by Diego Rivera
My father introduced me to them. “This is Diego de Rivera, my son. He is the author of the military and political documents you have examined, gentlemen.”
The oldest of the men stood up. My father then said to me, “You have the honor to stand before General Don Pedro Hinojoso, Minister of War of the Republic of Mexico. All the other gentlemen are also heroes of Mexico, veterans of the wars of liberation against invaders and traitors.”
One by one, each of the old men formally introduced himself. I felt the same thrill of pride I had felt when I had been invited to join the veteran fighters of Guanajuato. Having had military instruction in school where I had been appointed a group leader, I made the correct military response and stood at attention.
General Hinojoso said, “Can you give your word of honor, as the son of a veteran fighter and comrade-in-arms, that these documents originated with you?”
“My general,” I replied, “I give you my word of honor that all these drawings and writings are completely mine.”
Hearing this, all the men rose and General Hinojoso left his seat, came to where I was standing and embraced me.
“My son,” he said, “I greet you as the youngest soldier of the Mexican Army.”
I was ashamed to feel a certain liquid forming in my eyes, but I saw the same thing happening in the eyes of the general, my father, and the others. I don’t know whether it was I who suddenly became mature that night or whether all men, even generals, are really boys behind their adult masks.
Then my documents were spread out upon the table, and the generals began examining them and asking me questions. How much was actual enthusiasm on their part and how much was the product of the cognac I saw on the table I cannot say, but they began to shower me with praise.
However, one very severe-looking man said, “My boy, you obviously have a native genius for strategy. But even more important is a knowledge of the organization of an army. Do you know anything about that?”
There was a large blackboard standing against the wall. In response, I walked over to it. “General,” I said, “do me the honor of asking me whatever questions you wish on that subject. I will answer as well as I can.”
Questions rained on me, my father joining in the examination. When the grilling was over, I could see that all doubts had disappeared.
Then General Hinojoso banged on the table. “Damn it, Diego,” he shouted, “you’re a born soldier. But that, my boy, places a great responsibility upon you. I hope, before you get too old and useless, you’ll realize what a military fighter can do, not only for the liberty of Mexico but also for the liberty of all the people of the world. Damn it, boy, you were born in my home town, and now you must consider yourself one of my friends. You must know what being revolutionary means. After all, your father and your grandfather were revolutionaries. Don’t fail, boy! A man may have the talent to make war, but he has the right to use it only for the freedom of mankind.”
Then the old soldier coughed, stood up, gave the military salute, and left the room.
All next day I ran around to assure myself of the army commission I felt entitled to. Hinojoso, himself, gave me a paper requesting Congress to pass a law permitting the War Minister to make the necessary exceptions in order to induct me. I also obtained the President’s endorsement of the petition. Before the day was over, I had secured passage of a law that would have enabled me to enter the Military Academy at the age of thirteen instead of eighteen. I was then only ten years old, but in the three years before I might enter the Academy, General Hinojoso offered to give me any help I asked for.
He said, however, that I was at liberty to prepare myself for my military career in any way I wished. If I desired, he would send me abroad, or I could study at home. I could even stay with him in his home.
“I have no sons or family,” he said, when I came to his house to tell him about the passing of the law, “and I know your father would not object if you became my son as well as his. You have everything you need here to become a real technician in your chosen profession.”
With grave solemnity, he conducted me to a library of thousands of books on bookshelves covering all the four walls.
I was a little disappointed to see only books; I had expected to be led into an arsenal.
After a while, the minister closed the door behind me and I was left standing alone in the middle of the vast library.
Looking around, I saw the model of a battleship in a corner of the room. I studied it carefully, marveling at its craftsmanship. I had never seen a model as finely detailed, with guns, hull, rigging, keel worked out with such perfection that my imagination could board it without trouble and sail off to all corners of the world. I stood transfixed until the general returned. It took all my strength of mind not to tell him that, rather than become a soldier, I now much preferred to be a sailor.
My response had been an esthetic one; the art of the ship-model builder had suddenly and completely blotted out my military interests. When my father came in later to discuss the curriculum of the military preparatory school he proposed to send me to, I was so repelled by the idea of the regimented life I would lead there that I literally ran out of the room and into the open air.
It was then, I think, I knew that whatever false roads I took afterwards, art was my destiny and would find me everywhere I went.
AT THE SAN CARLOS SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
SOON AFTERWARDS, I enrolled in the San Carlos School of Fine Arts. The classes were held at night; by day I continued to go to elementary school. For the next two years, I led this burdensome existence. What sustained me was the discovery of the pre-Conquest art of Mexico, for which I conceived a passion that was to influence my entire artistic life.
When I was thirteen, I received an art scholarship enabling me to attend San Carlos by day. I was, at first, a model student, industrious and obedient. Determined to learn all that tradition could teach me, I accepted whatever the teachers prescribed. My hard work earned me the highest grades and every possible prize.
My older classmates became jealous of me and lost no opportunity of embarrassing me. For my part, I sought to be accepted as one of them despite the handicap of my extreme youth. One of my proudest achievements toward this end, when I was fourteen, was winning a competition for making up the dirtiest possible original expression. My prize-winning obscenity was: “Copulate with your mother and gargle with her menstrual juice.”
From then on I was nicknamed Chilebola, which means “extra hot chile.” To live up to this imposing title, I adopted a tough swagger and would fight anybody at the drop of a hat.
Physically I was still a fat, oversized little boy, but I possessed a tremendous store of energy, almost all of which I put into learning how to paint.
Yet I was not happy artistically. The further I progressed in the academic European forms, the less I liked them and the more I was drawn to the old Mexican art. I particularly detested having to copy engraved replicas and plaster casts.
Reaching the breaking point, I revolted noisily by organizing a strike with other discontented students. The immediate object of our protest was a priest accused of sexual corruption. Actually, we were demonstrating against the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Díaz, who was now openly flouting the anticlerical provisions written into the Constitution by Juárez. Of all living men, Díaz was most to blame for the stultification of life and art in Mexico. And it is to him that Mexico, today, owes its wedding-cake palace architecture and insipid public statuary.
The student demonstration turned into a riot. As its leader, I was summoned before the authorities and expelled.
Thus ended my formal training in art. Aside from a period of eight months in later years, when I was invited back to the San Carlos as its director, I would have no further connection with any academy.
I was sixteen at the time I left the art school, the age when most students are first admitted.
THREE EARLY MASTERS
AMONG THE TEACHERS at the
San Carlos, three stand out in my memory. The first was Felix Parra, a conventional painter himself but possessed with a passionate love for our pre-Conquest Indian art. He communicated this enthusiasm to me with such success that it has lived on in me, through many changes of taste and fortune, to this day.
The second was José M. Velasco, whom I regarded as the world’s greatest painter of landscapes. From Velasco, I learned the laws of perspective, and it was he, rather than Parra, whom I followed when I studied on my own. I traveled up and down the country, painting Indians, forests, houses, streets, and churches, all more or less in the manner of this master.
The third was Rebull, a man in his seventies, who had been a pupil of Ingres. One day, when a class of about fifty students was painting a model, he singled me out. He found fault with my drawing, but he said, “Just the same, what you’re doing interests me. First thing tomorrow morning, come to my studio.” The other students flocked around to see what had interested old Rebull enough to extract an invitation to his studio, to which he had admitted no student for twenty years. They could see nothing and ascribed his enthusiasm to a senile whim.
But the next day the old man told me what he had discovered in my work was an interest in life and movement. Such an interest, he said, is the mark of a genuine artist. “These objects we call paintings,” he went on, “are attempts to transcribe to a plane surface essential movements of life. A picture should contain the possibility of perpetual motion.” Rebull made me more aware than I had yet been of the laws of proportion and harmony, within which movement proceeds, and which are to be discerned in the masterpieces of all ages.
POSADA
ABOUT THIS TIME, I met and came under the influence of the great folk artist José Guadalupe Posada, the most important of my teachers. Posada was not connected with any academy nor was his work to be found in any fashionable home. He was an engraver with a shop in the Calle de Moneda. A small, fat man, he etched illustrations for the songs, jokes, and tales which wandering minstrels brought to the folk of Mexico. In his lifetime, he did more than 15,000 of these etchings, all printed on sheets of colored tissue paper and sold from door to door.
Posada had no place in the official circles of Mexican art, and he was unconcerned about immortality, though he has achieved it where more respected artists of his time have failed and are now forgotten. He knew as much about form and movement as any man I have ever met. It was he who revealed to me the inherent beauty in the Mexican people, their struggle and aspirations. And it was he who taught me the supreme lesson of all art—that nothing can be expressed except through the force of feeling, that the soul of every masterpiece is powerful emotion.
Of course the import of this teaching was lost upon me then—and for many years afterwards. Finding myself in art was to be a long and painful process. Looking back upon my work today, I think the best I have done grew out of things deeply felt, the worst from a pride in mere talent.
PRE-CONQUEST ART
MEANWHILE I PAINTED, and although I now took some pride in my work, I was also often depressed by a generalized sense of inferiority. It was a racial feeling, not unlike that felt by many artists in the United States. And like many of them, it finally would bring me to Europe. But in my (Mexican) case its roots were not specifically the same.
Before the coming of the Spaniards, the Mexican Indian artists had shown great force and genius. Like all first-rate art, their work had been intensely local: related to the soil, the landscape, the forms, animals, deities, and colors of their own world. Above all, it had been emotion-centered. It was moulded by their hopes, fears, joys, superstitions, and sufferings.
Under the tyranny of the Spaniards, the half-breed descendants of these great Indian creators turned away from the native sources that had given Mexican art its power. Feeling inferior to their conquerors and oppressors, they sought to raise themselves to equality by imitating the accepted models of classical European art.
It was the response of men reacting to a tradition of defeat—and this tradition was within me, too, buried in my subconscious. Yet I was continuously aware of the greatness of pre-Conquest art. Within and without, I fought against inhibiting academic conventions, trusting my emotions to guide me in painting canvases I am still not ashamed to have done. Among these are my “Pisafoo,” “Tuni,” “White Sensitive,” and “White Sensuous”—works whose purity of feeling gives them a value which transcends their rather wicked subject matter.
AN EXPERIMENT IN CANNIBALISM
IN 1904, wishing to extend my knowledge of human anatomy, a basic requisite for my painting, I took a course in that subject in the Medical School in Mexico City. At that time, I read of an experiment which greatly interested me.
A French fur dealer in a Paris suburb tried to improve the pelts of animals by the use of a peculiar diet. He fed his animals, which happened to be cats, the meat of cats. On that diet, the cats grew bigger, and their fur became firmer and glossier. Soon he was able to outsell his competitors, and he profited additionally from the fact that he was using the flesh of the animals he skinned.
His competitors, however, had their revenge. They took advantage of the circumstance that his premises were adjacent to a lunatic asylum. One night, several of them unlocked his cages and let loose his oversize cats, now numbering thousands. When the cats swarmed out, a panic ensued in the asylum. Not only the inmates but their keepers and doctors “saw cats” wherever they turned. The police had a hard time restoring order, and to prevent a recurrence of such an incident, an ordinance was passed outlawing “caticulture.”
At first the story of the enterprising furrier merely amused me, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I discussed the experiment with my fellow students in the anatomy class, and we decided to repeat it and see if we got the same results. We did—and this encouraged us to extend the experiment and see if it involved a general principle for other animals, specifically human beings, by ourselves living on a diet of human meat.
Those of us who undertook the experiment pooled our money to purchase cadavers from the city morgue, choosing the bodies of persons who had died of violence—who had been freshly killed and were not diseased or senile. We lived on this cannibal diet for two months, and everyone’s health improved.
During the time of our experiment, I discovered that I liked to eat the legs and breasts of women, for as in other animals, these parts are delicacies. I also savored young women’s breaded ribs. Best of all, however, I relished women’s brains in vinaigrette.
I have never returned to the eating of human flesh, not out of a squeamishness, but because of the hostility with which society looks upon the practice. Yet is this hostility entirely rational? We know it is not. Cannibalism does not necessarily involve murder. And human flesh is probably the most assimilable food available to man. Psychologically, its consumption might do much to liberate him from deep-rooted complexes—complexes which can explode with the first accidental spark.
I believe that when man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has now, the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos.
MY FIRST GRANT
IN 1902, at the age of sixteen, I was receiving thirty pesos a month as a scholarship from Teodoro A. Dehesa, Governor of the State of Veracruz.
It was my father who got me this stipend. He had first tried to secure a grant from the Governor of Guanajuato, a dull man who had no interest in art and who promptly refused. But Dehesa was of a different sort. Cultured and liberal-thinking, he was the leader of what might be called the progressive wing of the Diaz government. He survived in Díaz’s reactionary administration only because he had once dramatically earned the dictator’s lasting gratitude. When the latter was a revolutionary himself and only an insignificant army colonel, he had been sentenced to death, and Dehesa had saved him from the firing squad. Dehesa’s qualities were well known throughout Mexico, and
my father had for some time resolved to speak to him about me when his affairs took him to Veracruz.
MURILLO ATL
IN THE SAME YEAR that the scholarship went into effect, the great Mexican painter Murillo Atl returned to Mexico from Spain. An eye disease had halted his painting career, and he had brought back no canvases. What he had brought instead was a fanatical enthusiasm for neo-impressionist art. He was mostly under the influence of the Italian-Swiss neo-impressionist Giovanni Segantini, but he was hardly less excited by the neo-impressionists of Paris. Atl had a great feeling for color and a passionate love for landscape, which he communicated with a missionary zeal.
Like me, Atl was politically an anarchist, a product of the discontented middle class. Our common political and artistic interests brought us very close. Through hard life experience, I later came to reject anarchism for the more realistic politics of social-democratic action and still later, of communism. Atl’s violent individualism took him to the extreme right and ultimately into the role of fascist agent.
But in 1904, Murillo Atl was the dominant influence among aspiring young artists discontented with academicism. Unable to paint, he devoted his tremendous energy and his prestige to turning his disciples upon the path of neo-impressionism. Both Joaquin Clausell, the great landscape painter, and myself owe a great deal to Atl in this respect.