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If any man can
be said to have changed the course of a nation's art
single handed, it is Diego Rivera. He was born in 1886
in the Mexican silver mining town of Guanajuato. His
father, a freemason with a 'liberal' background, was a
teacher at the time of Diego's birth and later became a
school inspector. Rivera was the elder of twin boys, but
his brother died at the age of two. His family left his
birthplace when he was six, driven out partly by the
failure of certain mining speculations and partly by the
unpopularity generated by his father's liberalism.
Rivera soon showed himself to be a precociously
gifted artist and began to study in the evenings at the
Academy of San Carlos at the age of ten. At sixteen
Rivera joined a student strike at the Academy and was
expelled. In due course he was officially reinstated,
but never returned, instead working independently for
the next five years.
Realizing that his son was getting nowhere in his
chosen profession, Rivera senior helped Diego win a
scholarship, awarded by the Governor of the Province of
Veracruz, to study abroad. The young artist arrived in
Spain in January 1907. Rivera made Spain his base for an
extended tour which took in France, Belgium, Holland and
England. He was in France in 1909, where he encountered
the work of the Fauves and Cezanne, but he was later to
claim that the artist who impressed him most was
Henri Rousseau, 'Le Douanier' 'the only one of the
moderns whose works stirred each and every fibre of my
being.'
In 1910 he made a trip home, and held a successful
exhibition in Mexico City. The wife of the powerful
President of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, bought six of the
forty paintings shown, and a number more were purchased
by the Academy of Fine Arts. But Diaz, who had been in
power for thirty years, was about to fall. Rivera
watched the revolution which displaced him and put the
liberal Madero in power, but did not wait for subsequent
events; he returned to Paris in 1911. Rivera now made
many friends in the cosmopolitan Parisian avant garde,
and at one time even shared a studio with
Modigliani, who painted some striking portraits of
him. But his chief contacts were with the Russians,
largely because he had two Russian mistresses - this was
the beginning of his career as a great womanizer. He was
also becoming a legend in his own right, less for his
talent than for his gargantuan stature and appetites.
The Spanish modernist writer Ramon Gomez de la Serna
wrote thus of Rivera:
They told fantastic tales about him; that he had the
ability to suckle young at his Buddhic breasts ...
that he was all covered with hair, which must have
been true because on the wall of his study, by a
Russian woman artist, Marionne [Marievna Vorobiev
Stebelska, one of Rivera's mistresses], who painted
in his studio, in a man's suit, with the boots of a
tigertamer and a lion's skin, was his portrait,
nude, with legs crossed and covered in kinky hair.
From 1913 onwards Rivera was working within the orbit of
Cubism. There was a particularly clear kinship
between the work he was producing - still mostly
landscapes - and the work of
Robert Delaunay. The winter of 1917 was a time of
emotional upheaval. The woman with whom he lived,
Angelina Beloff, had a child. The baby was sickly (it
died early in 1918), and Rivera, who resented the amount
of attention Angelina gave to it, took himself off to
her rival, Marievna, for five months. Marievna also
became pregnant.
Rivera was working like a demon, in
isolation from his former friends and full of real or
imaginary ills. It was soon after this that he decided
to break with Cubism. in 1919 he set off for Italy with
David Alfaro Siqueiros, who had just arrived from
Mexico, using money provided by Alberto Pani, the
Mexican Ambassador to France. Together they studied the
frescoes of the great Italian masters, and discussed the
future of Mexican art. The decision to go back to Mexico
was made in 1921. The homecoming was an emotional
moment. 'On my arrival in Mexico,' Rivera said, 'I was
struck by the inexpressible beauty of that rich and
severe, wretched and exuberant land.' In November 1921
he accompanied the Minister of Education, Jose
Vasconcelos, on a visit to Yucatan, an area where pre
Columbian influence was very strong. The two men got on
well together, and Rivera was the first artist to be
appointed when it was decided to experiment with murals
at the Preparatoria (National Preparatory School).
Rivera's first attempt was painted in encaustic, but he
soon mastered traditional fresco technique, and shed
stiff European allegories in favour of a new and popular
style, where the influence of the Aztecs mingled with
that of Cubism and Rousseau. At the same period Rivera
joined the Communist Party, with which he was to have a
long, complicated and stormy relationship. Right wing
students rioted against the Preparatoria murals before
they were completed, and Rivera was the only artist who
stubbornly continued to work there, a pistol stuck in
his belt. It was at this time that he attracted the
attention of a ring leader amongst the younger girls,
Frida Kahlo. She was later to become his second
wife.
Rivera soon proved that he was hugely prolific as
well as energetic and determined. In 1923 he began a
second series of murals at the Ministry of Education -
this enormous cycle was to consist Of 124 frescoes. He
also embarked on a smaller cycle for the Agricultural
School at Chapingo. His work was much criticized at
home, but attracted increasing attention abroad. In
1927, when the murals at the Ministry of Education had
at last been finished, Rivera was invited to go to
Russia, for the tenth anniversary celebrations of the
Revolution. He was flatteringly received in November he
signed a contract with the Minister for Culture,
Lunacharsky, to paint a mural for the Red Army Club in
Moscow. But every now and then Rivera had a moment of
discomfort, of which the most acute occurred when he met
Stalin:
the Central Committee ... my fellow guests smirking
with satisfaction, drooling with superiority ...
they might have been entering paradise. ... Suddenly
a peanut shaped head, surmounted by a military
haircut, decked out with a magnificent pair of long
moustaches, rose above them ... one hand slipped
into his overcoat and the other folded behind him a
la Napoleon. ... Comrade Stalin posed before the
saints and worshippers.
Rivera's Russian hosts found him rather more of a
handful than they had bargained for. He got on badly
with the assistants assigned to him, and the much
heralded mural project was soon at a standstill. In May
1928 a solution was found to what had become a dilemma:
Rivera was ordered home by the Latin American
Secretariat of the Comintern as a prelude to his
expulsion from the Party in 1929. The year 1929
witnessed other momentous changes in his life. One
reason for his eagerness to go to Russia was that he was
tired of the tantrums of his first wife, the beautiful
but termagant Guadalupe (Lupe) Marin. On his return home
he decided to replace Lupe with his young admirer Frida
Kahlo who was to become an important painter in her own
right. Since he had gone through a church ceremony with
Lupe, but never a civil one, the marriage was fairly
easily dissolved, and he and Frida were married that
August. in December he accepted a commission from the
American Ambassador to Mexico to paint a series of
frescoes in the loggia of the sixteenth century Palace
of Cortez in Cuernavaca. The building, splendidly
proportioned, set in a superb landscape and full of
historic overtones, inspired Rivera to produce some of
his most memorable and now best loved images.
In 1930 Rivera was invited to go to the United
States, and decided to exploit his new found fame north
of the border, despite a deep rooted suspicion of
gringos. In November 1930 he arrived in San Francisco to
paint a mural for the Stock Exchange. This was followed
by a witty fresco for the California School of Fine Art
showing the painter and his team at work: right at the
centre of the composition is Rivera's enormous backside.
He returned briefly to Mexico, then went to New York in
November 1931 for a retrospective exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art. This was the Museum's fourteenth
exhibition and only its second one man show - the first
had been devoted to Matisse. It broke all previous attendance records
and made Rivera and his wife into major American
celebrities. His next stop was Detroit, where he had
been invited to provide murals for the inner courtyard
of the Detroit Museum. The reception given to them when
they were officially unveiled in March 1933 was stormy,
but Rivera and his partisans prevailed. The painter then
moved back to New York to carry out a yet more
prestigious commission - a mural for the RCA Building,
part of the new Rockefeller Center. Rivera, more than
ever filled with the spirit of provocation, and euphoric
after his recent successes, tried the patience of his
patrons too far by featuring a portrait of Lenin in his
composition, which was supposed to depict 'Man at the
Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the
Choosing of a New and Better Future'. Work was abruptly
halted and Rivera was paid in full according to his
contract - which prevented him from having any further
control over the fate of his work. It was first hidden
from public view behind a curtain and then, despite
assurances to the contrary, destroyed. The episode
provided the biggest scandal of Rivera's career. He
lingered for a while in New York, determined not to
acknowledge defeat, filling his time painting a set of
murals for the New Workers School and two small panels
for the headquarters of the New York Trotskyites.
Eventually he was forced to creep away with his tail
between his legs.
After the New York fiasco Rivera found it difficult
to secure commissions for murals, even at home. Between
1935 and 1943 he received no government co mmissions of
any kind. The best he could get - in 1936 was a mural
commission for the new Hotel Reforma in Mexico City,
from his old patron, Alberto Pani. But here, too, there
was a disagreement, and as a result the murals were
altered without the artist's consent. Mexican laws on
this subject being different, and stricter, than those
which prevailed in the United States, Rivera was able to
bring a suit for damages and win it.
Since his expulsion from the official Communist Party
Rivera had sided with the Trotskyites, and when Trotsky
and his wife arrived in Mexico in January 1937 the
Riveras were amongst the first to welcome them. Frida
Kahlo, who had already put up with many infidelities on
her husband's part, became Trotsky's lover, though the
affair was soon over. Another admirer, to whom she did
not respond so positively, was the 'pope' of
Surrealism, Andre Breton, who arrived in Mexico in
1938. The exact cause of Kahlo and Rivera's divorce in
1940 remains mysterious; but their lives were too much
intertwined for them to remain apart, and they were soon
remarried.
The late 1940s were marked by a series of humiliating
attempts on Rivera's part to get back into the Communist
party. He had quarrelled with Trotsky before the latter
was assassinated, and the Mexican police even at one
time suspected him of complicity in the crime. In 1946
Rivera made a major attempt to win the party's
forgiveness, denouncing himself as a bad Communist, even
saying that the quality of his work had suffered
throughout the period of his separation from the Party.
He was roundly rejected, and the same thing happened
when he tried again a few years later. What counted
against him was less his association with Trotsky than
the fact that he had once painted an unflattering
portrait of Stalin. He eventually grasped this, and when
he was asked to provide a major work for the Mexican
Exhibition in Paris in 1952 he produced a coarse piece
of pro-Stalinist and anti-Western propaganda which
contained a suitably heroic likeness of the Soviet
leader. The Mexican government refused to exhibit it,
since by implication it insulted the French government,
and Rivera was rewarded with a satisfactory uproar in
the French press.
In September 1954 he was finally re-accepted by the
Communists. But this dubious success came a little late
since earlier in the year he had lost Frida. Due to an
appalling accident suffered when she was still an
adolescent she had been in poor health for many years,
and in the last period of her life was in constant pain
and often bedridden. Her husband was shattered by the
loss. He was not in good health himself, and in 1953 he
used his re-acceptance by the Party to go to Russia for
medical treatment. On his return he had yet another
surprise in store for the Mexican public which avidly
continued to follow his activities. Some years
previously he had painted a mural for the Del Prado
Hotel in Mexico City, one of his most delightful
compositions. (This was seriously damaged in the
earthquake of 1985) Called
Dream of a Sunday Afternoon on the Central Alameda,
it is an autobiographical work which shows the artist as
a boy, hand in hand with a female skeleton in grand
Edwardian costume - a typically gruesome piece of
Mexican folklore. They are surrounded by characters from
a fantastic paseo. The mural was kept covered after its
completion because Rivera had included the slogan 'God
Does Not Exist'. Now he ceremoniously painted out the
offending words, thus announcing his reconciliation with
the Church though the reconciliation somehow did not
involve another breach with the Communist Party. With
the opposing forces in his life, and in Mexican culture,
now neatly in balance, Rivera died in November 1957.
- From Edward Lucie-Smith,
"Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists"
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