by Diego Rivera
It turned out, however, to be nothing of the kind. “Above everything,” he began, “I first convey to you and the two captains, your friends, the apologies of our Old Man, who would have liked to enjoy the good company of you hard-boiled mariners and guests of his ship. I want to tell you, personally, how sorry I am, too, not to have partaken of your company, as the rules require. But I’m certain you understand the situation. You’re all good enough sailors to know there’s a chance of our going under. And we know that when things are as they are, only real seaman can eat and drink as you’ve been doing. The trouble is we’re carrying civilian passengers who have no understanding of our precarious situation.
“The Old Man and I have literally not closed our eyes for the past two days. The Old Man sleeps at the commander’s desk, standing up. He’s practically through. The men below are in the hands of the ship’s doctor.
“The tradition of the sea authorizes the skipper to ask a meritorious service from any professional seaman traveling on his ship during an emergency. Therefore, my boy and comrade, you must excuse me for asking, but would you please convey the Skipper’s request to your captain friends. He asks them to take one turn every three days at the commander’s desk, and you, if you will, shall divide my time with me.”
I replied promptly and with gusto, “Fine, I’ll tell the captains pronto and I know they’ll be as greatly honored as I am. But, my friend, I’m not really a seaman. I could as easily be a substitute Pope as a substitute sailor.”
“Stop talking like that, my boy! Do you think I came to talk to you without first studying the passenger list? You’re the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera. All right; but as good a painter as you may be, no damn fool in the entire world could eat, drink, and have such fun when he knows his ship might sink momentarily if he didn’t have the stuff of a true sailor. So that’s settled.”
I didn’t attempt to argue with him. I remembered my feelings as a child when I had seen the ship model in General Hinojoso’s library. I thought of boyhood days on the beaches of Veracruz, where I had battled the surf raised by the furious north wind. I returned to the table and gave the captains the message. They responded with whoops of joy, the Catalonian Roig twirling his mustaches in anticipation.
When I got back to the first officer, I asked, “Listen, friend, who is in charge downstairs, below deck, right now?”
“Only the cargo master. Both of the officers are out of service,” he said.
“Then I will go downstairs and stay there until one or the other of these men recovers sufficiently to replace me.”
“But how dare I allow that? That’s the hardest service on the ship.”
“Two of your men are out. Have you the right to refuse replacement?”
The first officer stiffened, looked me square in the eye as he touched his hand to his cap, and said smiling, “You’re right, Mexican. That’s the way of your country. Thank you!”
He left to get me service togs and soon returned with a helmet with microphones over the ears and a pair of coveralls for protection against the heat. When I had dressed, he gave me two long whips and a pistol.
“These are to preserve your authority,” he explained.
I started downstairs toward the hold. Here, through clouds of smoke and black dust, I could see the cargo. I knew that the heavy crates had to be shifted frequently in order to keep the ship balanced; that if the ship tipped too far, the skidding boxes would smash the hull. I could see a pair of soot-stained mariners engaged in the backbreaking work of lifting an enormous crate.
I walked past them, threw my whips and pistol in a corner, and adjusting my helmet, shouted to the men, “Listen, comrades, I’m nothing but a Mexican passenger. I’m here because I was asked to help. I’m as interested as you are in stopping this ship from going to hell and taking us all with it. A Mexican comrade does not need whips or guns to keep his Spanish comrades working. Isn’t that so? So I’m going to tell you what the man upstairs ordered, and you’re going to do it.”
After looking me over, they shouted back, “Go ahead, we’re with you!”
The men worked on without pause or complaint though, by now, they were on the verge of exhaustion.
I was inspired to pitch in with more energy than I had believed I possessed. In the darkness of a ship’s hold there is no way to measure the passing of the hours except in variations of pain and fatigue. Three or four times I was asked from above whether I needed to be replaced. Looking at the valiant sailors, on the point of collapsing before my eyes, I angrily answered “No!” I held my post until the rolling of the ship subsided and the danger was past.
Before we arrived in Santander, my port of debarkation, the captain of the Alfonso gave a banquet for his passengers, honoring the bravery and courageous services of the two captains and the Mexican painter. More important, he presented gifts of three thousand pesetas to each of my captain friends and two thousand pesetas to me, which I admit I appreciated more than the glory.
The captains and I spent all our money together along the way from Santander to Madrid and Barcelona, trying to have an even better time ashore than we had had in our first days at sea. When our money ran out, I took regretful leave of my shipmates and entrained for Paris. In September, 1911, I was in Paris again.
REUNION WITH ANGELINE
IN PARIS, I immediately went to see Angeline Belloff. Our reunion was rapturous. Both of us had agreed to wait until this moment to see whether our love was strong enough to withstand the test of separation.
We now decided to live together.
For the next ten years that I spent in Europe, Angeline lived with me as my common-law wife. During all that time, she gave me everything a good woman can give to a man. In return, she received from me all the heartache and misery that a man can inflict upon a woman.
We later had a son, the only son I have ever sired, who died of meningitis before he was two years old.
In a little while, I had set up a comfortable menage and recommenced my studies and experiments in painting.
PICASSO
IN 1913 I had reached the cubist phase of my development. I worked hard at my cubist paintings all through that year and the first half of 1914, because everything about the movement fascinated and intrigued me. It was a revolutionary movement, questioning everything that had previously been said and done in art. It held nothing sacred. As the old world would soon blow itself apart, never to be the same again, so cubism broke down forms as they had been seen for centuries, and was creating out of the fragments new forms, new objects, new patterns and—ultimately—new worlds. When it dawned on me that all this innovation had little to do with real life, I would surrender all the glory and acclaim cubism had brought me for a way in art truer to my inmost feelings.
But in 1913-14, nothing was more exciting in art than the cubist movement. Shortly after the beginning of 1913, to prepare for the Salon d’Automne, I went to Toledo, Spain, to do a series of paintings which openly connected me with the movement. I later used some of these Toledo canvases in my first one-man show in Paris in 1914.
At about this time I also painted three memorable noncubist works: a portrait of my elegant fellow artist Adolfo Best; a big ferris wheel; and a foreground of the Montparnasse Station.
I could see the latter from my studio window and, in the painting, I tried to give an impression of the trains in motion. It was a large canvas, and my friends were so impressed with it that they urged me to send it to the Independent Artists Exposition, which I did. A good friend of mine on the placement committee gave the work the best space in the show. It proved to be one of the most popular canvases, and reproductions of it were published in several art reviews. It was even caricatured among a selection of the best paintings of the shows of the year.
On another journey to Toledo, I completed certain canvases I had started there and did many new ones. I brought all these paintings back with me to Paris in the fall of 1914, dividing most of the completed ones between the
Salon and the Independents and sending the remainder for display in Prague and, later, the United States.
In 1914 I was already beginning to be referred to by the critics as one of the more interesting members of the cubist movement. I was even gaining a certain fame among the avant garde. Best of all, I was living on the practice of my art, and painting as I liked.
The greatest of the cubists and my idol at the time was Pablo Picasso. I was eager to meet this already celebrated Spaniard, but my shyness prevented me from approaching him directly. Somehow, however, Picasso learned of my feelings toward him and one day he sent me a message through a mutual friend.
This friend, the talented Chilean painter Ortes de Zarete, came to my apartment early one morning. “Picasso sent me to tell you that if you don’t go to see him, he’s coming to see you.”
I accepted the invitation with pleasure and gratitude and immediately accompanied Zarete to Picasso’s, together with my friends the Japanese painters Fujita and Kawashima, who were posing for a canvas I was then doing. This was a portrait showing two heads close to one another in a color scheme of greens, blacks, reds, and yellows. Typical of my work of this period, it owed not a little to Mondrian, a good friend and neighbor, with whom I had been exchanging ideas and artistic experiences.
Dressed in the costumes used for the portrait, my Japanese models looked picturesque and amusing. Both wore long toga-like robes and sandals. Their hair was cut in bangs over their foreheads and encircled with colored ribbons. They appeared to have stepped out of a schoolbook of ancient history.
I went to Picasso’s studio intensely keyed up. My feelings were like those of a good Christian who expects to meet Our Lord, Jesus Christ.
The interview was marvelous. Picasso’s studio was full of his exciting canvases; grouped together they had an impact more powerful than when shown by dealers as individual masterpieces. They were like living parts of an organic world Picasso had himself created.
As for the man, will and energy blazed from his round black eyes. His black, glossy hair was cut short like the hair of a circus strong man. A luminous atmosphere seemed to surround him. My friends and I were absorbed for hours, looking at his paintings. Our interest so pleased him that he let us see his most intimate sketchbooks. Finally, Zarete and the Japanese said good-bye and left; but when I made a motion to go, Picasso asked me to stay and have lunch with him, after which he went back with me to my studio.
There he asked to see everything I had done from beginning to end. I had completed my painting “Sailor Eating and Drinking,” and several others that I liked: a second portrait of Adolfo Best called “The Man in the Stilograph” (now in the collection of the sculptor Indenbaum); and the still lifes “Balalaika” and “Bottle of Spanish Anise.”
After I had shown Picasso these paintings, we had dinner together and stayed up practically the whole night talking. Our theme was cubism—what it was trying to accomplish, what it had already done, and what future it had as a “new” art form.
With this meeting, Picasso and I became great friends. He brought all his own friends to visit my studio: the writers Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob; the painters Georges Seurat, Juan Gris, and others. Picasso’s enthusiasm for my work caused a sensation in Montparnasse. My contemporaries who felt kindly toward me were gratified and those who did not were surprised and outraged.
Being accepted by the master of cubism himself was, of course, a source of tremendous personal satisfaction to me. Not only did I consider Picasso a great artist, but I respected his critical judgment, which was severe and keen.
My enthusiasm for Picasso has not lessened, though today I would qualify it by two reservations. It seems to me that, in every one of his periods, Picasso has shown more imagination than originality, that everything he has done is based upon the work of somebody else. Also, I have come to feel that Picasso appeals chiefly to the emotions of the upper classes. In contrast with an artist like Renoir, for instance, he lacks a genuine universality. Renoir’s first paintings were bought by such ordinary people as his wood dealer and his butcher. It would be hard to imagine Picasso’s canvases hanging in any kind of worker’s home.
In Paris, Picasso and I used to have the best times, especially when we were by ourselves. Then we would say things about other painters which we would never tell anybody else.
We would walk through the art galleries and take off on other artists’ styles on the backs of match boxes. In a spirit of pure mischief, we would often play tricks on our women acquaintances, among whom I had acquired a terrible reputation.
When one of them would come to his studio, Picasso would hide me behind a door. In the course of the conversation, Picasso would happen to mention my name. This would inevitably provoke a stream of epithets from his unsuspecting guest. Picasso would laugh heartily, shrug his shoulders, and say, “Well, I said he was an angel.”
WAR
IN MY ONE-MAN SHOW at the Galerie Weill, at the beginning of 1914, I showed both Spanish and French landscapes, still lifes and portraits, including those recently completed of Fujita and Kawashima, “Young Girl with Artichokes,” and “Young Girl with a Fan.” This, my first European one-man show, was an emphatic declaration that Rivera had become a cubist.
Two works I painted about this time, in which I still feel some pride, are a large canvas called “The Girl Friend” and a portrait of the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz, commonly known as “The Man in the Sweater.” Though I had still not mastered the cubist idiom, the latter painting, in particular, was well received. Even today it is admired. Not long ago it was included in an exhibit of modern portraits in the New York Museum of Modern Art. It is a well-constructed canvas, done with warmth and grace.
In the summer of 1914, I painted “The Clock,” a surrealistic work with a humble alarm clock, a Russian balalaika, and an advertisement of Shustow cognac in the foreground; and a blue sketchbook and a Mexican motif, a multicolored serape, in the background. I favored the clock because clocks havez always been important to me. For some reason, I cannot fall asleep without one ticking underneath my pillow. I carry a clock with me everywhere I go, on boats, trains, and planes.
At the end of my show, in the pre-war months of 1914, Angeline and I made a trip to the Mediterranean island of Majorca, the largest and most beautiful of the islands off the coast of Barcelona.
Among the friends who accompanied us were the beautiful dancer Varmanova and her Russian poet husband; the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz; a student friend of his named Landau; and an English painter whom we called Kenneth. Myself excepted, no one in our group believed that war would come. Angeline and our friends were all pacifists. Unable to conceive of violence on a large scale, they dubbed me “The Wild Cowboy” for believing that the “civilized” nations of Europe would soon fall upon one another in mass orgies of killing.
Despite my conviction that war was inevitable, I had joined my friends when they risked their necks in workers’ demonstrations against war, and now I wished with all my heart that I would be proved wrong. It was not, however, long before they began to see how events were tending. On French Independence Day, July 14, 1914, we were all drinking and making merry when the news of the Austrian Archduke’s assassination reached us, and it was reported that fighting was already going on in the Balkans.
Soon after, we took the ferry to Barcelona, where we heard the ominous report that Russia had just declared war upon Austria. However, Russia’s allies, England and France, had not yet acted. Our company could not decide what to do, and it was with a feeling of helplessness that we reembarked for Majorca. As we neared the coast, we saw an English destroyer firing at a German submarine.
We stayed three months longer on the wonderful, isolated island, feeling as remote from the conflict on the continent as if we were in the South Seas. Finally, mobilization orders came for the Russian poet and the English painter, both of whom were reserve officers. The rest of us, Lipschitz who had tuberculosis, Landau who simply didn’t wan
t to be killed, and myself, citizen of a noncombatant country, huddled together in Barcelona for several days.
We had run out of money. We had expected to go back to Paris and there sell some of our work, but that was now impossible. Landau, whose father was a banker, succeeded in getting some cash, which he divided with the rest of us.
It didn’t amount to much. My subsidy from the Veracruz government had vanished with the downfall of Madero in 1913, and Angeline and I had only one other source of money we could count on. Angeline had been commissioned to paint the Russian national emblem on the wall of the Russian consulate in Barcelona. The payment she received made it possible for us to exist a few more days.
Our situation was further aggravated by the surprise arrival of my mother and my sister from Mexico. Fearing that I might go off to the front, they had come to see me for what they thought might be the last time. So great had been their concern that they had not thought to arrange for passage back nor did they have the money to do so. Angeline and I now had to sell everything we owned to pay for their return tickets.
No sooner were they gone than another unexpected guest arrived, my cousin Juan Macías. He suddenly appeared one day in the doorway of our flat. He had been studying in Germany, where he had been the pet, not only of his tutors, but apparently, also, of many beautiful young fräuleins, Juan was short but well built and exceptionally strong, and his favorite amusement was to have me punch him hard in the stomach, with all my might.
“Harder,” he would say. “That didn’t hurt at all.”
For the mere pleasure of seeing the lovely boulevards of Barcelona, Juan accompanied me when I went painting street scenes. The girls of the town would sometimes gather round us in the belief that we were carnival artists. I, of course, wore my Mexican costume. Juan, having left Germany in a hurry, had brought along only the formal clothing he had been wearing—a derby hat, a long jacket, a fancy dark-gray waistcoat, striped pants, and dapper shoes. It was easy to mistake him for a circus manager or a minor diplomat who had gone astray on his way to a consular reception.