Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera: The Wall as a Weapon

In February 1934 workmen at Rockefeller Center peeled a fresco off a lobby wall and destroyed it. Rivera had been paid in full — $21,000, more than double his Detroit fee — and had been told to remove a portrait of Lenin that appeared nowhere in his approved sketches. He refused, offering instead to add Abraham Lincoln and American abolitionists. Rockefeller Center Inc. announced that the wall had been replastered. Artists boycotted and protested; Rivera went home and painted the whole composition again, larger, in Mexico City, this time adding Leon Trotsky and John D. Rockefeller Jr., drinking in a nightclub beneath a cloud of syphilis bacteria.

Guanajuato to Montparnasse

Diego Rivera was born in 1886 in Guanajuato to a well-to-do family and began drawing at three. He trained at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, and in 1907 a government scholarship sent him to Europe. He worked in Madrid under Eduardo Chicharro, then settled in Montparnasse, where he spent the decisive years of his formation inside the Paris avant-garde.

From roughly 1913 to 1917 he was a Cubist, and a good one — the faceted planes and shallow space are entirely fluent. Then he abandoned it, moving toward a Post-Impressionist manner under the influence of Cézanne. This was not a failure of nerve. Cubism was a private language for a metropolitan audience of a few hundred; Rivera had begun to want an audience of millions who could not read.

Vasconcelos and the Walls

He returned to Mexico in 1921, into a country that had just finished tearing itself apart and was trying to invent a national identity from the wreckage. The education minister José Vasconcelos had a plan: put the story of Mexico on the walls of public buildings where anyone could see it, at state expense. Rivera became the central figure of that programme, and between 1922 and 1953 covered enormous surfaces in Mexico and the United States — the Secretaría de Educación Pública, the agricultural school at Chapingo, the stairways of the Palacio Nacional — with a deliberately simplified, boldly coloured, monumental style drawing openly on Aztec form and Mexican popular imagery. He revived true fresco, painting into wet plaster, as a working medium in Latin America, which is a technical achievement as much as an artistic one.

He joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1922. It expelled him in 1929 on suspicion of Trotskyite sympathies. He applied to rejoin in 1954.

Detroit

The best of him is in Detroit. In 1932 Wilhelm Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, commissioned the murals, and Edsel Ford put up $20,000. Rivera spent three months touring the Ford River Rouge Complex and produced hundreds of sketches before touching plaster. He then painted for eight months across 1932 and 1933, working fifteen-hour days and losing a hundred pounds in the process.

The result is twenty-seven fresco panels covering all four walls of what is now the Rivera Court: steel-making, pharmaceutical laboratories, automobile assembly, with the two largest panels on the north and south walls given over to the manufacture of Ford's V8 engine and its parts. It is neither a hymn to industry nor a denunciation of it, which is why it survives; the machines are magnificent and the men are being consumed by them, both at once.

It nearly did not survive. One panel restages the Nativity with a doctor and nurse vaccinating a Christ-like child while scientists stand in for the Magi. Catholic and Episcopalian clergy called it blasphemous and some demanded the whole cycle be destroyed. Edsel Ford and Valentiner refused to remove it. Rivera regarded the Detroit murals as his most successful work.

Man at the Crossroads

The Rockefeller commission came out of Detroit's success. Nelson Rockefeller had wanted Matisse and Picasso for companion works; neither was available. Rivera was given a theme with the flavour of a corporate mission statement — "Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future" — and produced a three-panel composition setting capitalism against socialism, a worker at the controls of machinery between visions of material and ethical development.

Then the *New York World-Telegram* attacked it as anti-capitalist propaganda, and Rivera, provoked, added Lenin. The architect Raymond Hood spotted it. Nelson Rockefeller asked for its removal. Work stopped on 10 May 1933; after expenses Rivera cleared about $7,000; the wall was curtained for nine months and then stripped.

Why Diego Is Called a Genius

The faculty was synthesis at scale. Rivera had absorbed Cubism in Paris, then Cézanne, then the exacting discipline of true fresco, and he fused all of it with pre-Columbian form and Mexican popular imagery into a public visual language that could carry complex historical argument to viewers who could not read a word. That is much harder than it sounds. Legibility at forty feet, across twenty-seven panels, without becoming a poster, requires compositional control of a very high order, and Britannica credits him with establishing "a new iconography based on socialist ideologies and Mexico's indigenous and popular heritage" and with reviving fresco itself in Latin America. He took art out of the gallery and put it on the walls of ministries and schools, permanently changing what public art in the Americas could be.

The counter-case is unavoidable, and Rivera embodied it rather than answered it. He was a lifelong Communist who took very large sums from Edsel Ford and the Rockefellers to decorate their monuments — the contradiction is not a critic's invention, it is the structure of his career. The Lenin episode is more complicated than the martyrdom story allows: the portrait was not in the sketches the client approved, Rivera added it as a provocation after a hostile press attack, and he was paid in full. That the Rockefellers destroyed the work anyway was philistine and indefensible; that Rivera broke the agreement first is also true. His political loyalties bent with circumstance: expelled by the Party in 1929 on suspicion of Trotskyism, he put Trotsky into the Mexico City version of the destroyed mural, then applied for readmission to the Party in 1954. And the murals are propaganda in the plain sense: state-funded, ideologically directed, idealising the indigenous past and the revolution that paid for them. Great propaganda is still propaganda. It is also, in Detroit, one of the outstanding achievements of twentieth-century painting.

Legacy

Rivera died on 24 November 1957. The Mexican government has since designated his murals *monumentos históricos*, which places them alongside cathedrals and pyramids in the national inventory — an odd fate for a Communist, and an accurate one. His marriages, five in all, and above all the two to Frida Kahlo — married in 1929, divorced in 1939, remarried in 1940 — have latterly threatened to eclipse the work. The walls are still there. They were always the argument.

Achievements

• National Prize for Arts and Sciences — 1950
• Notable work: The History of Mexico
• Notable work: Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central
• Notable work: Río Juchitán
• Notable work: Portrait of Ramón Gómez de la Serna
• Movement: social realism and Mexican muralism