The political situation in Mexico
during the 1920s was favorable to the development of a national art.
In the public eye, the primary role in the development of this new
art was played by Diego Rivera (1886-1957), one of the great
hero-figures in the history of twentieth-century Latin American
culture. Rivera, born in the mining town of Guanajuato, was the son
of a school-teacher. At the time of his birth, Mexico was ruled by
Porfirio Diaz, an efficient dictator acting in the interests of the
Mexican upper class. His policies included the 'scientific' use of
land, brought together to form large-scale haciendas, and the
encouragement of foreign investment.
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Frida Kahlo and
Diego Rivera
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Rivera's art
education was thorough, and thoroughly conventional. His
family had moved to Mexico City in 1892, and he studied at the
official Academia de San Carlos (established in 1781) for
seven years. In 1906 he was awarded a government traveling
scholarship, and went first to Spain, then to Paris, arriving
there in 1908. He gradually absorbed the Parisian avant-garde
styles of the day, moving from Neo-Impressionism to Cubism.
During this time he paid one visit to Mexico, in 1910, just
before the outbreak of the savage revolution which lasted for
the next decade and devastated the country.
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By 1918 Rivera, still working in
Paris, was well known in avant- garde circles. In common with a
number of leading artists of the time (they included, for a brief
period, Picasso) he had abandoned Cubism and was working in a
consciously 'classical' style inspired by Cezanne. In 1920 he made a
crucial trip to Italy, studying Giotto, Uccello, Piero della
Francesca, Mantegna and Michelangelo. This trip was undertaken at
the urging of Alberto J. Pani, the Mexican ambassador to France.
Through Pani Rivera was in touch with Jose Vasconcelos, then rector
of the University of Mexico. Both men encouraged Rivera to come home
and devote his artistic skills to his country. In 1920, when
Vasconcelos became Minister of Education in the new government of
Alvaro Obregon, which finally put an end to the civil wars, Rivera
decided the moment had come.
| On his return to
Mexico in 1921, Rivera was immediately drawn into the
government mural programme planned by Vasconcelos but
envisioned before the revolution by Dr Atl and others. His
first murals, in the Anfiteatro Bolivar of the Escuela
Nacional Preparatoria, were not as advanced as the work he had
done during his Cubist period in Paris. The style was a
version of what would later come to be recognized as Art
Deco. |
La
Vendedora
de Alcatraces
(1938)
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| Rivera's
political ideas were at this point more radical than his
artistic ones. In 1922 he was the leading figure m the
formation of a new Union of Technical Workers, Painters and
Sculptors whose manifesto borrowed the language of Russian
revolutionary Constructivists, proclaiming a collective
repudiation of'so-called easel-painting and all the art of
ultra-intellectual circles' in favor of art works which would
be accessible, physically and intellectually, to the mass
public. |
Looking for an idiom in
which to make good this promise, Rivera turned to the flora and
fauna of Mexico itself (which he tended to see through the eyes of
Gauguin and Le Douanier Rousseau), and to Pre-Columbian art. The
first murals in his fully mature style, a fusion of many elements
taken from the Cubists, from Gauguin, from Rousseau, from
Pre-Columbian narrative reliefs and perhaps most of all from
fifteenth-century Italian fresco painting, were done for the east
patio of the Secretaria de Educacion Publica in Mexico City in 1923.
This gigantic series of compositions (117 fresco panels covering
almost 1600 square meters of wall) was not finished until just over
four years later. Rivera worked on them for up to eighteen hours a
day. This mental and physical effort rightly established him as the
leader of the new Mexican school, which the Obregon regime regarded
as one of the chief means of creating a new identity for the country
after so many years of turmoil.
There were,
however, ironic aspects to Rivera's position. One was that,
while his political beliefs implied opposition to the United
States, his reputation was greatly helped by North American
enthusiasm and patronage. His finest series of murals, in the
loggia of the Palacio de Cortes in Cuernavaca, was
commissioned in 1929 by the American ambassador to Mexico,
Dwight D. Morrow.
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Retrato de
Ignacio Sánchez |
Rivera
was to paint important murals in the United States itself- for
the San Francisco Stock Exchange, for the Detroit Institute of
Arcs and for the Rockefeller Center in New York. The last of
these was destroyed when only half completed, after Rivera
refused to remove a likeness of Lenin. The resultant scandal
raised his public profile even higher. His work had tremendous
impact on the American painters of the time, most of all upon
the Regionalists, such as Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), who
certainly did not share Rivera's political views.
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Muchacha con
Girasoles
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Rivera's own
political career, conducted very much in public, was stormy
and sometimes had deleterious effects on his art. He regarded
himself as a natural Communist but was frequently on bad terms
with both the Mexican Communist Party and with the official
Communists in the Soviet Union. He resigned from the party in
1925, was re-admitted in 1926, and then in the following year
paid an official visit to Russia, from which he was
ignomimously expelled at the request of the Soviet
government. |
| By
1932^ he was seriously at odds with orthodox Communism and was
denounced as a 'renegade', the situation worsened when, in
1937. he was instrumental in getting President Lazaro Cardenas
to grant asylum to the exiled Leon Trotsky who for a while
lived in Mexico as Rivera's guest. The two men quarrelled
before Trotsky's assassination in 1940, but Rivera, who now
desperately wanted to be re-admitted to the party, had great
difficulty in obtaining forgiveness. This was granted only in
1954, after many genuflections to the official Communist line,
and a number of artistic compromises. |
Rivera's stormy relationship with
Communism is relevant to his relationship with the idea of
Modernism. For much of his career he was trying to make art which
would achieve objectives closely related to those of Soviet
Socialist Realism. Rivera was a greater artist than any Stalin had
at his disposal, and his work was less closely controlled than that
of his Russian contemporaries. To say this, however, does not really
address the main issue - that of Rivera's own aims. These were to
speak directly to the Mexican people, and in order to achieve them
he had to abandon much that was typical of modern art, at least in
formal terms, such as fragmentation of imagery and the disguise of
appearances. Above all, he had to subject himself to the demands of
narrative - something which the early Modernists had been most
concerned to reject.
Rivera found ingenious ways of
telling stones taking hints from Mexican popular engravers, such as
Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), whom the Muralists turned into a
revered ancestor figure, and also from the illustrated newspapers of
the time, with their ingenious interlocking lay-outs. These
borrowings cannot disguise the fact that his aims remained fundamentally
opposed to basic Modernist concepts. It is easier to relate what he
did in Mexico to the work of Piero della Francesca and Masaccio
rather than to that of Picasso and Matisse.
There is even a resemblance to Annibale Carracci, whose narrative
systems for the mythologies in the Farnese Gallery in Rome bear a
certain correspondence to Rivera's solutions.
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