Rivera [1. Auflage] 9781780421902, 1780421907
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Rivera
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Author: Gerry Souter Page 4: Self-Portrait, 1941. Oil on canvas, 61 x 43 cm. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton. Layout: BASELINE CO LTD 33 Bis - 33 Ter Mac Dinh Chi St., Star Building, 6th Floor District 1, Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA © Parkstone Press International, New York, USA © Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av. Cinco de Mayo no°2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.
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: 978-1-78042-190-2 2
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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.” — James Monroe Hewlett (President of the Architectural League of New York, the Society of Mural Painters and a member of the National Academy of Design), 1929
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Biographie 1886:
Born on the 8th or 13th December 1886 in Guanajuato, he romanticised his life so much that even his date of birth became a myth. He was a mixture of Mexican, Spanish, Indian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian and Portuguese origins.
1892:
Moves to Mexico.
1894:
He enters the Colegio del Padre Antonio where he remains for three months. He then moves to the Colegio Católico Carpentier which he leaves for the Liceo Católico Hispano-Mexicano.
1897:
Rivera receives a grant which allows him to study full-time at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts.
1906:
He graduates with honours.
1907:
Rivera begins his travels in Europe. He goes first to Spain to study with one of the principal portraitists of Madrid, Eduardo Chicarro y Aguera. He then leaves for France where he discovers the artistic life of Montparnasse. He becomes friends with Modigliani.
1914:
He meets Picasso in his studio, who approves of his work and admits Rivera to his circle. This is a great opportunity and an opening into the world of such celebrities as Juan Gris, Guillaume Appolinaire, Robert Delaunay, Fernard Léger and Albert Gleizes. He enters into a relationship with the painter Marie Vorobieff, but marries Angelina Beloff. He also has several mistresses with whom he has brief affairs.
1920:
In January Rivera takes the train to Milan. His travels in Italy last seventeen months and allow him to discover the art of painting frescoes. He returns to Mexico full of this knew-found knowledge and ready to devote himself to mural painting. The government offers him the walls of the Anfiteatro Bolívar (National Preparatory School of Mexico).
1922:
In June he marries Guadalupe (Lupe) Marín; they have two daughters. At the end of the year he becomes a member of the Communist Party. 5
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1924:
Works in the Chapingo Chapel and at the National School of Agriculture.
1927:
Travels in the Soviet Union. Divorces Lupe Marín.
1929:
Returns to Mexico. In August Rivera marries Frida Kahlo, who was eighteen years old on the day of their marriage. In September he receives a proposition to paint a fresco at the palace of the conqueror of Mexico, Hernán Cortés, in Cuernavaca.
1930:
Rivera goes to the United States. He paints at the School of Fine Arts of California, the University of California, Berkeley, and the San Francisco Art Institute.
1931:
Returns to Mexico, and the famous house of Diego and Frida is built. In November they return to the United States for the exhibition of Rivera’s work at MoMA.
1932-1933:
Works on the twenty-seven panels at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
1933:
Start of the project at the Rockefeller Center in New York.
1934:
Returns to Mexico and paints the mural at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico.
1939:
Divorces Frida Kahlo.
1940:
Final voyage to the United States. Rivera paints the frescos for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. On the 8th December, Diego’s possible birthdate, he remarries Frida.
1949:
Fifty-year retrospective at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico.
1954:
Frida Kahlo dies on the 13th July.
1955:
Marries Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946.
1957:
Diego Rivera dies at San Angel, on November 24th. 7
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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 Guanajuato
ecclesiastical
registry,
baptism
documentation states that little Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez and his twin brother actually appeared on December 13th.
Landscape 1896-1897 Oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm Guadalupe Rivera de Irtube Collection
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The latter, 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 practiced sacred rites while he drank goat’s milk fresh from the udders and lived wild in the woods with all manner of creatures. Whatever the truth concerning his birth and early childhood, Diego inherited a crisp analytical intellect through a convoluted blending of bloodlines, being of Mexican, Spanish, Indian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian and Portuguese descent.
Landscape with a Lake c. 1900 Oil on canvas, 53 x 73 cm Daniel Yankelewitz B. Collection, San Jose
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The young Diego was a pampered son. He could read by the age of four and had begun drawing on the walls. When they moved to Mexico City it 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 Guanajuato, the paved thoroughfares of the capital with its elegant French architecture and the Paseo de Reforma rivalling the best of Europe’s boulevards overwhelmed Diego.
Self-Portrait 1906 Oil on canvas, 55 x 54 cm Collection of the Government of the State of Sinaloa Mexico 12
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At eight he was enrolled in the Colegio del Padre Antonio. He remained there for three months, tried the Colegio Católico Carpentier and then departed to the Liceo Católico Hispano-Mexicano. Having driven the French out of Mexico in 1867, the president, Díaz, spent the next few years of his administration wiping out the democracy of Benito Juárez and re-establishing French and international cultures as examples of progress and civilisation for the Mexican people. 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.
Landscape with a Mill, Damme Landscape 1909 Oil on canvas, 50 x 60.5 cm Ing. Juan Pablo Gómez Rivera Collection Mexico City 14
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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, which 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 wellthought-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,
Notre-Dame, Paris 1909 Oil on canvas, 144 x 113 cm Private collection, Mexico City
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who were, unfortunately for the Mexican científicos who set the policy, not dying off fast enough to offset their birth rate. By the age of ten Diego had experienced the results of Mexico’s autocracy. Making the most of his gift of drawing and endlessly sketching concerned his parents now. Diego liked to draw soldiers, so his father considered a military career, but the boy also spent much of his spare time at the railway station to draw the trains – so what about a job as a train driver? Subject matter aside, Diego’s mother defied her husband’s wishes that the boy enter the Colegio Militar and sent him instead to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts for evening school classes.
Portrait of Angelina Beloff 1909 Oil on canvas, 59 x 45 cm Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz Veracruz 18
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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. 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.
The Old Ones 1912 Oil on canvas, 210 x 184 cm Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
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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. 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.
Portrait of a Spaniard (Hermán Alsina) 1912 Oil on canvas, 200 x 166 cm Private collection
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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. 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,
Study for “The Jug” 1912 Gouache on paper, 28.5 x 23 cm María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection, New York
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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. 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.
Adoration of the Virgin 1912-1913 Oil and encaustic on canvas, 150 x 120 cm María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection, New York
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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. And, here in Madrid, an interesting quirk of content appeared amidst his self-generated themes. No religious paintings by young Diego have ever been recovered or noted. 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 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.
Portrait of the Painter Zinoviev 1913 Oil on canvas, 97.5 x 79 cm Private collection
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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-year-old El Greco paintings. This move was hardly a plunge into the future, and Rivera’s painting from 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.
Woman at Well 1913 Oil on canvas Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City
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The bohemian lifestyle eventually laid Diego low, so he stopped drinking and went on a vegetarian diet. He took hikes and began reading very serious books:
Aldous
Huxley,
Emile
Zola,
Arthur
Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Voltaire and Karl Marx. He devoured books on mathematics, biology and history, drowning his over-indulged body with intellectual stimulation. After sticking it out for two years, Rivera, apparently flush with winnings gathered from a Spanish casino, took a train to Paris. No sooner had Diego put down his bags than he was out the door, down the hill and across the Seine heading for the Louvre.
Still Life 1913 Oil on canvas, 84 x 65 cm The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
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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. 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.
The Eiffel Tower 1914 Oil on canvas, 115 x 92 cm Private collection
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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 Symbolism. While there, he began the painting House on the Bridge, one of many paintings he completed in Bruges, rising at dawn and painting until the light was gone. This introspection mirrors his early Mexican landscapes and picks up his feelings of being the observer, the outsider looking in, seeing through his gift of artistic translation.
Portrait of Kawashima and Fujita 1914 Oil and collage on canvas, 78.5 x 74 cm Private collection
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One day, 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...” named Angelina Beloff.
Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla) 1915 Oil on canvas, 144 x 123 cm Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City
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After a period in London, the then inseparable four returned to Paris, where Diego 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.
Portrait of Martín Luís Guzmán 1915 Oil on canvas, 72.3 x 59.3 cm Fundación Cultural Televisa, Mexico City
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The Salon des Indépendants accepted six of his paintings: four Bruges landscapes, La Maison sur le Pont and Le Pont de la Tournelle. 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.
Portrait of a Woman, Mrs. Zetlin 1916 Gouache on paper, 16 x 13 cm Claude and Pierre Ferrand-Eynard Collection, Paris
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Homecoming On October 2nd, 1910, Diego came down the steamship gangplank at the port of Veracruz wearing a broad grin for his waiting father and his sister. 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. 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.
Self-Portrait 1916 Oil on canvas, 82 x 61 cm Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
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To further stamp the imprimatur of government approval on his exhibition, the president’s wife, Carmen (Carmelita) Romero Rubio de Díaz would open Diego’s exhibition on November 20th. 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. Emiliano Zapata brought his mounted army up from the south toward Morelos, only a few miles from Mexico City.
Still Life with Green House 1917 Oil on canvas, 61 x 46 cm Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
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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 left Mexico City on January 3rd, 1910 for a small village two hours away by train named Amecameca. 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.
Midi Landscape 1918 Oil on canvas, 79.5 x 63.2 cm Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
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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. In reality, while parked safely behind his easel in Amecameca peering at the volcano Popocatépetl, 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.
Portrait of Angelina Beloff 1918 Oil on canvas, 116 x 146 cm Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
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His New Exile to Europe 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 President Madero – the Decada de Dolores
Suburbs of Paris 1918 Oil on canvas, 65 x 80 cm Private collection
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(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.
Still Life with an Anise Bottle or Spanish Still Life 1918 Oil on canvas, 54 x 65 cm Museo Casa, Guanajuato
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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 government 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.
The Mathematician c. 1918 Oil on canvas, 115.5 x 80.5 cm Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
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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. Moving back and forth between Spain and Paris between 1913 and 1917, the Diego Rivera Painting Engine was in full production. Being a latecomer, he was obsessed with making a contribution to Cubism, not merely copying (as was his forté) the methodology.
Woman with a Red Shawl 1920 Oil on canvas, 80 x 75 cm Private collection, Mexico City
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At one point in 1914, 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.
Creation 1922-1923 Encaustic and gold leaf, 708 x 1219 cm Anfiteatro Bolívar, Escuela Nacional Preparatoria Mexico City 60
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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. While Diego claimed earlier familiarity with Marx, “it is doubtful that he retained any of the content of his youthful skimming of literature and social tracts.” As he had attached himself to Cubist 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 mobilise to fight the sabre-rattling imperialist Germans. Everywhere, men and women took sides and passionately defended their decisions to the death. While this doctrinaire confrontation found its voice in street riots, labour strikes and ringing rhetoric,
Bathers at Tehuantepec 1923 Oil on canvas, 63 x 52 cm Museo Casa, Guanajuato
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Diego fretted about reaction to his first – and only – one-man show in Paris. Twenty-five of his works looked down from the walls of Berthe Weill’s gallery. In the spring of 1916 he showed his work with Post-Impressionists and Cubists in Marius de Zayas’ Modern Gallery at 500 Fifth Avenue in New York. 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.
The Foundry: Emptying the Crucible 1923 Fresco, 438 x 316 cm Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 64
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The spring of 1917 witnessed a severe fracture in the heretofore tightly bonded Cubist 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 head wound that “stopped him from painting for two years.” Léger painted camouflage and dodged around the battlefield with a stretcher, but was gassed and cut loose from the army with a deep hacking cough. As Apollinaire penned an inspired bit of verse while supporting his pad on the breech of a cannon, he received a debilitating head wound near Champagne in 1916.
The Embrace 1923 Fresco, 478 x 183 cm East wall, Patio del Trabajo Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City 66
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A hole was trepanned in his head with an augur to ease pressure on his brain and he returned peering out from a cocoon of bandages. Apollinaire never recovered enough to stave off the ravages of the 1918 influenza epidemic and died. Taking Apollinaire’s place as the critic/spokesman for the artist colony was the poet and aesthete Paul Reverdy. In his magazine Nord-Sud he wrote 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.
Entering the Mine 1923 Fresco, 474 x 350 cm Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 68
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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 the party going by strolling to Lhote’s studio. Feeling the effects of his vin ordinaire, Reverdy launched into a verbal attack on the Cubist hangers-on. Unable to bear the abuse any longer –
Exit from the Mine 1923 Fresco, 478 x 215 cm Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 70
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and perhaps believing his own press as defender of the downtrodden – Diego stepped up and slapped the critic. Shrieking, Reverdy grabbed handfuls of Rivera’s hair. Diego bellowed 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 Reverdy, who snubbed it. The writer Max Jacob, standing nearby, shrugged. “The rancour of poets is enduring.” he said.
Surface Miners 1923 Fresco, 426 x 210 cm Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 72
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Following what became known as 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”, leaving out the slap and the poke in the mouth.
Friday of Sorrows on the Canal of Santa Anita 1923-1924 Fresco, 456 x 356 cm Patio del Trabajo, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 74
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In renouncing Cubism, Diego 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.
Ribbon Dance 1923-1924 Fresco, 468 x 363 cm Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 76
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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 had denied paternity to his daughter Marika by one of his mistresses, Marevna Vorobov. His reputation in Paris was in tatters since L’Affaire Rivera and his abrupt departure from the Cubists.
Day of the Dead – The Offering 1923-1924 Fresco, 415 x 237 cm Patio de Las Fiestas Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City 78
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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. For a period of seventeen months, Rivera prowled through Italy filling sketchbooks with hundreds of drawings.
The Market 1923-1924 Fresco North wall, Patio de Las Fiestas Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City 80
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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. 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.
The Burning of the Judases 1923-1924 Fresco, 430 x 383 cm Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 82
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Mexican Muralists Diego Rivera arrived in Mexico City primed and ready to begin painting on walls. 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. 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.
Day of the Dead – City Celebration 1923-1924 Fresco, 417 x 375 cm Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 84
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He also had concerns about style, and Rivera’s Picasso-Cubist abstractions. As if rubbing salt into the wound, the director established Diego’s studio in a building upon which Diego’s life-long rival, Roberto Montenegro was creating a governmentcommissioned fresco. Finally, grudgingly, Vasconcelos gave Diego a wall of his own. The
Anfiteatro
Bolívar
was
a
concert
performance space in the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. Diego’s wall was 23ft 3 in high and 40ft wide. He used friends and acquaintances for models, making the groups a who’s who of Mexico City’s artistic community.
The Partition of the Land 1924 Fresco Administrative Building (second floor) Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo 86
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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. Beneath the sphere peeping out from the back of the niche is the figure of the Pantocrator. He rises from a tree of life described in Mexican folklore. Rivera also wanted to show how much he had learned from his Italian studies and how well it translated into a Mexican idiom. Something happened while Diego worked on the National Preparatory School mural that eventually changed his entire life.
Alliance of the Peasant and the Industrial Worker 1924 Fresco North wall, administrative building (second floor foyer) Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo 88
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One day the Mexican singer Concha Michel began a flirty and suggestive exchange and announced that 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 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. This steamy possessive relationship helped set up a life-changing event in Diego’s life.
Bathers at Tehuantepec 1925 Red chalk and pastel, 64.5 x 50 cm Vicky and Marcos Micha Collection, Mexico City
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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. 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!”
Flower Vendor 1926 Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 109.9 cm Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu
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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!” 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 opened and a slender twelve-year-old girl entered the auditorium.
The Burning of the Revolutionary 1926 Fresco North wall, Patio del Trabajo Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City 94
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She wore the student uniform of the Preparatory School and looked up at Diego with challenging dark eyes. 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 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.”
Tropical Mexico and the God Xochipilli and his Votaries 1926 Fresco North wall, Patio del Trabajo Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City 96
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He now faced the greatest challenge of his creative life. He had persuaded, cajoled and baited Vasconcelos into awarding him an amazing opportunity. The Ministry of Education in Mexico City offered 128 panels, amounting to 17,000 square feet, covering three floors of open loggias. He began work on March 23rd, 1923. For Diego Rivera, the job was all or nothing. It could make him Numero Uno, first among muralists in Mexico.
Night of the Poor 1926 Fresco, 206 x 159 cm Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 98
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Diego Rivera had been drenched in Communist ideology while living in Paris. He 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 workers’ struggle as the only path for all Mexicans to achieve a class-free society. 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”.
The Agitator 1926 Fresco West wall, Chapel Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo 100
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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. 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.
The Learned 1926 Fresco, 207 x 153 cm Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 102
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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. Only Diego remained and stayed with the Party on and off over the years. He convinced the minister that regardless of the political climate, the fresco mural cycles must continue to move forward. As Diego laboured Lupe supported him, but always, just below the surface, jealousy simmered into molten anger that occasionally burst upon him. Despite all the distractions in his life, work on the Ministry of Education murals continued at a relentless pace.
Revelation of the Path 1926 Fresco Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo
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It seemed as though all the copying of other styles during his career – Renoir, Gauguin, El Greco, the Cubists and Giotto – finally proved valuable in creating the distinctive style of Diego Rivera in fresco. 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.
The Land’s Bounty Rightfully Possessed 1926 Fresco Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo
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His acceptance of a commission to work on the Chapingo Chapel of the National School of Agriculture came in the autumn of 1924. The chapel stands in its own grounds separate from the main school complex, and offered Rivera excellent opportunities for story-telling fresco from its large back wall to intimate spaces beneath the side arches and in the stairway, all protected from the weather. In total there was about 1,500 square feet of space for his work beneath the barrel-vaulted ceiling.
Portrait of Guadalupe 1926 Oil on canvas, 67.3 x 56.5 cm Private collection
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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. 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.
The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man 1926-1927 Fresco, 692 x 598 cm Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo 110
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In August 1927, the pigment was barely dry on the last panel of the Chapingo commission when Rivera packed a bag and headed for the Soviet Union. 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 be the star of the Mexican delegation. He was the guest of the Soviet Union, headed by the beneficent Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, now known as Josef Stalin.
Subterranean Forces 1926-1927 Fresco, 355 x 555 cm Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo
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Diego saw a chance to see the fruits of Communism first hand and to get away from the firebreathing Lupe. Fortunately this separation was expedited by an acquaintance, the handsome young poet Jorge Cuesta, who one day confessed in tears his undying love for Lupe. Jorge and Lupe were married after Diego left for the Soviet Union. As Diego was fêted 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.
Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilising the Earth 1926-1927 Fresco, 244 x 491 cm Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo 114
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He lectured about the ineffectiveness of easel painting and the nature of its product confined to those few bourgeois 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.
Formation of Revolutionary Leadership 1926-1927 Fresco, 354 x 555 cm Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo
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However, when he suggested that artists should look to their icon painters – peasant craftsmen – he was accused of supporting the Church. Suddenly helpers for the mural project were harder to find and materials failed to materialise. He was rapidly becoming persona non grata in the Soviet art world. While his stay in the Soviet Union had been openended, the Latin-American 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, Lunacharsky confided that the mural deal was not going to happen. Doors were closing and, for his own safety, Diego had to leave the Soviet Union.
View of chapel showing The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man (on last wall) 1926-1927 Fresco, 692 x 598 cm Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Chapingo 118
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When he returned to Mexico City, acquaintances noticed something had gone out of his work. 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. 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.
Portrait of Concha c. 1927 Oil on canvas, 62.3 x 48.3 cm Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu
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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 Education. Indeed, according to both Diego’s later writings and her diary, she marched into the courtyard of the Ministry of Education where Diego was at work on scaffolding in the third-floor loggia and called out,
The Distribution of the Arms 1928 Fresco, 203 x 398 cm South wall, Patio de Las Fiestas Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City 122
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“Oiga, Diego, baje usted!” (Hey, Diego, come down here!) 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.”
Emiliano Zapata (Martyr Emiliano Zapata) 1928 Fresco, 204 x 132 cm North wall, Patio del Trabajo Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City 124
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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. 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.
Night of the Rich 1928 Fresco, 205 x 157 cm Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 126
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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.”
Wall Street Banquet 1928 Fresco, 205 x 155 cm North wall, Patio de Las Fiestas Secretaría de Educación Pública, Mexico City 128
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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
well-known
photographer. Frida had been the son her father never had. “She is a devil!” Guillermo confided in a whisper to Diego when the painter came courting to La Casa Azul.
Our Bread 1928 Fresco, 204 x 158 cm Patio de Las Fiestas, Secretaría de Educación Pública Mexico City 130
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“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. In 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.
The Aztec World 1929 Fresco Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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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.
The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – The Enslavement of the Indians – The Construction of the Cortés Palace 1929-1930 Fresco Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca 134
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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 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!
The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – The Conversion of the Indians 1929-1930 Fresco Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca 136
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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. In his desperation to be readmitted he 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.
The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – Crossing the Barranca 1929-1930 Fresco Palacio de Cortés, Cuernavaca 138
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Diego Rivera was appointed Director of the San Carlos Academy of Art, twenty-five years after being expelled from that institution. 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.
The History of Mexico – From the Conquest to the Future 1929-1930 Fresco, 749 x 885 cm West and north walls, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City 140
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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. In 1929, however, it was heretical. Diego Rivera Wants to be the Mussolini of the Artists, cried one newspaper headline.
The History of Mexico – The World of Today and Tomorrow 1929-1935 Fresco Palacio Nacional, Mexico City 142
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Earlier, back in September 1929, 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’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.
The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City 1931 Fresco, 568 x 991 cm San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco 144
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For his murals Diego was offered the incredible sum of $12,000 to cover his salary, materials and the pay of his preparation crew. 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.
Portrait of a Military Man Museo Regional de Guadalajara, Jalisco
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Frida was pregnant and the doctors had told her giving birth would be an impossibility because of her pelvic injuries caused by her accident, but she ignored them. Three months into her pregnancy, she suffered a miscarriage. Its effect was devastating, but no less crushing than discovering Diego had been having an affair with one of the preparation crew assistants. However, he had a surprise for her. They were going to San Francisco.
Allegory of California 1931 Fresco, 43.82 m² Pacific Stock Exchange, San Francisco
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A Communist Cheered by Americans Diego Rivera’s ticket of admission to the United States was actually punched back in 1926 when the sculptor Ralph Stackpole gave one of Rivera’s paintings to William Gerstel, president of the San Francisco Art Commission. Gerstel came up with $1,500 for Rivera to paint 120 square feet of the California School of Fine Arts. 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. Of course, the ecstatic opinions of a few art collectors and curators had nothing to do with the beleaguered Federal Immigration Service.
Portrait of John Dunbar 1931 Oil on canvas, 199.5 x 158 cm Private collection
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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. 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 fresco mural on a galvanised steel base, allowing it to be portable. The scene depicted the Stern family children, the estate gardener’s child and workers tending the rich orchard of blossoming almond trees.
Landscape with Cactus 1931 Oil on canvas Private collection
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A tractor represented modern farming along with symbols of the past. 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.
Assets 1931 Fresco, 239 x 188 cm Dolores Olmedo Collection, Mexico City
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Various embassy representatives went to work until it was decided to let Diego finish his US commissions before returning to Mexico. 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 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.
Edsel B. Ford 1932 Oil on canvas, 97.8 x 125.1 cm The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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But as he laboured on the staircase mural, his thoughts must have drifted from time to time to his next trip to the United States, and the long journey to Detroit, Michigan, the steel-fuelled heart of the American industrial Midwest. While working at the Pacific Stock Exchange, Rivera had met William Valentiner, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He 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.
The Red Race 1932 Brown and red pigment with charcoal over light charcoal 270 x 585 cm Private collection 158
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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.
The Black Race 1932 Brown and red pigment with charcoal over light charcoal 264 x 582 cm Private collection 160
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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. 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. With Clifford Wight, Lucienne Bloch and Canal helping him, he launched into his painting marathon of fifteen-hour days to create seven of these new works.
The White Race 1932 Brown and red pigment with charcoal over light charcoal 271 x 584 cm Private collection 162
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Four of the murals were adaptations from his panels in Mexico. The remaining three came from construction scenes around Manhattan. Besides working on the portable murals, Diego helped arrange eighty-nine drawings, studies, pastels and watercolours created for other murals and fifty-six easel paintings. MoMA had no walls to call its own in 1931, but rented rooms in the Heckscher Building ten floors above Fifth Avenue at number 730. This was the Museum’s fourteenth exhibition and only its second one-man show, and Diego’s drawing power broke all previous attendance records, with 57,000 visitors over thirty days. The reviews cheered him,
The Yellow Race 1932 Brown and red pigment with charcoal over light charcoal 269 x 582 cm Private collection 164
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as did the frantic social whirl. As his show in New York wound down, Diego’s mind shifted to the commission awaiting him in Detroit. The Detroit Institute of Arts was much smaller in 1932 than it is today with two new wings added. But its entrance was no less elegant, mounting a staircase to the Great Hall with its vaulted ceiling and half-circular windows lacking only stained glass to complete the feeling of a cathedral. 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.
Detroit Industry (South wall) – The Stamping Press 1932-1933 Fresco The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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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. As the wall preparation work and Diego’s sketching continued, Frida and Lucienne Bloch, one of Diego’s assistants, set up the Riveras’ apartment in the Wardell Hotel. 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. As well as discovering a tropical lesion on her toe, she found she was pregnant again.
Detroit Industry (South wall) – Pharmaceutics and Surgery 1932-1933 Fresco The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit 168
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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.
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Production of Automobile Exterior and Final Assembly 1932-1933 Fresco The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit 170
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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. As Frida recovered during the warm summer of July 1932, Diego began to work on the twenty-seven panels, telling his story in three levels up each wall. Throughout the walls undulate stratas of soil, assemblyline hooks, loops of rising and falling buckets on conveyor belts describing the endless evolutionary parade from earth to man-made materials.
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 172
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While individual portraits stand out – mostly men wearing suits – the workers pull, heave and thrust together in choreographed unison while behind, around and beneath them, the hive functions in a cacophony of concussive choreography. Implacable steel machines drill and punch, screw and grind. Whistles blow, squaring the hours into intervals of work. On March 13th 1933, Diego put down his brushes and the work was declared finished. 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.”
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 174
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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.
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Production and Manufacture of Engine and Transmission 1932-1933 Fresco, upper register, 269.2 x 1371.6 cm (middle register) 68.0 x 185.4 cm (main panel); 539.8 x 1371.6 cm The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit 176
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They then arrived in New York City on March 20th. 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. 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.
Detroit Industry (East wall) 1932-1933 Fresco The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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Titled Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, Diego turned in his sketch, had it approved by the Rockefellers, and pressed on with the mural that rose on the front and side walls of the elevator bank facing the Center’s main entrance. Soon, however, the future seemed left in the hands of a “worker-leader” in the lower right quadrant of the composition whose face had been neutral before, but now had quickly become Diego’s patriarch of the egalitarian working class, Vladimir Lenin. As more people noticed the portrait, the word reached Rockefeller who sent Diego a politelyworded note that boiled down to “Get rid of Lenin”.
Detroit Industry (East wall) – Woman Holding Grains 1932-1933 Fresco, 257.8 x 213.4 cm The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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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 ordered him to descend. The big adventure was ended, but Diego found one final wall to paint for the New Workers School.
Detroit Industry (East wall) – Woman Holding Fruit 1932-1933 Fresco, 257.8 x 213.4 cm The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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The Last Years Arrival back in Mexico did not guarantee happiness, as Frida discovered when they moved into their new pair of houses. Frida was suspicious that Diego was again having a love affair with someone else. 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. 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.
Detroit Industry (West wall) 1932-1933 Fresco The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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Frida packed a suitcase and left for New York with a couple of women friends. There she enjoyed a libidinous time with both men and women, cutting a swathe though the social élite who were both bored and adventurous. Diego, as usual, retreated into his work. He asked the government for a wall to reproduce the mural he had proposed and half completed for the Rockefellers. He was given a wall on the third level of the national culture centre, the Palacio de Bellas Artes. He was the first Mexican artist to receive this honour.
Detroit Industry (West wall) – Steam 1932-1933 Fresco, 518.2 x 169 cm The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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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 antiStalinist movement. One addition on the “bad” side is a portrait of Nelson Rockefeller. 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. Though many of his subjects were wealthy women such as Adalgisa Nery, Natasha Gelman and the actress Paulette Goddard,
Detroit Industry (West wall) – Electricity 1932-1933 Fresco, 518.2 x 170.2 cm The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
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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.
Proletarian Unity (panel nineteen of Portrait of America a series of twenty-one portable frescoes painted for the New Workers School) 1933 Fresco, 161.9 x 201.3 cm Nagoya City Art Museum, Japan 190
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Meanwhile, Trotsky and his wife Natalya moved from safe house to safe house through Europe, guarded by their followers. 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. 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 fiftyseven with his silver mane of hair and towering intellect, was attracted to the charming young Mexican girl who, at the age of twenty-nine, was a blossoming artist and possessed a razor-sharp wit.
Man, Controller of the Universe 1934 Fresco, 485 x 1145 cm Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City
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Her self-confidence had also been improved since her New York fling and an eight-month affair with the handsome sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The two lovers planned to set up together in a Mexico City apartment, but when furniture ordered for the love nest ended up delivered to Diego’s front door complete with receipt, Diego saw red and drew his trusty .44 Colt. 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.
The Flower Carrier 1935 Oil and tempera on masonite, 121.9 x 121.3 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Francisco 194
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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.
The Burlesque of Mexican Folklore and Politics (The Dictatorship, Dance of the Huichilobos, Touristic and Folkloric Mexico, and Festival of Huejotzingo) 1936 Fresco, 389 x 211 cm Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City 196
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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 sold. 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 the artist 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.
Portrait of the Poet Lalane 1936 Oil on canvas Private collection
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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. 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.
Modesta 1937 Oil on canvas Private collection
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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. Rivera’s moveable mural panels for the Golden Gate Exposition on Treasure Island required six months of his time.
Portrait of Lupe Marín 1938 Oil on canvas, 171.3 x 122.3 cm Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
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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 young 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.
Self-Portrait 1941 Oil on canvas, 61 x 43 cm Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton
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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. On Diego’s birthday, December 8th, 1940, he and Frida were remarried on Frida’s conditions. He wrote in his autobiography:
Portrait of Mrs. Natasha Gelman 1943 Oil on canvas Private collection
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“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; there were to be no sexual relations. She explained this condition by saying that it was impossible for her to overcome the psychological barrier which went up whenever she thought of all my other women. I was so overjoyed to have Frida back that I agreed to everything.” None of the conditions stood the test of time.
Portrait of Mrs. Natasha Gelman 1943 Oil on canvas Private collection
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The world of art had completed yet another orbit. The Impressionists had been replaced by the postImpressionists, 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,
Calla Lily Vendor 1943 Oil on canvas Private collection
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remnants related to those great phantasmagorical images entangled on walls south of the border and surviving tenuously in the United States. His paintings also had 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.
The History of Cardiology 1943-1944 Fresco, 600 x 405 cm Universidad Iberoamericana, Auditorium, Tlapan
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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 Fashion Designer Henri de Châtillon 1944 Oil on canvas, 121 x 152 cm Vicky and Marcos Micha Collection, Mexico City
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The mural tells the history of modern Mexico from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century using a chronological collection of recognisable personages who 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 rear plane of depth all beneath a canopy of tentacle-like tree branches. A cluster of children’s balloons in the foreground mirrors in shape a hot-air balloon ascending in the background. Almost in the centre is Diego as a pale child with striped stockings in front of an adult Frida wearing a carmine red repozo and resting her hand on his shoulder.
Portrait of Adalgisa Nery 1945 Oil on canvas, 123.3 x 62.4 cm Dora and Rafael Mareyna Collection, Mexico City
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Diego holds the hand of the fashionably-dressed mythical cartoon 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. In his depiction of the bucolic setting, the historical parade required at least a touch of his personal-socialpolitical belief collection. On a piece of paper no more than two inches high is a quote 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.”
The Great City of Tenochtitlán 1945 Fresco, 492 x 971 cm Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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“Death to Diego Rivera!” roared the cries of conservative mobs of wealthy religious breast-beaters 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.
Peasants 1947 Oil on canvas Museu de Arte Contemporâneo da Universitad de São Polo São Paulo 220
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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. 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.
Night Landscape 1947 Oil on canvas, 111 x 91 cm INBA Collection, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City
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The Retrospective returned Diego to his former star status. 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. The painting featured a smiling Josef Stalin and an idealised, fatherly Mao Zedong facing off against hawkish, unsmiling effigies of Uncle Sam 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 Black man nailed to a cross, a thuggish John Bull and the French Marie-Antoinette,
The Temptations of St Anthony 1947 Oil on canvas, 90 x 110 cm Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City
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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 members of the government let out a collective shriek. The government immediately notified him that The Nightmare… could not be hung, displayed or reproduced anywhere as representing anything to do with Mexico.
Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park 1947-1948 Fresco, 480 x 150 cm Museo Mural, Mexico City
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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 the world could have painted murals of such magnitude and force. We recommend that the paintings remain on exhibition.”
Portrait of an Actress 1948 Oil on canvas, 61 x 49 cm Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz Veracruz 228
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In April 1953, Frida Kahlo had her first and only one-woman show in Mexico at the Galería de Arte Contemporáneo. There, she held quiet court as her friends crowded around her making encouraging comments, laughing and doing their best to keep the afternoon gay. But anyone who looked into the face of the once high-spirited, profane, loyal, outspoken, talented, intelligent girl from the Blue House in Coyoacán knew she was dying.
Portrait of Ruth Rivera 1949 Oil on canvas, 199 x 100 cm Juan Coronel Rivera Collection, Mexico City
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Ordered to remain in bed, on July 2nd, 1954 Frida insisted on accompanying Diego to a Communist demonstration against the CIA and their engineering of the deposition of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Diego wrote: “The evening before she had given me the ring she had bought for our silver 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.’” She was forty-seven years old and died on the evening of July 13th, 1954 in the Casa Azul in the very room in which she had been born.
Self-Portrait 1949 Tempera on linen, 34.9 x 27.9 cm Private collection
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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....
Portrait of Señora Doña Evangelina Rivas de Lachica 1949 Oil on canvas, 198.1 x 139.7 cm Private collection
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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.
Self-Portrait 1949 Oil on canvas, 31 x 26.5 cm Private collection, Houston
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He returned to Mexico certified cured by the Soviet doctors. Over the next year, he brought himself into the spotlight once again. On April 15th, 1956, he entered the Hotel Del Prado in front of a large contingent of the alerted press, had scaffolding set up behind the screened-off mural, and painted out the statement “God does not exist”. On emerging, he also announced “I am a Catholic.” This admission from the old Communist free-thinker stunned all who thought they knew him. In one swoop he had placated Rome, who had condemned his “heresy” of non-belief.
The Totonac Civilisation 1950 Fresco, 492 x 527 cm Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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He turned 70 years old in December 1956 and had slowed down considerably. He often gave interviews and some of his later easel paintings illustrated the articles, but he constantly referred to his need to return to frescoes, his true art form. A wall awaited him at the School of Cardiology and he did some preparatory sketches. He managed some portraits and searing sunsets, but he was marking time.
The History of Medecine in Mexico – The People’s Demand for Better Health 1953 Fresco Hospital de la Raza, Mexico City 240
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He was victim of a phlebitis attack in September 1956 and 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. 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.”
Popular History of Mexico 1953 Mosaic Teatro de los Insurgentes, Mexico City
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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 trouble-maker, the Frog Prince, the Fresco Maestro, the “Commie” Painter, everyone who thought they know about him had an image of the big man in the sombrero.
Artist’s Studio 1954 Oil on canvas, 179 x 150 cm Collection of the Acervo Patrimonial de la Secretaría de Hacienda y Crédito Público, Mexico 244
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For decades he had sought a voice and vision of his own. When he found in fresco that unique form of communication he also found a pact with the devil requiring public spaces to display his deeply-felt convictions and interpretations. 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.
The Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Mexico – The Conquest or The Arrival of Hernán Cortés in Veracruz 1957 Fresco Palacio Nacional, Mexico City 246
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List of Illustrations A Adoration of the Virgin
27
The Agitator
101
Allegory of California
149
Alliance of the Peasant and the Industrial Worker
89
Artist’s Studio
245
Assets
155
The Aztec World
133
B Bathers at Tehuantepec
63, 91
The Black Race
161
Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilising the Earth
115
The Burlesque of Mexican Folklore and Politics (The Dictatorship, Dance of the Huichilobos, Touristic and Folkloric Mexico, and Festival of Huejotzingo)
197
The Burning of the Judases
83
The Burning of the Revolutionary
95
248
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C Calla Lily Vendor Creation
211 61
D Day of the Dead – City Celebration
85
Day of the Dead – The Offering
79
Detroit Industry (East wall)
179
Detroit Industry (East wall) – Woman Holding Fruit
183
Detroit Industry (East wall) – Woman Holding Grains
181
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Manufacture of Poisonous Gas Bombs Gas and Cells Suffocated by Poisonous Gas
173
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Production and Manufacture of Engine and Transmission
177
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Production of Automobile Exterior and Final Assembly
171
Detroit Industry (North wall) – Vaccination and Healthy Human Embryo Detroit Industry (South wall) – Pharmaceutics and Surgery
175 169 249
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Detroit Industry (South wall) – The Stamping Press
167
Detroit Industry (West wall)
185
Detroit Industry (West wall) – Electricity
189
Detroit Industry (West wall) – Steam
187
The Distribution of the Arms
123
Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park
227
E Edsel B. Ford
157
The Eiffel Tower
35
The Embrace
67
Emiliano Zapata (Martyr Emiliano Zapata)
125
Entering the Mine
69
Exit from the Mine
71
F The Fashion Designer Henri de Châtillon
215
The Flower Carrier
195
Flower Vendor Formation of Revolutionary Leadership 250
93 117
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The Foundry: Emptying the Crucible
65
Friday of Sorrows on the Canal of Santa Anita
75
G The Great City of Tenochtitlán
219
H The History of Cardiology
213
The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – Crossing the Barranca
139
The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – The Conversion of the Indians
137
The History of Cuernavaca and Morelos – The Enslavement of the Indians – The Construction of the Cortés Palace
135
The History of Medecine in Mexico – The People’s Demand for Better Health
241
The History of Mexico – From the Conquest to the Future
141
The History of Mexico – The World of Today and Tomorrow
145
L The Land’s Bounty Rightfully Possessed Landscape
107 9
Landscape with a Lake
11
Landscape with a Mill, Damme Landscape
15 251
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Landscape with Cactus
153
The Learned
103
The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man
111
M The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City
145
Man, Controller of the Universe
193
The Market
81
The Mathematician
57
Midi Landscape
49
Modesta
201
N Night Landscape
223
Night of the Poor
99
Night of the Rich
127
Notre-Dame, Paris
17
O The Old Ones Our Bread 252
21 131
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P The Partition of the Land
87
Peasants
221
Popular History of Mexico
243
Portrait of a Military Man
147
Portrait of a Spaniard (Hermán Alsina)
23
Portrait of a Woman, Mrs. Zetlin
43
Portrait of Adalgisa Nery
217
Portrait of an Actress
231
Portrait of Angelina Beloff
19, 51
Portrait of Concha
121
Portrait of Guadalupe
109
Portrait of John Dunbar
151
Portrait of Kawashima and Fujita Portrait of Lupe Marín Portrait of Martín Luís Guzmán Portrait of Mrs. Natasha Gelman
37 203 41 207, 209
Portrait of Ruth Rivera
231
Portrait of Señora Doña Evangelina Rivas de Lachica
235
Portrait of the Painter Zinoviev Portrait of the Poet Lalane
29 201 253
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The Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Mexico – The Conquest or The Arrival of Hernán Cortés in Veracruz
247
Proletarian Unity (panel nineteen of Portrait of America, a series of twenty-one portable frescoes painted for the New Workers School)
191
R The Red Race
161
Revelation of the Path
105
Ribbon Dance
77
S Self-Portrait
13, 45, 205, 233
Still Life
33
Still Life with an Anise Bottle or Spanish Still Life
55
Still Life with Green House
47
Study for “The Jug”
25
Subterranean Forces
113
Suburbs of Paris
53
Surface Miners
73
254
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T The Temptations of St Anthony
225
The Totonac Civilisation
239
Tropical Mexico and the God Xochipilli and his Votaries
97
V View of chapel showing The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man (on last wall)
119
W Wall Street Banquet
129
The White Race
163
Woman at Well
31
Woman with a Red Shawl
59
Y The Yellow Race
165
Z Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla)
39
255
Rivera
FOCUS
Rivera