My Art, My Life

by Diego Rivera

  Atl fired me with the desire to go to Europe. My greatest enthusiasm in contemporary European art was then Cézanne, with whose work I had become familiar through reproductions. However, before I went on to France, I decided to stop in Spain, believing that it would provide a necessary plastic transition between Mexico and modern Europe.

  In 1905, I expressed this desire to Governor Dehesa. He told me that, if I had a one-man exhibition and succeeded in selling my paintings in Mexico, he would provide traveling and living expenses for four years’ study abroad. I would receive three hundred francs a month, a sum that proved barely enough to exist on but then seemed like a tremendous fortune to me. I worked for a year preparing for my show, doing landscapes mainly. One of the best of these, “Citlaltépetl,” which I painted in Jalapa, is now part of the Antebi collection in Mexico. I favored pastels, because with them I could most easily achieve divisions of color. But I also painted with solid oil colors which I mixed myself with the help of Francisco de la Torre and Alberto Garduño, using Mexican copal gum as the base. Atl also gave his assistance.

  When I had enough paintings, Atl organized my exhibit, I not being then, or ever since, capable of handling such practical affairs. Atl invited critics, writers, and newspapermen and, of course, potential buyers, sometimes using devious means to induce them to attend. The show went so well that everything, to the last sketch, was sold. I joyously reported this to Governor Dehesa, and he granted me the promised subsidy.

  The needy Atl organized shows for many young painters as a means of supporting himself. He told the artists after the exhibition was over, “Boys, for you the honor and the glory, for me the base material profit.”

  But in my case Atl not only gave me every cent we collected but contributed money of his own. He also presented me with a letter of introduction to the Spanish painter Eduardo Chicharro, with whom he had made friends while living in Madrid. Chicharro, then a medal winner with an international reputation, enjoyed the patronage of the richest families in Madrid. This kindness of Atl I very much appreciated. Cézanne had just died, and with that idol gone, I decided to study longer in Spain than I had first planned. Chicharro had an open workshop, and he was interested in color. To me, this compensated for his academic manner, with which I was already acquainted.

  PASSAGE OF ANGER

  A FEW MONTHS before leaving for Spain, while painting in the shadow of Mount Orizaba, the great volcano of Veracruz, I witnessed the earliest of the many terrible clashes that were to occur between the people and the despot Díaz.

  It happened like this. Along the foothills of Orizaba were textile mills where Mexican peasants toiled for long hours under inhuman conditions. Petty regulations were enforced by the millowners to keep the workers at the level of beasts of burden. Infractions of the rules resulted in brutal beatings by the foremen. Wages were paid not in cash but in tokens redeemable in the company store. Since these wages were not enough even to keep an Indian peasant alive, the workers were continually in debt.

  In the winter of 1906, the millowners increased the number of hated regulations while cutting the miserable wages. Without plan or organization, the outraged workers walked out of the mills.

  With the naive trustfulness of Mexican peasants, they decided to appeal to the “Father of His People” for help. A delegation of pajama-clad and sandal-shod workers trudged to Díaz’s palace. Díaz promised to take care of his “children,” and there was no hint of what was to follow in his reception of the delegation.

  The way he took care of them was to send troops who shot down men, women and children gathered in streets. To this day, I can see the still bodies of the victims lying lifeless in the widening pools of their blood.

  As the strike went on, the terrible soldiers returned. I put aside my brushes and joined the millworkers. Once the sabre of one of Díaz’s mounted policemen struck me on the back of my skull, near the nape of the neck. I was thrown into prison with other strikers, and the stale prison bread was the most wonderful food I have ever tasted.

  After my release, I found myself so paralyzed by helpless anger and frustration that I was unable to paint anything.

  I boarded the ship that was to take me to Spain, still in the grip of horror. I could not sleep. Often I would stand at the bow alone, singing and yelling. My fellow passengers must have thought me a madman. How could I explain the scenes of carnage which I could not make myself forget?

  And yet my chants and cries on shipboard remained more the wild shouting of a Nietzschean than the steely anger of a true revolutionary. Though my social and political ideas had grown more elaborate, they had also become less direct, clear, and biologically truthful than when, at six, I had spoken from the pulpit in the Church of San Diego. But I can truthfully say that the final crystallization of my political ideas began at this time.

  MY SPANISH FRIENDS

  I ARRIVED IN SPAIN on the 6th of January, 1907. I was twenty years old, over six feet tall, and weighed three hundred pounds. But I was a dynamo of energy. As soon as I located Chicharro’s studio, I set up my easel and started to paint. For days on end, I painted from early dawn till past midnight.

  For diversion, I wandered through Madrid’s wonderful Prado Museum and other galleries where the masterpieces hung.

  My contact with Spanish art, however, affected me in a most unfortunate way. The inner qualities of my early works in Mexico were gradually strangled by the vulgar Spanish ability to paint. Certainly the flattest and most banal of my paintings are those I did in Spain in 1907 and 1908.

  The Spanish masters to whom I was most drawn were Goya, Velázquez, and El Greco. I also found new delights in the Dutch, Flemish, and Italian masters and in the Castilian, Catalonian, and Aragonese primitives. And of such ever-living masters as Brueghel, Lucas Cranach, Hieronymus Bosch, and Patinir, I became a reverent disciple.

  I performed some study exercises in the room of the Goya portraits at the Prado, copying not individual paintings, but making composites, in order to achieve a fuller comprehension of the style of this master. Three of these Goya exercises now hang in well-known Goya collections, two in the United States, and one in Paris. I shall not, however, disclose the identity of these forgeries; let the experts have fun.

  I performed a similar exercise with El Greco. The result was so inferior to the Goyas that I never did another. Nevertheless, it too hangs in a collection of genuine “El Grecos” and still awaits detection.

  These frauds were not my doing actually. While in Madrid, I met Luis de la Rocha, an amiable and obscure young painter, who acted as a sort of guide and secretary to me in his country. When he saw me about to destroy the composites, he asked me to give them to him. Rocha frankly told me what he meant to do. “Diego, I’m your friend. I’m glad to have been able to give you my time, and I’ve tried to help you all I could during your stay in Spain. We’re both poor boys, but I’m much poorer than you. As you know, my father has learned how to turn new paintings into old ones and market them abroad. Since you’re going to destroy these, let me and my family have them. We need the money.”

  So I gave him the paintings to recompense him for his services; also to give myself the enjoyment of seeing the experts hoaxed. But I never expected my youthful exercises to succeed on the scale they did.

  In Spain, I also made friends with the great Spanish writer Marquis Ramón del Valle Inclán, and with Ramón Gómez de la Serna, who was winning recognition as an important writer of the new generation.

  The younger Ramón was the most productive writer I have ever known. At the age of nineteen, Serna had already written a pile of books that reached a height of thirty inches. Some day a discerning critic should make his way through the forests of this strange literary genius. Serna’s work carried on or anticipated every modern and ultramodern literary tendency of our time.

  The elder Ramón had a mind as comprehensive as that of any of the giants of the Spanish Golden Age. His books show marvelous political sense, as well as a wide
-ranging imagination, and an individual and flavorous style.

  Valle Inclán lacked his left arm. In a cafe brawl, an inferior literateur had broken it with a cane, so injuring it that it had to be amputated. Valle Inclán romanticized the loss in dozens of fantastic stories. His imagination took off on any theme. From a visit to Mexico, he built an Odyssey of adventure replete with numerous sultry amours. He would draw me into his narratives as eyewitness or as a new object for his inventions. For all his fantasizing, he had the sensitivity to capture the essential quality of life in my unhappy, comic, and beautiful country, and his El Tirano Banderas remains one of the most moving books about Mexico.

  Through Serna, I met the most curious man in all of Spain at that time, the homeless anarchist philosopher Don Silverio Lancza. This madman dreamed of a Utopia where total equality prevailed and all men were aristocrats and artists. I hope his writings, with their beautiful violence of language, will someday be “rediscovered.”

  Also through Serna, I met one of the most fascinating personalities and one of the finest painters of Spain in the early twentieth century. Dario de Regoyas’ paintings of the Spanish countryside and Spanish life show a perception as profound as anything by Goya. He was a marvelous colorist and one of the most outstanding of the neo-impressionists.

  The only good mural painter in Spain, Areta, was also a good comrade of mine. All of these friends and I moved in the same circles.

  DESOLATE LANDSCAPES

  TOWARDS THE END of my stay in Spain, I became so sick from my excesses in eating, drinking, and working that I put myself on a vegetarian diet and fresh-air regimen. I took long hikes through the countryside, stopping along the way to become better acquainted with the Spanish peasantry. About this time, I also developed and indulged a sudden voracious appetite for reading. I immersed myself in the works of Nietzsche, Huxley, Zola, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Voltaire, Kropotkin, and, above all, Karl Marx. In books, I sought ideas. I read very little fiction, which did not satisfy me then and has not since because of its unreality. I read too much, instead, books on mathematics, biology, and history—subjects which have continued to interest me to this day though I mainly use my leisure time to observe life itself.

  As I have said, I did very little painting of any worth during my year and a half in Spain. Aside from my art study and varied reading, what I gained most from Spain was what I saw of the Spanish people and their condition.

  At the beginning of the century, industrial Madrid consisted of a few small factories. The working class was small and unorganized, largely a lumpen proletariat, a proletariat in rags, lacking in any initiative for social change. Most of the common people were pícaros or thieves. Having no legitimate ways of earning a living, they turned to lawless ones—rackets and crimes—in order to survive. They were shiftless, cunning, picturesque, sorrowful, and tragic.

  On the whole, nevertheless, the people of Madrid bore their life with courage. This courage did not inspire them to revolt but imbued them with an ironic acceptance of suffering. The very idioms of their slang expressed this resignation. Sympathizing with their misery, the local police treated them with corresponding understanding tolerance. It was not unusual to see a municipal policeman taking a poor wretch whom he had collared, not to the lockup, but to a tavern to buy him a drink.

  In contrast to this burlesque gendarmerie was the infamous Guardia Civil, the direct successor to La Santa Hermandad, the Holy Brotherhood, military arm of the monarchy and the Inquisition. This sinister force was heir to the most sadistic Spanish traditions. It was cruel and treacherous, and was openly dedicated to the protection of the upper classes and the maintenance of their privileges and distinctions. It helped to make the social system of Spain one of the most unjust and backward in the world and shielded the darkest of religious fanaticism. To everyone who sought to bring freedom and justice to Spain, the Guardia Civil was the unremitting enemy.

  Its ranks were made up of the most arrogant, ignorant, and reactionary sons of Spanish upper bourgeois families. These young toughs needed no instructions to serve their class interests. They expressed open and aggressive contempt for their “inferiors,” the lower middle class and, of course, the workers. Class division was, nevertheless, less distinct in Madrid than in the more industrial sections of the country: the metallurgic districts of the north; the industrial sections of the southeast; Catalonia; and the mining area around Almadén. There the Guardia Civil used its iron fist openly, as I was able to see at first hand.

  I am sorry to say that the Spanish Church worked side by side with these gangsters. Priests, bishops, cardinals, monks, and nuns gave an aura of sanction to their activities, spreading over the people a dark blanket of superstition and ignorance which smothered every impulse toward change, so that such rebellions as occurred were always sporadic, violent, and impregnated with despair.

  CHECKBOOKS IN MY FINGERS

  JUST BEFORE MY DEPARTURE from Spain, I played a passive but stellar role in an interesting occurrence at Chicharro’s studio.

  During the last exhibition I had there, the master painter Don Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida paid the workshop a visit. He desired to see what the youth of the time was doing in art. Sorolla had an attractive personality, and was very sure of himself. His style was academic and marked by a photographic realism, but his talent was genuine and his mastery of technique exceptional.

  On the day of his visit, Sorolla took a look around at the walls hung with many paintings. Arrested by a picture of an old ironsmith’s shop painted by me, he gave it a long and close look. (This painting, “The Blacksmith Shop,” is now in the collection of Marte R. Gómez in Mexico.)

  “Who did that, Eduardo?” he asked. His voice sounded so severe that I expected scathing criticism.

  Chicharro answered, “The Mexican.”

  “Where is this Mexican?”

  “There,” and Chicharro pointed to me.

  “The Mexican” was my Madrid nickname, given to me because of the large sombrero I always wore, my head being so large that no ordinary-size Spanish hat would ever fit me.

  “Come here, boy,” said Sorolla.

  I went to him, murmuring, “At your orders, patrón.”

  Looking straight into my eyes, Sorolla said, “Give me your right hand, my son.”

  He took the hand I held out in a strong grip. Then clasping it at the wrist, he said, “Show me your fingers.” After touching each, one after the other, he asked, “Don’t you know what you have there?”

  “No, maestro,” I replied, perplexed.

  Sorolla chuckled. “All right then, boy, I’ll tell you. In this finger you have a checkbook of American dollars, here a checkbook for pounds sterling, here a checkbook for Spanish pesetas, here a checkbook for Argentine pesos, and here a checkbook for French francs. I tell you, son, I know what I’m saying. I’ve been to all these countries with my paintings. You don’t look rich, my boy; neither was I at your age. My father was an ironsmith like the one in your painting. Yet I came back from my travels abroad with many checkbooks. I guarantee you, you damned Mexican, that if you paint day and night, you’ll have twice as much money as I have. I say this because Eduardo has told me you’re an exceptionally hard worker.”

  All my workshop companions looked at me with envy, but Chicharro with tenderness and admiration. Don Joaquin Sorolla then shook hands with me.

  As soon as he was gone, Chicharro said to me excitedly, “Have you heard what he said? Sorolla has never before said anything like it to any other artist. And he certainly knows what he’s talking about. The future is yours.”

  The next day, as if anticipating the wealth Sorolla had prophesied for me, I gambled in a local casino. I ran a stake of 500 pesetas, which I had received for one of my paintings, up to 3,500 pesetas. Three days later, fortified by my winnings and accompanied by my friend Valle Inclán, I left Madrid for a tour of Europe.

  Along the way, I was troubled by Sorolla’s prophecy. Though, like any poor boy, I was tempted by
the idea of becoming rich, I did not want to become enslaved to the checkbook, to become a commercial painter. I knew how one climbing the mountain of worldly success can slip down into the river below without being conscious of the descent until he is already drowning.

  With such thoughts, I arrived in Paris one spring morning in 1909.

  ART STUDENT IN PARIS

  THE PARIS AIR was foggy, the sun barely visible. Some Spanish friends met Valle Inclán and me at the railway station and took us to the Hotel Suez on the Boulevard St. Michel, which catered mainly to Spanish and American art students. I was assigned the very same room in which that remarkable artist Julio Ruelas, precursor of surrealism, had recently died. It was small but it had a big window overlooking the boulevard.

  Paris had been my goal. My roving now ended, I set to work and soon fell into the usual routine of the art student, studying the museum collections, attending exhibitions and lectures, and working in the free academies of Montparnasse. I also did open-air work along the Seine River. At night I joined groups of fellow students in the cafés in warm discussions of art and politics.

  Among these students were several Russians who had suffered exile and lived among professional revolutionaries. Their life was one of black misery, sustained only by reports of riots in Russia and their own Utopian dreams.

  In my painting, I sought a way to incorporate my increasing knowledge and deepening emotions concerning social problems. Two great French revolutionary artists, Daumier and Courbet, lit my path as with great torches. In their work they had achieved a synthesis very much like that which one day would liberate me.