The Long Voyage Home

(See Cover) In the center of Mexico City squats a vast, magnificently ugly edifice of white marble, imported block by block from Italy. Officially it is the Palace of Fine Arts, but mexicanos call it the elefante blanco and point out, with mingled pride and disdain, that the ponderous thing is slowly sinking, of its own weight, into the city's soft subsoil.

The building is a stony reminder that Mexico has been trying to digest imported culture since the days of Hernando Cortes, and has been having a continuous bellyache in the process. But inside the museum's marble halls last week, work men were uncrating the paintings of one Mexican who took Europe in his stride and came home to en rich his country with great art that it could call its own. His name: Diego Rivera. The crates in the Palace of Fine Arts held 500 pic tures ranging from the academic studies and cubist experiments of Rivera's student days to the power fully realistic productions of his maturity, assembled for a retro spective show opening in May.

The show would help clinch Rivera's reputation as the Western Hemisphere's finest living painter.

His murals, for which he is most famed, are often as vast as novels, while the paintings of most of his contemporaries are short stories at best. Among Rivera's own mural-painting countrymen, none can match either his native drive or his European-trained virtuosity.

It would also be hard to match the unpredictable native drive of his politics. Rivera is a Marxist and he plays the part with rumpus-raising, vociferous passion. His paintings are famed for clarity; Rivera's fiery politics are not. He has been a Communist and he talks like one still, but the party now considers him too un disciplined to let him belong.

Benevolent Boy Frog. Diego himself is a benevolent monster, six feet tall and weighing close to 250 pounds. No two people, seeing him for the first time, would be likely to describe him in the same way, but Rivera's wife, Surrealist Frida Kahlo, an accomplished painter in her own right, has pictured him as he seems to her. In a chapter written for a forthcoming book, Diego Rivera: 50 Years of His Work, she says: "Looking at Diego . . . you immediately think of a boy frog standing on his hind legs. His skin is greenish white, like that of an aquatic animal. Only his hands and face are darker, the sun having burnt them. His baby shoulders, narrow and round, flow without angles into feminine arms and end in marvelous hands, small and of delicate design ... His huge stomach, drawn tight and smooth as a sphere, rests on strong legs . . . that end in large feet pointing outward in an obtuse angle as if to take in all the earth ... He sleeps in a fetal position and when awake moves with elegant slowness as if he lived in liquid . . . Women . . . would like always to have him in their arms like a newborn baby."

Rivera's mountainous form has always been a cynosure of neighboring eyes, and even among Mexico City's easygoing artists he is notorious for his good-neighbor policy, but Frida maintains a dignified silence about the women who have thronged his life. "Probably people expect of me a very personal portrait," she explains, " 'feminine,' anecdotal, diverting, full of complaints and gossip . . . Perhaps they expect to hear 'laments of 'all that has been suffered' living with a man like Diego. But I do not believe the banks of a river suffer for letting the water run . . ."

The True Truth. There has never been much consistency in the surging course of Artist Rivera's life. He was born 62 years ago in the mountain town of Guanajuato, and was involved almost at once in the kind of controversy that has surrounded him ever since. His mother was an ardent Catholic, his father a revolutionary fighter and an atheist. Acting with characteristic dispatch, little Diego decided in favor of atheism. He swears that his family had to leave Guanajuato when he was six because of his piping diatribes against the Church.

If there is any truth in such a story, it may be what Rivera's friendly enemy and fellow muralist, Communist David Siqueiros, calls la verdad verdadera--the true truth--meaning something poetically, if not factually, true. "What is marvelous with Diego," says Siqueiros, "is that he never tells a 100% lie." Frida agrees: "He is such a liar as are poets or children who have not been turned into idiots by their parents or the school."

Rivera got into the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts when he was only eleven, but his real teacher was Jose Posada, the Daumier of Mexico, whose printmaking shop stood near the school. "I used to peer into his window every evening," says Rivera, "until at last he invited me inside. We talked together for seven years, about politics and art. He taught me the connection between art and life; that you can't express what you don't feel."

Rivera promptly forgot the connection. Being a sharp student, with a blotterlike ability to absorb and reproduce the methods of a succession of his masters, he won a traveling scholarship at 20, spent the next three years "gobbling up museums," painting in Europe, and expressing little that he felt.

In 1910 he drifted home again to exhibit what he had done. He ran right into the revolution against Dictator Diaz. The same week Diego's exhibit opened, Francisco Madero proclaimed Diaz a usurper and, with the help of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, began the seven-month job of forcing the aging dictator out of Mexico. After Diego's show closed, he lit out for the open country, carrying messages to the revolutionaries.

Picasso v. Peaches. When the revolutionaries won, they obligingly renewed Rivera's scholarship. In 1911 he sailed for Europe once more, this time for a ten-year stay.

In Paris he set up housekeeping with a pretty Russian blonde named Angelina Beloff, learned Russian and talked Marxism with Angelina's expatriate friends. He also enlisted in the cafe cohorts of Pablo Picasso, who was by then knee-deep in cubism. "I have never believed in God," says Rivera today, "but I believe in Picasso." Cubism, he maintains, "was the most important development in art since the Renaissance." He points out that cubist principles of composition underlie his most realistic murals.

But there came a time when Rivera pooh-poohed Picasso: mere cubism was not enough. Diego's rebellion began one fine morning in 1918, he recalls: "I was just coming out of a cubist show at the Rosenberg gallery when a fruit vendor passed in front of me in the sunshine, pushing a little wagon full of peaches. The sight was so much more beautiful than all those dry, thin abstractions inside the gallery. It made me want to paint the richness we can see and feel, not just intellectual constructions." Rivera was coming back to the maxims of his first teacher, old Jose Posada.

To make a new start, Rivera went to Italy, studied the murals of Giotto, Uccello and Andrea del Castagno. His

Communist friends objected. A self-proclaimed revolutionary like Diego, they argued, should also be up to date in his art. By returning to the representational clarity and the simple story-telling art of the Renaissance, Rivera had proved himself hopelessly bourgeois.

Rivera boomed his scorn of such views. He insisted he knew, better than they did, what "the workers" would look at.

"You know," he said, "the highest pitch of French cuisine is canard faisande--duck that has been hung a long time, so you can smell the bouquet. Very enjoyable to the educated nose. But if you offer it to the workers they will throw the rotten duck out, unless they throw it in your face. Now . . . the kitchen of the high bourgeoisie will make the proletarian vomit, and the paintings of the high bourgeoisie will make him vomit too--though this is nothing against the duck, or against modern art."

Nowadays, the only paintings in Rivera's studio besides his own are out-&-out abstractions by Russian Vassily Kandinsky and Switzerland's Paul Klee. "I like them," says Rivera, "because I have an educated nose. But I don't confuse myself and my friends and the art critics with the millions. I myself have always wanted to paint for the millions--and so I stick to my idea of a clear, firm, simple and precise art that everyone can understand."

Joyful Reverence. Full of the idea of painting "for the millions," Rivera hastened home from Paris in 1921 and joined forces with two other revolutionaries who were to make Mexican art history: Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco. Together they formed a government-backed syndicate of artists, published a manifesto announcing their intention "to socialize artistic expression." To the syndicate that meant ditching easel painting and going to work on walls--wherever they could find a big, challenging bare one.

In the next decade, Rivera did what is probably his greatest work: 124 frescoes in the Ministry of Education, a historical mural in the Cortes Palace at Cuernavaca, and his frescoes in the old expropriated chapel that has been part of Mexico's Agricultural School at Chapingo since 1920. Part of the chapel at Chapingo he decorated with an agricultural allegory in which the earth is personified by a series of nudes. They were modeled by Lupe Marin, the tempestuous, olive-skinned beauty who was his second wife.

He proved to be a master of flowing figure composition, of painted space and painted light. He handled crowds and battle scenes with the flair of a D. W. Griffith, and pictured farmers and factory hands with so much natural rhythm that their work had the quality of a dance. But all this skill was just the foundation for the best virtue of Diego's art: an atmosphere of joyful reverence for life, which onlookers could remember long after the details of the paintings had faded from their minds.

Undertaker Joe. When he finished at Chapingo, Rivera decided it was time for a visit of homage to Moscow. He went there in 1927, and seemed to enjoy himself hugely. He stood for three icy hours on one occasion sketching a parade in the Red Square, later sold 45 watercolors of it to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. He also met and sketched Stalin. He was in one of his pro-Stalin moods, and he felt moved and honored. Later, in one of his unpredictable flipflops, he changed his mind, wrote sarcastically (in Esquire):

"I will always remember the day that I met the undertaker [of the Revolution] ... At eight o'clock in the morning we entered the offices of the Central Committee. I glanced at my fellow guests. Smirking with satisfaction, drooling with superiority, a look of pre-eminence over all other mortals . . . plastered on their faces, they might have been entering Paradise . . . Suddenly a peanut-shaped head, surmounted by a military haircut and decked off 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 stood posed before the saints and worshippers."

When Rivera got home from Moscow he married Frida Kahlo, a pretty, sloe-eyed art student who had sworn to her schoolmates, at 13, that she would some day bear him a child (she never has, but Lupe had borne him two girls). Diego and Frida moved into her sparkling Spanish-colonial home in Coyoacan (a Mexico City suburb). There, in the course of time, came many old and new friends of Diego. One of them, after Diego soured on Stalin, was Leon Trotsky. For almost two years (1938-39), Trotsky lived as the Riveras' guest, writing his life of Stalin, and awaiting his assassins. It was not until 15 months after Trotsky had moved out that the assassins caught up with him (TIME, Sept. 2, 1940).

Rivera now vows that he was never a Trotskyite, and that he sheltered Stalin's enemy merely out of kindness, "despite his political errors." Rivera's own bitterly anti-Stalin writings, he explains solemnly, were "just a trick to mislead the stockholders of Bethlehem Steel." But the Reds have reason to know that there is always one more trick in Rivera's trunk. When he applied for readmission to the party, in 1946, their response was a horrified no. "So I have no right," he says with elephantine humility, "to call myself a Communist."

Trouble at the Crossroads. Rivera's murals heavily influenced the WPA muralists who spread their work across the walls of U.S. post offices in the 1930s. About the same time, his own became increasingly complicated. He started spelling things out--caricaturing his personal and political enemies, deifying his heroes --and his paintings lost their poetic savor. But if his art was no longer so lyrical, Rivera's mural in Mexico City's old National Palace still made powerful prose. So did the clamorous panels he painted in the Detroit Institute of Arts to celebrate the machine age. His next job, in Rockefeller Center's RCA Building (1933), got him headlines around the world.

The theme had been handed him with the contract: "Man at the Crossroads looking with uncertainty but with Hope and High Vision to the choosing of a course leading to a New and Better Future." To Rivera, the "Crossroads" were capitalism and Communism, so he painted a mural contrasting Wall Streeters on a binge with Lenin uniting the workers. The Rockefellers said Lenin must go: Rivera thumbed his nose. In the end the Rockefellers had the fresco reduced to plaster dust.

Rivera's latest mural, which was unveiled last summer in Mexico City's new Del Prado Hotel, made history too (TIME, June 14-21). It contained a portrait of one of Juarez' anticlerical followers displaying a placard with the words Dios no existe--"God does not exist." The slogan was drawn straight from Mexican revolutionary history, but in predominantly Roman Catholic Mexico it still spelled riot. The Archbishop refused to bless the hotel.

The citizenry was outraged. As one cab driver put it: "We know Rivera is our greatest painter, but he hurts our feelings."

Cannon in the Dining Room. Catholic students raided the hotel, scratched out the brief blasphemy and mutilated Rivera's self-portrait as well. The hotel management hastily boarded up the whole thing.* Today, customers in the Del Prado's wine-carpeted dining room nibble their canard faisande before a decorous red screen, on the other side of which Rivera's painting stands like a hidden cannon.

Rivera himself considers it his best mural. Critics could agree in placing it among the best-integrated and liveliest in color of Rivera's paintings, but they might reasonably complain that it takes the maestro himself to even begin to tell what it is all about.

"I call it dreams of a Sunday afternoon in the Alameda--the park just across from the hotel," he explains. "There on the left you see Cortes with his hands full of blood, and then the Inquisition. Next there is General Santa Anna giving away the keys to Texas, and above him Juarez, holding the Constitution of 1857. Later the Alameda became the place where high society promenaded every Sunday. I put that in the middle of my mural, showing the wife of Diaz walking with her friend. Then I put myself as a boy, with a snake and a frog, because I always used to carry them in my pocket. Behind me is Frida. You notice I am holding hands with a skeleton, which was a favorite character of Posada--the artist who guided me. He has her arm on the other side. The girl with the long hair was one of my first. I loved her when I was ten or eleven years old--a girl of the streets, with very much life. Finally there's the Revolution. You see the police beating the Indian who tried to get into the park, which I have seen with my own eyes. On the right is Guadalupe Marin holding the pinwheels, with our two grown-up daughters. In the corner above you see some class portraits."

Beauty & the Bucket. Rivera also works hard and earnestly at painting society portraits by the dozen. Some unblushingly flatter the subject, some are true portraits, and many of them are excellent pieces of work. His cement and glass studio in the fashionable suburb of San Angel is an efficient factory of such portraits, and of flower paintings, sexy nudes and "typical" Mexican scenes for the rich tourist trade as well.

Cinemactress Paulette Goddard (whom Rivera has painted at least twelve times) remembers the studio as "a nice place to be. Everybody comes to visit Diego--politicians, students, artists. The discussions are never dull. I sit and study Spanish and eat--my God, how I eat. I bring bread and ham and a Spanish book and sometimes a bottle of champagne--in a bucket."

As portraitist and caterer to the tourist trade, Rivera makes a lot of money and gets rid of it as fast as he makes it. He is probably the softest touch in Mexico, one who will courteously tip his sombrero to a beggar as he presses a wad of bills, uncounted, into the man's hands. The bills left in his wallet go for enlarging and housing his collection of pre-Spanish-Conquest Mexican sculpture, which is by far the biggest private collection (some 7,000 pieces) in the world.

His love for the Indian past makes Rivera Punch-proud of the trace of Indian blood in his own veins. He calls the Indians "as marvelous as the Spaniards are hideous," blandly denies his own predominantly Spanish inheritance. "I am one-third Indian, one-third Jew, and one-third nobody knows--probably Chinese," he boasts, with a fine disregard of the arithmetical rules of descent.

Snakes on the Ceiling. For the past seven years, Rivera has been chipping away at a project close to his heart. He is building a temple at the edge of a lava bed near Mexico City, which will be a monument to the man himself. Though it is only half finished, the temple already looks as ancient as something Hernando Cortes might have found in 1519. It rises in a truncated pyramid, seeming as solid as the native basalt blocks of which it is built.

Rivera considers it more important than any of his paintings: "I have always wanted to do architecture, and this could be the beginning of a new architectural tradition in Mexico--part Aztec, part Mayan, and also my own." It is ages removed from the Italian-marble Palace of Fine Arts, ten miles distant.

The downstairs part will serve as a museum for Rivera's pre-Cortesian sculptures. Stone-grey and stone-cold, the rooms coil upon each other in a snakelike labyrinth. In the ceilings are white stone mosaics different from anything Rivera has done before--deceptively simple abstractions that seem to waver, cloudlike, on the edge of recognizability. One of them, representing Tlaloc the rain god, is a face formed of two writhing snakes, set so as to be reflected in a sunken pool. The tower of the god of air is so designed that a chill draft eddies through it on the stillest days.

Rivera is building the temple by hand, and by inches, with five Indian helpers, putting into it a good part of the money he gets for his easel paintings. Upstairs will be a studio for himself and atop that a thatched, high-gabled roof in the Mayan style. He hopes to do some sculptures himself after he has moved in, to decorate the outside of the building. "But I have not much time," he says matter-of-factly. "Before I finish, I die."

Before he dies, Rivera may well add sculpture to his talents and triumphs, just as he may well get himself into more political rumpuses. After all his travels, however, Diego knows where home is. Happily fingering and musing over his pre-Cortesian sculptures, he looks like one of the statues himself--big-bellied, self-contained, benign, timeless.

"These were a free, happy people," he says, looking at the sculptures affectionately as though they were his friends. "I should have liked much better to have lived at that time."

* They might have destroyed it except that: 1) the hotel is government-owned and its murals cannot be altered without approval of the three-man committee on mural paintings; 2) the committee consists of Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera.

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