses. Diego blamed her for the bad feelings they had left behind. He blamed her for having to leave his great victories
behind. She was at fault for his bad mood and the bad work he was going to have to do to get started again. For her part, Frida was suspicious that Diego was again having a love affair with someone else. After much spying and skulking about, she discovered Diego’s latest love interest was her younger sister Cristina. The two people in the world that she loved and trusted the most had betrayed her. Her world seemed to be crashing as her health took a bad turn. She suffered a third miscarriage in the third month of pregnancy. Her appendix was removed and the pain in her right foot had become so acute that she allowed the amputation of all five toes. Adding to her grief, Rivera refused to end his affair with Cristina. Frida’s disappointment and the wound she suffered at Diego’s hands never completely healed. Its reopening occurred many times in her painting as she used the symbolism of her heart separated from her body, as in Memory, painted in 1937, and Memory of an Open Wound, completed in 1938. She retreated
into her Aztec ancestors’ mythology, reproducing their ceremonial carving out of the living heart from their captives to offer up to their gods. In lieu of actually carving out anyone’s heart, Frida packed a suitcase and left for New York with a couple of women friends. She enjoyed a libidinous time with both men and women, cutting a swathe though the social élite who were both bored and adventurous. Actually, Diego had no problem with her lesbian affairs. He wrote, “The male sexual organ is confined to one place whereas female genitals are distributed all
150. Diego Rivera, Self-Portrait, 1949.
over the female body. For this reason, two women can have entirely different and incredibly
Tempera on linen, 34.9 x 27.9 cm.
satisfying sex with each other.”48
Private collection.
Diego, as usual, retreated into his work. He had a good portion of the money left over from the Rockefeller Center debacle after paying off his crew, but he earned nothing while
151. Diego Rivera,
completing the National Palace murals and needed to keep his face in the public eye. He asked
Peasants, 1947.
the government for a wall to reproduce the mural he had proposed and half completed for the
Oil on canvas.
Rockefellers. He was given a wall on the third level of the national culture centre, the Palacio
Museu de Arte Contemporâneo da
de Bellas Artes. He was the first Mexican artist to receive this honour and was followed later
Universitad de São Polo, Sao Paulo.
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by three other members of Mexico’s Mural Renaissance: Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Once again, Rivera laced the composition with the usual suspects: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Diego’s biographer Bertram Wolfe – all grouped on the “good” side of the triptych behind a Communist banner proclaiming the IV International, an anti-Stalinist movement. One addition on the “bad” side is a portrait of Nelson Rockefeller. Rivera continued to preach on the triumph of Revolutionary Socialism at the expense of the supposed theme of the mural, man controlling his destiny with hope for a better future. The blue-eyed blond man manipulating the controls at the mural’s centre looks anything but hopeful. If this is the exact plan for the Rockefeller mural, possibly the men with the sledgehammers did Diego a great favour. With the completion of the Palacio and National Palace murals there were no more walls in Diego’s immediate future, so he returned to easel painting and portraits. His work and the murals of his contemporaries had brought world attention to Mexico’s folkloric face. By 1936, as the capital assumed a more international flavour, a hotel was built in the Art Deco style on the Paseo de la Reforma. This modern building was faced with tezontle, a red pumice. The pink-faced construction was at home situated close to the Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City’s main art gallery. In keeping with its location, the Pani family who owned it commissioned a set of four panels for the hotel’s banquetting hall. Diego accepted with relish and received 4,000 pesos, about $1,000, for the panels, titled The Dictatorship, Dance of the Huichilobos, Touristic and Folkloric Mexico, and Festival of Huejotzingo (celebrating yet another bandit hero, Augustin Lorenzo). Compared to the fees he received for easel paintings, this payment barely covered his preparation crew’s salaries, his materials and some of his time. But wall frescoes were responsible for his fame and acted as advertising hoardings, drawing new clients to him. Almost every element in the panels was a caricature, a lampoon and an exaggeration of Mexican life, its politics, the hoards of American tourists and the many living Mexican personalities who were immediately recognisable. Since he was delving into satire, and remembering the fate of his Rockefeller murals, he made the panels moveable to evade the sledgehammers in case of miscalculation. For whatever reason, besides the possible clash with his client, Diego’s heart was not in this project. The quality of the satire and caricature was not up to his usual subtlety. Uproar, finger-pointing and ancestral imprecations followed. Alberto Pani sent his brother to the hotel with paint-pots and brushes, and a list of changes he wanted made. Pani altered a face here, moved an arm there, and made other cosmetic changes to some of the caricatures so they would not offend. Diego, enraged, marched to the hotel with his crew. The Panis met 152. Diego Rivera,
him and pistols were drawn. Diego threatened to gouge out Arturo Pani’s eye. The Panis
Tehuantepec Dance, c. 1935.
threatened a lawsuit and the police were summoned. Diego surrendered his weapons and was
Charcoal and watercolour,
hauled off to jail.
48.1 x 60.6 cm.
In court Arturo Pani bragged that he made the changes in Rivera’s murals himself, with his
Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
own hands. He said, “…my changes show how easy it is to paint like Diego Rivera!”49 Finally
Los Angeles.
a judge closed the matter by invoking the Mexican law that stated anyone causing changes to
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a work of art while the artist’s name remains on the work is guilty of forgery. The judge then forced the Panis to pay Diego in full. The red-faced Panis had the panels stripped from the walls and replaced them with mirrors. They were sold to Rivera’s dealer, Alberto Misrachi and sent into storage at his Central Art Galleria in Mexico City.50 Even as Diego finished the hotel’s murals, his restless energy led him back again to easel painting. Though many of his subjects were wealthy women such as Adalgisa Nery, Natasha Gelman and the actress, Paulette Goddard, he also painted from sketches of local Indians at work (The Flower Carrier, 1935) and at play (Fandango Tehuantepec Dance, a swirling fiesta reminiscent of Gauguin). Throughout the 1940s, Rivera turned out many finished studies of an Indian girl with her pigtails tied together between her shoulder blades. Her presence became a signature in his later paintings and frescoes. Another signature element was the Calla Lily, a white flower dominated by a large yellow stamen thrusting outward from its centre. He had entered into a decade without walls. With no murals to excite the press and lure dealers, his energy focused on easel painting. At times Diego set up an assembly-line, turning out watercolours in groups of five or six. First a palette of cadmium yellow, gold, ochre and then reds: carmine, rose madder, alizarin crimson… he often made two or three paintings of the same subject. There was a large market for his work north of the border, and his casual handling of money and contributions to the Communist Party kept him constantly in need. Another need was his restoration to favour with the Communist Party, from which he had been exiled. The splinter faction he preferred was headed by Leon Trotsky, who since his fallout with Stalin was just one jump ahead of Stalin’s assassins. Guarded by their followers, Trotsky and his wife Natalya moved from safe house to safe house through Europe. Diego seized on this situation as a patriotic act inviting his restoration to the Party. He pursued Mexican President Cárdenas to provide a haven for this international political figure. Lázaro Cardenas had managed to gain the peoples’ favour by sending former President Calles into exile in the United States. His reign began with considerable land reform, returning great tracts of the land seized from the campesinos back to the original owners and their peasant workers. This was not the style of Communism favoured by the Mexican Stalinists. Cárdenas was a man of deep principles and on January 9th 1937, the tanker Ruth docked in Tampico. Down the gangplank came Trotsky, his wife Natalya Sedova and their bodyguards. Standing on the pier to meet them was Frida Kahlo and a deputation from the Mexican President’s office. Diego had a bad case of gout and could not leave the hospital. When the party arrived in Mexico City aboard a special train, Diego was on hand at the station. The Trotskys were taken to La Casa Azul, Frida’s Blue House, where they would stay rent-free for two years. From their first meeting, Trotsky, at the age of fifty-seven with his silver mane of hair and towering intellect, was attracted to the charming young Mexican girl
153. Diego Rivera,
who, at the age of twenty-nine, was a blossoming artist and possessed a razor-sharp wit. Her
The Flower Carrier, 1935.
self-confidence had also been improved since her New York fling and an eight-month affair
Oil and tempera on masonite,
with the handsome sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The two lovers planned to set up together in a
121.9 x 121.3 cm.
Mexico City apartment, but when furniture ordered for the love nest ended up delivered to
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
Diego’s front door complete with receipt, Diego saw red and drew his trusty. 44 Colt.
San Francisco.
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Fortunately, before he thundered into their midst at their trysting place in the Casa Azul, Naguchi made it out of the bedroom and across the roof. Diego never had a clear shot. Trotsky and Frida communicated with notes left in a book and managed their affair discreetly, meeting at Cristina’s house. By this time, Frida had forgiven her sister’s affair with Diego. Trotsky’s wife Natalya, however, was not so broad-minded when she discovered the romance, and gave her husband a “me-or-her” ultimatum. Being the stiff-necked ideologue that he was, Trotsky saw divorce as damaging to his image and, by this time, he had become “uncomfortable” with Diego’s backsliding Communist commitment. He and Natalya sought accommodation elsewhere in Coyoacán. In October 1938 Frida had left for New York and her first one-woman show of paintings at the Levy Gallery. Between November 1st and 15th about half of the twenty-five works had 154. Diego Rivera,
sold. Enjoying her freedom and intoxicated by the success of her work, she had several affairs.
Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in
Meanwhile Diego wrote to his friend, the American art critic Sam A. Lewisohn,
Alameda Park, 1947-1948.
recommending her work, not as her husband but as an artist and colleague. Among her other
Fresco, 480 x 150 cm.
male and female lovers, she enjoyed a long affair with photographer Nickolas Muray, but still
Museo Mural Diego Rivera,
felt a need to return to Mexico. Diego cautioned her to take advantage of her New York
Mexico City.
success and accept a showing of her work in Paris offered by the Surrealist André Breton.
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She agreed, and continued on to Paris where Breton’s “show” was ill-conceived and not ready when she arrived. Breton and his wife were more gadflies than organisers. Soon, however, her work was displayed to fair reviews, though often she laboured under recognition as “Diego Rivera’s wife”. Back in New York she discovered that her lover, Nickolas Muray, had ditched her, which was a cruel blow that spurred her to return to Mexico and Diego after six months apart. On returning after her successful tour of the art capitals, she found Diego to be cool towards her. While he never minded her lesbian affairs, sleeping around with Nickolas Muray and Trotsky was too much, and he asked her for a divorce. He was, at the time, having an affair with the Hollywood movie star Paulette Goddard. On May 24th, 1940, dressed as policemen, acting as Stalinist assassins, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Vittorio Vidale raided Trotsky’s quarters, but failed in their murder attempt. The audacity and closeness of the attack put Diego on guard for his own safety. He made a telephone call to the American Embassy and a shadowy gentleman named James McGregor connected to the US State Department. The two had met on January 11th, 1940, and Diego had provided the names of all the Communists in the Mexican government plus some concerns about Stalinist agents entering Mexico with refugees from the Spanish War.
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He also spoke about how the Stalinist movement was being bankrolled through a Mexico City financial institution. Even though Diego had an ideological grudge against the United States, the last thing he wanted was that country infiltrated by Stalin’s minions. His information was nothing new to the State Department, but it confirmed what they already knew and demonstrated Diego’s friendly sympathies. Now, with Stalinists blazing away in his own backyard, Diego picked up the phone and told Paulette to pack a bag. With a nod and a wink – and a diplomatic passport – he flew from Mexico City airport, crossed the United States border, stopped over in Brownsville, Texas, where the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued him a one year visa, and continued on to San Francisco.51 There, coincidently, the architect Tim Pflueger and Diego’s wealthy fan, Albert Bender, had a mural fresco contract waiting for him. The Golden Gate International Exposition was in preparation and Diego was to paint a moveable fresco as the public watched in an Exposition location called Art in Action on the man-made Treasure Island. The exhibit was originally supposed to be a collection of Old Masters to hang for two years, but nations who were contributing became edgy about the coming war and recalled their paintings. Later, on August 21st, another Stalinist agent, Ramón Mercader, earned Trotsky’s trust and managed to get close enough to the aging revolutionary to plant an ice-axe in his skull. Frida became hysterical when she heard of his death, because the assassin of Trotsky was the yound and beautiful Mercader whom she had met, in Paris, when she had been apart from Diego. As the police tore into Rivera’s house, she called Diego from the Casa Azul and told him that they scooped her up for twelve hours of interrogation. Diego had hard-eyed armed guards placed around his workplace on the island. He made arrangements for her to come to San Francisco in early September where she placed herself in the hands of her trusted friend, Dr Eloesser. He diagnosed osteomyelitis, cut off her cigarettes, and put her to bed in Diego’s apartment on 49 Calhoun Street, high up Telegraph Hill. After a brief recovery period, she flew to New York where she convalesced with friends. Eloesser, always Frida’s champion, explained to Diego that her illness was due in part to stress over the divorce. To Frida, the doctor explained: “Diego loves you very much and I know that you love him too. Naturally and this is undisputed, Diego loves only two things besides you: first, painting and second, women in general. He has never been – and never will be – the man to be permanently faithful to one woman…”52 On Diego’s birthday, December 8th, 1940, he and Frida were remarried on Frida’s conditions. He wrote in his autobiography: “She wanted to be financially self-sufficient through her own efforts, and live from what she earned by selling her own work; I was to foot half the household expenses, nothing more; 155. Diego Rivera, The History of
there were to be no sexual relations. She explained this condition by saying that it was
Cardiology, 1943-1944.
impossible for her to overcome the psychological barrier which went up whenever she
Fresco, 600 x 405 cm.
thought of all my other women. I was so overjoyed to have Frida back that I agreed to
Universidad Iberoamericana,
everything.”53
Auditorium, Tlapan.
232
None of the conditions stood the test of time.
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Frida Kahlo would never completely recover from the stress and illness of this time in 1940. Her self-portraits turned more and more inward and dwelled on her afflictions. She moved back into the Casa Azul with Diego and there she remained. Diego commuted to his San Ángel studio for his easel work. The Golden Gate Exposition’s four mural panels demonstrate Rivera’s story-telling style that requires a considerable investment by the viewer. Beginning from left to right, he moves historically from the ancient Maya to modern California including agrarian and mechanical advances into the industrial age expressing Pan-American unity. He spreads the entire sweep of history over a changing background of aerial views and above framed collections of activities not unlike the imitation grisailles used in Cuernavaca and Detroit. As usual, the faces and characters depicted form a who’s who of significant portraits with each era. At the age of fifty-four, his mental and organisational agility was undiminished and the sheer physical energy required to cartoon and paint the almost seven by twenty-two metre space was incredible. As Stalin had forged a non-aggression pact with the Nazis, the “Man of Steel” was grouped with Hitler and Mussolini in a panel dedicated to the grim aspects of the upcoming war, next to Charlie Chaplin in his famous Hitleresque character from The Great Dictator performing his ballet with an inflated globe. Some of the groupings produced laughter from the watching crowds. A “Tree of Life” is planted beneath the central panel’s bizarre machine created out of the “Earth Goddess Coatlicue” and a conglomeration of machinery. Attending the planting is the unlikely trio of Dudley Carter, whacking away on a wood sculpture of a Rocky Mountain Ram, Frida Kahlo in her Tehuana dress holding a palette and brushes, and Paulette Goddard kneeling with a white plant. It was another example of Diego pairing his lovers in the same fresco. Rivera’s moveable mural panels for the Golden Gate Exposition on Treasure Island required six months of his time. Timothy Pflueger, the architect, had planned to use the finished work in the library of the San Francisco City College, but the plans for the library had been changed and now there were no walls large enough for the installation. The fresco on steel frames was placed in storage vaults. Eventually, in 1961, Pflueger created a space for the mural in the lobby of the San Francisco City College Arts Auditorium. During storage, the surface had sustained damage and a hole in the plaster had to be patched and repainted in acrylics. It remains a curiosity, a portrait gallery of unknowns for the most part, a piece of art history looking back at a time when murals and the ideas they illustrated were on the thinning edge of relevance. Diego returned to Mexico. The brief era of the Mexican muralists had faded. Architecture had moved on to worship the surface as a surface with inherent character in support of the whole structure. Natural materials were used for their own integrity, as
156. David Alfaro Siqueiros, From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz
shown by Frank Lloyd Wright, the post-war Bauhaus, and the international creations of
to the Revolution – Porfirio Díaz,
Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. Functionalism did away
Ministers and Courtesans (detail),
with surface decoration. Graffiti and posters supplanted the artistic statement of ideology
1957-1965.
expressed on public spaces. Films and television replaced history and editorial content
Museo Nacional de Historia,
embedded in fresco.
Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico City.
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The Mexican muralists had cast light on the art form during the 1920s and the years of the Great Depression. Murals spread throughout the United States as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) provided artists with work decorating walls in libraries, railway stations, public theatre lobbies, public works buildings and post offices. The world of art had completed yet another orbit. The Impressionists had been replaced by the post-Impressionists, the savage reality of the First World War had brought art in direct contact with pure anguished expression, and the human form had slid away into abstraction of its elements and the space surrounding it. Now the Cubists and Surrealists themselves diminished in a world of giant canvases laboured with the distilled preoccupations of the person with the brush, palette knife or paint-dipped stick with only nominal regard for a tenuous connection with the viewer. Diego Rivera had become an anachronism. His paintings, barely dry, still sold, but not as great art so much as nostalgia, remnants related to those great phantasmagorical images entangled on walls south of the border and surviving tenuously in the United States. His paintings also have a purity of focus, not part of a greater whole but simply observations of an artist with a sharp and penetrating vision – Rivera at his best, seeing life around him. During the Second World War he worked on building a combination studio, temple and bunker made of lava rock, divided into three floors with the topmost as his studio. Its primary function was a museum space to hold his huge collection – 42,000 pieces at his death – of pre-Columbian antiquities which he had collected with every spare centavo. To many, it appeared to be his tomb. He spent years dabbing away incoherently at walls in the National Palace and a legacy collection of portrait heads clustered like grapes above grisailles portraying scenes from the healing arts for the Instituto Nacional de Cardiología. Then he shook off the dust and a case of bronchial pneumonia to create Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Almeda on the wall of a restaurant in the Hotel Del Prado. The mural tells the history of modern Mexico from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century using a chronological collection of recognisable personnages who have affected that history. This is an autobiographical fantasy promenade of these characters as though the parade stopped long enough for them all to turn – a theatrical pause – and face the diners in the restaurant. There is a frontal, a middle and a back plane of depth all beneath a canopy of 157. Diego Rivera,
tentacle-like tree branches. A cluster of children’s balloons in the foreground mirrors in shape
Portrait of Adalgisa Nery, 1945.
a hot-air balloon ascending in the background. Almost in the centre is Diego as a pale child
Oil on canvas, 123.3 x 62.4 cm.
with striped stockings in front of an adult Frida wearing a carmine red repozo and resting her
Dora and Rafael Mareyna Collection,
hand on his shoulder. Diego holds the hand of the fashionably-dressed mythical cartoon
Mexico City.
skeleton, La Calavera. Lupe Marín stands at the far right with her and Diego’s two adult daughters near Diego’s signature character, the Indian girl with her braids knotted together.
158. Diego Rivera,
Alameda Park once was the site of a monastery and a crematorium where Inquisition
Portrait of an Actress, 1948.
victims were burned alive. It later became a public gathering place for band concerts and
Oil on canvas, 61 x 49 cm.
political rallies, and a military campground. Diego often came here with his parents. In his
Collection of the Government of the
depiction of the bucolic setting, the historical parade required at least a touch of his personal-
State of Veracruz, Veracruz.
social-political belief collection. On a piece of paper no more than two inches high is a quote
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from a student of the Academy of Letrán, situated on the park’s south side. Ignacio Ramírez, who earned recognition as an advocate of the separation of church and state under Juárez, had stated in a presentation to students and faculty “God does not exist.” “Death to Diego Rivera!” roared the cries of conservative mobs of wealthy religious breastbeaters that descended on the hotel. “Long live Jesus Christ!” they shouted. Stones crashed through the windows of Rivera’s San Ángel studio and into the parlour at the Casa Azul in Coyoacán. A deputation of reactionary students broke into the hotel and scratched out the offending quotation. With the aid of fellow artists Orozco and the seething Siqueiros, Diego mounted a counter-demonstration and, while the demonstrators faced off firing metaphysical broadsides, he repaired the damage. But the problem did not go away and newspapers printed attacks while the hotel owners quaked and cowered. As usual, Diego resisted all demands to change the words. Finally, a screen was erected over the mural to be removed on request only from important dignitaries.54 No thought was ever given to destroying the mural as had been done at the Rockefeller Center. Mexican law did not permit this, and the Committee of Fine Arts – the only body with authority to remove a work of art from public display – consisted of José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera. In 1949, after the Del Prado mural controversy had had time to fade away, the Mexican government did some quick calculations and determined that Diego Rivera had been a working artist representing his country for fifty years. Word went out to collectors and museums throughout the world and five hundred pieces were gathered in the Bellas Artes where the National Institute of Fine Arts opened a fifty-year retrospective exhibition. Even the Rockefellers – who had sledgehammered his work from their walls – participated, lending examples from their collection. Following the successful show, Diego Rivera, 50 Años de su Labor Artística, a monograph published in 1951 delivered a smorgasbord of reproductions, essays and photographs from Diego’s life. The Retrospective returned Diego to his former star status. His work from the exhibition, along with that of other Mexican painters, would go to Paris for a triumphant gala presenting Mexico’s new artistic credentials to the world. For the show Diego would create a special moveable mural, the subject of which would be, he said, Peace. To that end, he created a huge picture 33ft by 15ft titled The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace. It must be remembered that Diego had long been trying to have his membership of the Communist Party restored. He was also a hopeless political dilettante. His thrashing about with Communist sympathies in Europe had resulted in his being written off as the Antichrist in most circles. At the time of the commission, Stalin had been backing “Peaceful CoExistence” as a slogan behind his quietly brutal regime. Diego seized upon this “peace” idea
159. Diego Rivera,
and also the Communist-sponsored Stockholm Peace Congress as a symbol of this new
The Fashion Designer Henri de
direction. His restoration to the Party would be assured with this grand gesture.
Châtillon, 1944.
As a painting, The Nightmare… was a disaster, having been finished in thirty-five days, but
Oil on canvas, 121 x 152 cm.
as a giant propaganda poster, it was a gem. The painting featured smiling Josef Stalin and an
Vicky and Marcos Micha Collection,
idealised, fatherly Mao Zedong facing off against hawkish, unsmiling effigies of Uncle Sam
Mexico City.
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complete with a machine gun slung on his back, Bible in one hand and a sack of money in the other, in front of hanging men and a Negro nailed to a cross, a thuggish John Bull and the French Marie-Antoinette, looking lost and puzzled. Stalin offers a pen to the horrific trio while below, in her wheelchair of pain, a ravaged-looking loyal Frida Kahlo holds a copy of the Stockholm Peace Petition to be signed. Diego was certain of his restoration to Communist Party membership. Of course, at the unveiling in Mexico the government let out a collective shriek. The very governments Mexico was looking to impress with its sophistication, egalitarianism and plethora of investment opportunities stood slandered and pilloried. Meanwhile, the Communist leaders of the world and their fellow travellers were glorified in their pursuit of peace. The government immediately notified him that The Nightmare…could not be hung, displayed or reproduced anywhere as representing anything having to do with Mexico. Diego promptly returned his fee. Diego cried “Fascist censorship!” The painting belonged to him now and he could do what he wanted with it. He was once again a revolutionary painter and even the Daily Worker newspaper in the United States espoused his cause with a supporting letter signed by nine American artists. He claimed his pyrrhic victory with great gusto. When the Mexican Art Exhibition opened in Paris, the mural was absent. However, the magazine L’Humanité reproduced his “Peace Mural” as a flyer and distributed it free to attendees. In one sweep, according to Bertram Wolfe, his biographer and former Communist comrade, “…Stalin the Terrible had been overpainted with a portrait of Stalin the Good.”55 An aside to the Paris scandal bubbled up to the surface in Detroit when the City Council called the Institute of Arts and demanded a re-evaluation of the murals that still graced the art museum’s courtyard. The commissioners of the Detroit Institute of Arts showed stiffened backbone when they answered the Council’s demand in part, “There is no question that Rivera enjoys making trouble…but this man, who often behaves like a child, is one of the outstanding talents of the Western Hemisphere…No other artist in 160. Diego Rivera, The History of Medecine in Mexico: The
the world could have painted murals of such magnitude and force. We recommend that the paintings remain on exhibition.”
People’s Demand for Better Health, 1953. Fresco. Hospital de la Raza, Mexico City.
161. Diego Rivera,
Adiós Frida, Vaya con Dios Adiós Diego, Vida larga al artista de la gente
The Burlesque of Mexican Folklore and Politics (The Dictatorship, Dance of the
In April 1953, Frida Kahlo had her first and only one-woman show in Mexico at the Galería
Huichilobos, Touristic and Folkloric
de Arte Contemporáneo. The gallery was owned by Frida’s friend, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and the
Mexico, and Festival of Huejotzingo),
star of the event was Frida herself, snugly tucked into her own four-poster bed which had
1936.
been brought from the Casa Azul by cart while she arrived in an ambulance. There, she held
Fresco, 389 x 211 cm.
quiet court as her friends crowded around her making encouraging comments, laughing and
Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes,
doing their best to keep the afternoon gay. But anyone who looked into the face of the once
Mexico City.
high-spirited, profane, loyal, outspoken, talented, intelligent girl from the Blue House in
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Coyoacán knew she was dying. In four months she would confront the decision to amputate her right leg below the knee because of gangrene poisoning. The rot that lay deep in her bones since the day her bus had been crushed by a tramcar when she was a teenager had never been truly arrested. It had eaten away, bit by bit despite fourteen major bouts of surgery over sixteen years and many plaster and steel corsets to help straighten her damaged spine. Her crushed pelvis had killed her babies, and her love of Diego Rivera had both spawned and truncated her career as an artist. Married, divorced and remarried in San Francisco, Diego stood to one side and watched his wife in the midst of her friends and admirers with a large sampling of her life’s work in oil paint looking down on her. From almost every square of tin, wood and canvas, the face watching her was her own, a self-portrait diary of suffering, spiked with far too few moments of joy. He was working on commissions for a History of Medicine in Mexico: the People’s Demand for Better Health at the Hospital de la Raza and a mosaic facade for the Teatro de los Insurgentes – a unique comic book of a mural depicting – yet again – the history of Mexico from Cortés to Cantinflas, the Mexican comic entertainer. This is as close to Pop Art as Rivera got, and was painted about the time when that genre began. It was not that far from the caricature style he had employed in many earlier frescoes. His art was recycling itself as Frida began her steep decline. Some days he left the scaffolding to sit with her when she was depressed – which was frequently – as she had done with him during his bouts with illness. To keep his contracted deadlines he then worked at night, often dozing on the scaffolding or in a chair at his workplace. These sacrifices he mentions in his memoirs, but does not mention the new woman he was also involved with, or that Frida attempted suicide in her despair. She was terrified of the amputation, though she wrote: “…why do I need feet when I have wings to fly?” But the amputation took with it more than her lower right leg. It sucked out what sweet personality remained inside the drying, dying husk left behind. Her self-pity and aggressive cruelty crushed old friendships, but she rarely noticed the deep cuts she was making as her drug addiction stupefied any sensitivity. Diego tried to reduce her drug dependence by substituting alcohol in measured amounts. But Frida cheated and was finally drinking down two litres of Three Star Hennessey cognac a day. 162. David Alfaro Siqueiros,
Ordered to remain in bed, on July 2nd, 1954 Frida insisted on accompanying Diego to a
The Resurrection of Cuauhtemoc, 1950.
Communist demonstration against the CIA and their engineering of the deposition of
Pyroxaline on masonite.
Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. A photograph shows Frida in her wheelchair,
Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes,
drawn and thin, looking out from shadowed, sunken eyes. Diego stands behind her, his face
Mexico City.
set in a cheerless smile, lined and sightless. He wrote: “The evening before she had given me the ring she had bought for our silver
163. David Alfaro Siqueiros, The New Democracy, 1944-1945. Pyroxaline on canvas.
wedding anniversary, which we would have celebrated in seventeen days. I asked why she was giving me the ring now and she replied, ‘Because I sense I’ll be leaving you very soon.’”56 She was forty-seven years old and died on the evening of July 13th, 1954 in the Casa Azul
Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes,
in the very room in which she had been born. The death certificate cited “pulmonary
Mexico City.
thrombosis” as the cause of death, but her bedside drawer was filled with painkiller bottles –
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most of them empty, which suggested suicide. Her friends did not believe it, but they had not lived in Frida’s tortured body, feeling link after link with her art and her world switch off until there was only existence and the ability to end it on her own terms. Diego was disconsolate and sat by her bed all night. He had to be convinced she was dead, asking the doctor to cut her veins and see if blood flowed, proving the heart still functioned. No blood flowed. Her body was moved on July 13th to the foyer of the Bellas Artes, draped – against the government’s wishes – with the Red Flag. Mourners trooped past her open coffin and looked down at the now relaxed face, her hair done up in coloured ribbons. She wore her favourite Tehuana dress, and her best jewellery sparkled under the lights. Diego was a drawn, grey old man. It was raining when her body was carried in procession to the crematorium. Over six hundred people has passed her coffin, and now hundreds formed the procession, with Diego plodding along in a grey raincoat. Her body, laid out on an iron bier, was thrust into the flames and people gasped as she suddenly sat upright, her hair a halo of fire that framed her dead face. And then she was gone. When the remains were withdrawn from the furnace, Diego stayed behind the thinning crowd of mourners to sketch Frida’s skeleton. Her ashes were transferred to a pre-Columbian urn that remains today in the Casa Azul. Diego’s despair aged him terribly, savaging his boundless energy. His only relief from this loss arrived with word from Moscow that his membership of the Communist Party had been restored. The announcement seemed to rekindle his spark. Sixteen days after the first anniversary of Frida’s death, Diego married the publisher Emma Hurtado. This union seemed unlikely, since he had been diagnosed only nine months after Frida’s death with cancer of the penis. Future sex was out of the question. Maybe Frida Kahlo had the last laugh.... Knowing of his impotence, Emma took him as her husband anyway, and the union remained a loving one for its brief duration. After their marriage, Diego and Emma left for Moscow where he underwent cobalt treatments for his cancer. While there, with Emma at his side, his need to work overcame the doctors’ insistence that he needed bed-rest. Instead, he created over four hundred sketches and watercolours during his seven-month stay in the Soviet Union. Most were not up to his former standard, but he relished any work now. He returned to Mexico certified cured by the Soviet doctors. Over the next year, he brought
164. David Alfaro Siqueiros,
himself into the spotlight once again. On April 15th, 1956, he entered the Hotel Del Prado in
Patriots and Parricides, 1945.
front of a large contingent of the alerted press, had scaffolding set up behind the screened-off
Pyroxaline and acrylic celotex on
mural, and painted out the statement “God does not exist.” On emerging, he also announced
masonite.
“I am a Catholic.” This admission from the old Communist free-thinker stunned all who
Ex Aduana de Santo Domingo,
thought they knew him. In one swoop he had placated Rome, who had condemned his
Mexico City.
“heresy” of non-belief. He turned 70 years old in December 1956 and had slowed down considerably. He often
165. Diego Rivera,
gave interviews and some of his later easel paintings illustrated the articles, but he constantly
Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934.
referred to his need to return to frescoes, his true art form. A wall awaited him at the School
Fresco, 485 x 1145 cm.
of Cardiology and he did some preparatory sketches. He managed some portraits and searing
Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes,
sunsets, but he was marking time.
Mexico City.
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He was victim of a phlebitis attack in September 1956 which paralyzed his right arm. Like Frida, he refused to enter hospital and instead had a bed set up in his San Ángel studio surrounded by his paintings, sketches, cartoons and hundreds of pre-Columbian idols, curios and amulets. For company he gazed upon the unfinished portrait of his grand-daughter on one easel and the face of an un-named Russian child on another easel. He would finish them when he was better. At midnight on November 24th, 1957, his wife Emma heard his bell tinkle and went to his studio bedroom. “Do you want me to raise the bed?” she asked Diego. “No,” he countered, “on the contrary, lower it.” And then, in the bedroom of the house he had built joined to the house of the woman he had loved, Diego Rivera died. His ashes were placed in an urn in the Bella Artes along with other famous men of Mexico. He wanted his remains to be mingled with Frida Kahlo’s ashes, one last eternal joining, but his fame in death had propelled him past such homely sentimentality. He belonged now to the world’s history of art. The man-child, the troublemaker, the Frog Prince, the Fresco Maestro, the “Commie” Painter, everyone who thinks they know about him has an image of the big man in the sombrero. Few can recall the great masterpieces he painted, but when confronted with the mind-boggling wonder of his best frescoes, the connection is made between the man and his work. For decades he had sought a voice and vision of his own. When he found in fresco that unique communication he also found a pact with the devil requiring public spaces to display his deeply-felt convictions and interpretations. The wall commissions brought him both adulation and dismissal as a mountebank, a political gadfly using his art as propaganda. His women – regardless of his shoddy treatment of their feelings and his constant promiscuity – never stopped loving him. He was a product of his own myth that only in the end became a sad caricature. But he defeated mortality and lives in his art as he lived in life – on a grand scale. Viva, Diego. Viva.
48
Hayden Herrera: Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, New York, 1983, p.166
49
New York Post, November 21, 1936; Herald Tribune, November 24, 1936; New York Times, Nov 22 & 24, 1936, Excelsior, Nov 21 & 25, 1936; Bertram D. Wolfe, ibid., pp.351-352
50
Diego Rivera, ibid., pp.133-135
51
Pete Hamill, Diego Rivera, Harry Abrams, New York, 1999
52
Hayden Herrera, Frida Kahlo A Life of Passion, 1997, p. 268
53
Diego Rivera, ibid., p.242
Popular History of Mexico, 1953.
54
Diego Rivera, ibid., pp.158-161
Mosaic.
55
Bertram D. Wolfe, ibid., pp.387-389
Teatro de los Insurgentes, Mexico City.
56
Isabel Alcantara and Sandra Egnolff, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Prestel, New York, 1999
166. Diego Rivera,
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Index VICTOR ARNAUTOFF City Life (left half), 1934
191
77
PAUL CÉZANNE Aqueduct, 1885-1887 The Black Castle, 1900-1904
21 26
PAUL GAUGUIN Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), 1891 Vaïraumati Tei Oa (Her name is Vaïraumati), 1892 EL GRECO The Visitation, 1610 JUAN GRIS Figure of a Woman, 1917 FRIDA KAHLO Diego and Frida, 1929-1944 (II), 1944 Portrait of Engineer Marte R. Gómez, 1944 Postcard to Diego Rivera, 1944 Self-Portrait, c. 1938 Self-Portrait: “Very Ugly”, 1933 Xochítl, Flower of Life, 1938 JOSÉ CLEMENTE OROZCO American Civilisation – Anglo-America (detail), 1932 American Civilisation – Latin America (detail), 1932 American Civilisation – The Gods of the Modern Worlds, 1932 Man of Fire, 1938-1939 Social Revolution, 1926 The Spanish Conquest of Mexico – Portrait of Cortés The Franciscan, 1938-1939 The Trench, 1926
188
Alliance of the Peasant and the Industrial Worker, 1924
149
The Anise Bottle, 1915
GEORGES BRAQUE Fruit Dish and Glass, 1912
GUSTAVE COURBET A Hut in the Mountains, 1874-1876
Allegory of California, 1931
Arum Vendor, 1924 The Aztec World (detail), 1929 Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1923 Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1925 The Battle of the Aztecs and Spaniards, 1930 Beguine Convent in Bruges or Twilight in Bruges, 1909
16
71 47 184 41 51 171 13
The Black Race, 1932
205
Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilising the Earth, 1926-1927
145
The Burlesque of Mexican Folklore and Politics 45 40
37
(The Dictatorship, Dance of the Huichilobos, Touristic and Folkloric Mexico, and Festival of Huejotzingo), 1936 The Burning of the Judases, 1923-1924
134
The Burning of the Revolutionary, 1926
117
The Celebration of the First of May, 1923-1924
133
The Celebration of the Land Distribution, 1923-1924 70
161 166 162 9 165 8
242-243
Child with a “Taco”, 1932
132-133 48
Creation, 1922-1923
102
Day of the Dead – City Celebration, 1923-1924
135
Day of the Dead – The Offering, 1923-1924
125
Detroit Industry (East wall), 1932-1933
210
Detroit Industry (East wall) – Infant in the Bulb of a Plant, 1932-1933
214-215
Detroit Industry (East wall) – Woman Holding Fruit, 1932-1933
213
Detroit Industry (East wall) – Woman Holding Grains, 1932-1933
212
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Manufacture of Poisonous Gas Bombs Gas 106 107 136 139 111 140-141 93
and Cells Suffocated by Poisonous Gas (North wall), 1932-1933
200
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Production and Manufacture of Engine and Transmission, 1932-1933
202-203
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Production of Automobile Exterior and Final Assembly), 1932-1933
198-199
Detroit Industry (North wall) – The Red and Black Races and Geological Strata, 1932-1933
206-207
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Vaccination and PABLO PICASSO Composition with a Bunch of Grapes and a Sliced Pear, 1914 Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, 1937 CAMILLE PISSARRO Landscape with Pastures, Pontoise, 1868 PIERRE PUVIS DE CHAVANNES Woman at her Toilet, 1883 DIEGO RIVERA Adoration of the Virgin, 1912-1913 The Agitator, 1926
254
Healthy Human Embryo, 1932-1933 73 87
and Sulphur and Potash, 1932-1933 Detroit Industry (South wall, detail), 1932-1933
14
39
197 192-193
Detroit Industry (South wall) – Pharmaceutics and Surgery, 1932-1933
196
Detroit Industry (South wall) – The Stamping Press, 1932-1933
194
Detroit Industry (South wall) The White and Yellow Races and Geological Strata, 1932-1933 Detroit Industry (West wall), 1932-1933
61 147
201
Detroit Industry (South wall) – Commercial Chemical Operations
Detroit Industry (West wall) – Aviation, 1932-1933 Detroit Industry (West wall) – Electricity, 1932-1933
208-209 217 220-221 218
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Detroit Industry (West wall) – Steam, 1932-1933 The Distribution of the Arms, 1928 Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, 1947-1948 Edsel B. Ford, 1932 The Eiffel Tower, 1914 The Embrace, 1923 Emiliano Zapata (Martyr Emiliano Zapata), 1928 Entering the Mine, 1923 Exit from the Mine, 1923 The Fashion Designer Henri de Châtillon, 1944 Figures at the Market with a Scale, 1923 The Flower Carrier, 1935 Flower Vendor, 1926 Formation of Revolutionary Leadership, 1926-1927 The Foundry: Emptying the Crucible, 1923 Friday of Sorrows on the Canal of Santa Anita, 1923-1924 General view of the north and east walls of the Patio del Trabajo The Great City of Tenochtitlán, 1945 Head of “Hope” (study for the mural of the Anfiteatro Bolívar), 1923 The History of Cardiology, 1943-1944 The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – Crossing the Barranca, 1929-1930 The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – The Conversion of the Indians, 1929-1930 The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – The Enslavement of the Indian – Construction the Cortés Palace, 1929-1930 The History of Medecine in Mexico: The People’s Demand for Better Health, 1953 History of Mexico: From the Conquest to the Future, 1929-1930 The History of Mexico – The World of Today and Tomorrow, 1929-1935 The Land’s Bounty Rightfully Possessed, 1926 Landscape, 1896-1897 Landscape with a Lake, c. 1900 Landscape with a Mill, Damme Landscape, 1909 The Learned, 1926 The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man, 1926-1927 The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City, 1931 Man, Controller of the Universe, 1934 The Market, 1923-1924 The Mathematician, c. 1918 The Meager Table, 1917 Midi Landscape, 1918 New World Schoolteacher, 1928 Night of the Poor, 1926 Night of the Rich, 1928 Notre-Dame, Paris, 1909 The Old Ones, 1912 Our Bread, 1928 The Partition of the Land, 1924 Peasants, 1947 Popular History of Mexico, 1953 Portrait of a Military Man Portrait of a Spaniard (Hermán Alsina), 1912 Portrait of a Woman, Mrs. Zetlin, 1916
218 97 230-231 168 62 108 123 110 112 238 114-115 228 42-43 146 101 120 118-119 183 52 233 177 174
172-173 241 186-187 185 153 10 15 17 129 150, 155 4 250-251 130-131 78 76 20 104-105 129 126 19 29 129 148 224-225 253 33 30 86
Portrait of an Actress, 1948 Portrait of Adalgisa Nery, 1945 Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1909 Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1918 Portrait of Concha, c. 1927 Portrait of Guadalupe, 1926 Portrait of John Dunbar, 1931 Portrait of Kawashima and Fujita, 1914 Portrait of Lupe Marín, 1938 Portrait of M. A. Voloshin in an Armchair, 1916 Portrait of Martín Luís Guzmán, 1915 Portrait of Ruth Rivera, 1949 Portrait of the Painter Zinoviev, 1913 Portrait of the Poet Lalane, 1936 Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Mexico – The Conquest or The Arrival of Hernán Cortés in Veracruz, 1957 Proletarian Unity (panel nineteen of Portrait of America, a series of twenty-one portable frescoes painted for the New Workers School), 1933 The Red Race, 1932 Revelation of the Path, 1926 Ribbon Dance, 1923-1924 The Rural Teacher, 1932 Self-Portrait, 1916 Self-Portrait, 1941 Self-Portrait, 1949 Still Life, 1913 Still Life, 1915 Still Life with an Anise Bottle or Spanish Still Life, 1918 Still Life with Green House, 1917 Still Life with Lemons, 1916 Study for The Jug, 1912 Subterranean Forces, 1926-1927 Suburbs of Paris, 1918 Surface Miners, 1923 Tehuantepec Dance, c. 1935 The Totonac Civilisation, 1950 Tropical Mexico and the God Xochipilli and his Votaries, 1926 View of Arcueil Wall Street Banquet, 1928 The White Race, 1932 Woman at Well, 1913 Woman with a Red Shawl, 1920 The Yellow Race, 1932 Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla), 1915 DAVID ALFARO SIQUEIROS From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to the Revolution – Porfirio Díaz, Ministers and Courtesans (detail), 1957-1965 From the Dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to the Revolution – The Revolutionaries, 1957-1965 The New Democracy, 1944-1945 Patriots and Parricides, 1945 The Resurrection of Cuauhtemoc, 1950 J.M.W. TURNER Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, 1796 PAOLO UCCELLO Niccolo Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano also known as The Battle of San Romano, 1438-1440
237 236 38 56-57 44 158 35 80 156 85 83 55 79 32 178-179
98 205 152 124 49 6 159 222 66 68-69 65 72 74 36 142-143 24, 27 113 227 180 117 22-23 127 205 88 58 205 82
234 94 246-247 248 245
18
90-91
255
“I
was aware of Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, long before I encountered the many other “Diego Riveras” that roamed the world between the beginning of the twentieth century and the late 1950s. […] While his easel paintings and drawings constitute a large body of both his early and late work, his unique murals explode off walls in virtuoso performances of mind-staggering organisation. On those walls the man, his legend and myths, his technical talent, his intense story-telling focus and self-indulgent ideological convictions all come together.” (Gerry Souter)
Gerry Souter, the author of the remarkable Frida Kahlo, overcomes his huge admiration for Diego Rivera to give the artist a human dimension, found in his political choices, his love affairs and his belief that “this truth was Mexico, the language of his thoughts, the blood in his veins, the azure sky above his resting place.”