Having a Good Time

When Diego Rivera went home from Paris in 1921, he saw his native Mexico more appreciatively. Particularly he cast a fresh eye on a primitive art that no one else seemed to care about. He journeyed into the Pacific Coast provinces west of Mexico City, and began picking up pieces of precious art for about a peso apiece.

Word got around among the Indians of the region that there was a wealthy painter willing to pay money for the oddities they plowed up in the fields or found in digging ditches. A steady stream of natives came to his door, bearing grotesque clay figures of humans and animals, whistles, pipes, beads. The stuff gradually overflowed the two houses Rivera owns.

Mexico's National Museum showed little interest in these oddments. The Museum was too busy spending money on such academic sure things as the arts of the Mayas, the Mixtecs and the Aztecs.

Six months ago, Salvador Toscano, who is an official of Mexico's Palacio de Bellas Artes, suggested that Rivera give his collection a public airing. When art historians got busy on the collection they found that what they had long called Tarascan art, and knew almost nothing about, was actually a collection of several cultures in the states of Michoacan, Jalisco, Colima and Nayarit. A German-born ethnologist, Dr. Paul Kirchhoff, was called in to lend a hand. He found that Rivera had one of the greatest treasuries of the day.

Last week Senor Toscano's exhibit opened in Mexico City; 90% of it was from Rivera's collection. The show was front-page news in Mexico City, which was as unusual as an art show making Page One in New York City.

The Idea Was Fun: Visitors to the gallery found themselves in a world as whimsically engaging as first-rate Disney. The pre-Columbian art of the Indians of Western Mexico had a freshness of its own; none of the stern beauty of Aztec forms or the glum formality of Mayan relics. When the Indians were not laughing at themselves, they were good-naturedly caricaturing someone else. The dominant note was exaggeration: humpbacks had overpowering humps; in erotic figures phallus outweighed man.

Almost all the sculpture was in clay, uninhibited, unschooled, and surprisingly modern-looking. One figure, which looked like one of Disney's Seven Dwarfs, stood bent-kneed, bat in hand, as if timidly waiting for the next pitch. Another was a subtle, tender caricature of a man's face with the head and body of a fat, droll dog.

The show's real breathtaker was an entire Indian village peopled with small figures from three to five inches high. Whatever the action--women nursing children, acrobats tumbling, people dancing, others just loafing--everybody seemed to be having a lot of fun.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.