The Tintoretto of the Peons

By ROBERT HUGHES

Throughout his life, which was flushed with publicity, Diego Rivera was often photographed. He filled the frame--a 300-lb. Silenus in suspenders and open- neck shirt, the liquid eyes bulging at the rival lens. One image shows him feigning sleep. He lies mountainously in the garden of his house in Coyoacan, his head pillowed on the stony side of an eroded pre-Columbian head. He is pretending to be a big baby dozing by his mother, the Mexican past, touching the root of contentment. No other photo so pungently expresses Rivera's idea of his own history, as an artist born to link the old Mexico with a new, postcolonial one.

Diego Rivera was born a hundred years ago, in 1886, and he died of cancer in 1957: 71 years, not a long life by Picassian standards, but a staggeringly exuberant and productive one. All his attributes as an artist, including his sometimes overweening vulgarity, were cast in a large mold. He became a symbol, the key figure in cultural transactions between North and Central America in the first half of the 20th century. He played his role for Mexico, part ambassador and part genius loci, to the hilt. His energy had a titanic quality: he covered many acres of wall in Mexico and the U.S. with his murals and left behind a huge output of easel paintings, drawings and prints. Few 20th century artists have been as popular in their own societies. None is more relevant to the debate over "indigenous," or "national," art language as against "international style." A Marxist who read little Marx, he found a deep well of pictorial eloquence in the traditions and miseries of the campesino. "For the first time in the history of art," Rivera claimed, "Mexican mural painting made the masses the hero of monumental art."

Yet American capitalists wanted him too. In 1930, when he did his enormous fresco cycle of Mexican history in the Palacio de Cortes at Cuernavaca, a work that made no bones about his Communist sympathies, his $12,000 fee was paid by Dwight W. Morrow, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. In 1931 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller bought Rivera's sketchbook of the 1928 May Day parade in Moscow.

Though such pairings were tailor-made for satire, nothing suggests that his Yanqui patrons were masochists. They wanted the best public art they could get and believed, with reason, that Rivera could supply it. They thought him a cross between Whitman and Picasso.

To display such sympathies in the Depression made management look benign. When Edsel Ford wanted to celebrate the Rouge complex and the auto industry, he got Rivera to paint a mural cycle in Detroit; it attracted 86,000 visitors in its first month. Rivera had no problems in casting American engineers as the heroes of a new age. Encouraged by this, John D. Rockefeller in 1932 commissioned a Rivera mural, Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, for the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Rivera put in a head of Lenin and refused to take it out, though he offered to counterface it with some portraits of Lincoln and other moral equivalents. The result of this Mexican standoff was that the Rockefellers effaced the mural, while the Communist Party denounced Rivera for "opportunism." This finished Rivera's career as the conflicted Michelangelo of American capitalism, and he went back to Mexico to become the wholehearted Tintoretto of the peons.

Clearly, no artist who habitually worked on Rivera's scale can be shoehorned into the dimensions of a museum retrospective. But to mark Rivera's centenary, the Detroit Institute of Arts, where his Detroit Industry frescoes for the Fords are preserved, organized a large exhibition. In part it was prompted by the 1978-79 discovery of a mass of unpublished Rivera material--photographs, letters and, forgotten in a dim storage room, the full-scale cartoons for the Detroit frescoes. After opening in Detroit, the show goes on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art this week. Through 1986-87 it will travel to Mexico City, Madrid and West Berlin.

The fact that no such exhibition has been attempted in the U.S. for 55 years tells us something, of course. To a remarkable degree, Rivera since his death has been shoved into a special category--"Mexican muralist"-- segregated from the official version of modern-art history. A great merit of this show is the clarity with which it explains the roots of Rivera's art. It suggests how organically his mature, Mexican style from the '20s onward grew from his early attachment to Ingres, El Greco and the quattrocento. It also proves that Rivera in Paris (where he lived, on and off, from 1909 to 1921) was no provincial but a brilliantly gifted and responsive man immersed in the currents of the avant-garde. Once this is grasped, one sees his mature work, in all its placid monumentality, with its strange fusions of mechanical shape with archaic pre- Columbian effigies, in a different light.

At art school in Mexico City, he had learned to draw from Santiago Rebull, a former pupil of Ingres's. The French master's smooth, continuous modeling, his stress on linear profile and formal gesture, continued to be the root of Rivera's art. There are pencil drawings from the 1910s--portraits and still lifes--of the most exquisite and silvery precision, as exacting in their beauty as anything by Juan Gris. Young Rivera was interested in campesino subjects, not because he had ever shared the life of peons but because another teacher, Jose Maria Velasco, had encouraged him to paint them.

In Paris, one sees him chewing through Seurat, Mondrian, Delaunay, Gris and, above all, Cezanne. He loved mathematical construction and the golden section, and his obsession with "secret" geometry was to be of great help when he turned to the problem of making huge, static, formally coherent frescoes. Nowhere does his solid early skill show more clearly than in his 1913 portrait of a foppish Mexican artist, Adolfo Best Maugard, adjusting his glove on a terrace, while a great Ferris wheel rises over the skyline behind him. The figure owes something to El Greco, the cityscape a lot to Delaunay's Eiffel Towers, but the dramatic centering of the wheel on Maugard's hand, as though the man were a juggler twirling its flickering spokes, is entirely Rivera's own. His bighearted assurance prefigures the rougher, more arbitrary diction of his cubist paintings.

Rivera became a cubist after 1913, but he was no mere follower. Not only are his cubist canvases a lot bigger and more fiercely colored than those of most of his contemporaries, but they strike a peculiar stance between boldness and indecipherability, making the work of minor French cubists like Gleizes or Metzinger seem wispy and ladylike by comparison. The extreme case was Zapatista Landscape--The Guerrilla, Rivera's masterpiece of 1915. It has everything in it from a rifle and pistol holster to a sarape, a sombrero and the snow-capped Mexican cordillera. Yet despite all the detail, the figure of % the Zapatista is hard to find; some analogy between cubist hide-and-seek and a real guerrilla's elusiveness got Rivera thinking about camouflage and disappearance.

But by 1920 he had also been thinking long and hard about public art, which cubism never pretended to be. He was already a celebrity in Mexico. When Alvaro Obregon swept into office as President, Rivera found he had an enthusiast in the Minister of Education, Jose Vasconcelos, who invited him back to Mexico to take part in a huge program of public painting. In Mexico and Russia, unlike most of the early 20th century world, a fresco could still be counted on for political impact. Mexico had a huge illiterate population, used to learning doctrine by looking at images. Painting had little or no competition from other media. It could be as direct a form of social speech as it had once been in the city-states of the Renaissance. Characteristically, Rivera mythologized the impact of Mexico on his work after he returned in 1921 --and yet, in a way, he was telling the truth: "Gone was the doubt and inner conflict that had tormented me in Europe. I painted as naturally as I breathed, spoke or perspired. My style was born as children are born, in a moment . . . after a torturous pregnancy of 35 years." His idea of public art, though secular and materialist, turned out to possess an immense sacerdotal gravity: it could stand in for religious icons. Even a relatively small easel painting like Flower Day, 1925, is consciously hieratic in its symmetry, the stillness of its squat figures, the blazing epiphanic color and the clear identification of the Indian flower bearer, bowed under his angelic load of calla lilies, with a priest bowing before celebrants. And though dreadful excesses of cheap tourist cliche would sprout from Rivera's fusion of the thick crankshaft rhythms of pre-Columbian sculpture with the observed faces and bodies of Mexican peasants, there can be no doubt that in his hands, at least, it was a powerful union.

By its nature, this show can give only a faint impression of Rivera's achievements as a muralist. But his strength as a draftsman on the large scale can easily be assessed from the cartoons for the Detroit Industry frescoes. A drawing like Figure Representing the Black Race has a formal strength to match its chthonic allegorical power; it makes you realize what levels of graphic sophistication lay beneath the populist surface. Such is Rivera at his best, but even at his worst the man's kitsch and bad taste have an orotund wholeheartedness that seems endearing. His mock-surrealist landscapes of the 1940s, together with some of his more contrived social portraits, are rubbish, but they do not spoil the cumulative effect of the show.

Perhaps it is time to amend the familiar high-modernist view of Rivera as a gifted painter deformed by the needs of propaganda. Sometimes his work was too openly didactic and coarse grained, too attached to populist stereotypes of love, comradeship, struggle and work. It offended the etiquette of alienation. Too bad--he was still an extraordinary painter, a lighthouse of vitality. Nobody could say Rivera kept a steady political line, but at least he was no ideologue; his socialism was instinctive and antitotalitarian, like Picasso's, but much deeper. Rivera gave Leon Trotsky asylum from Stalinist assassins (including the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros) in his own house at Coyoacan, but two years later Trotsky moved out, complaining that he no longer felt "moral solidarity" with Rivera's "anarchistic" views. In 1940 Rivera denounced Stalin as "the undertaker of the Revolution," the betrayer of Spain; by 1952 he was painting a saintly Uncle Joe with a peace dove on one hand and the Stockholm peace petition in the other. Rivera's political life had as many twists and turns as the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. It inflated his personal myth but obscured his achievement as a formal artist--by which, as the political characters in his murals fade into historical remoteness, he must be judged. For its public, this splendid show has set that process in motion, giving us back a great soul who was also, at least some of the time, a great painter as well.