My Art, My Life

by Diego Rivera

  Juan’s tutor and other German friends had convinced him that Germany had become his second fatherland and that he owed some service to that nation. As his first assignment, he had been requested to return to Mexico and buy lemons, used in the manufacture of citric acid, important in war chemistry. A German-American electrical concern had given him a large sum of money to carry out this task.

  Juan decided that he could act more effectively with a title of nobility, and that had been his reason for coming to see me. He knew I could revalidate my family title before the Spanish court simply by paying the required taxes. Through my paternal grandfather and father, I was entitled to the rank of marquis under the then existing Spanish monarchy.

  Though I ridiculed the scheme, I paid the taxes from money Juan gave me and then renounced the title in his favor for a further sum.

  With this latter money, Angeline and I were able to leave Barcelona. We journeyed to Madrid, where we decided to remain awhile and work. It was now impossible to paint in France, and many other artists had already left Paris to work in Madrid. Among these were Robert Delaunay, the remarkable colorist, a man full of vitality and pretension; his Russian wife, also a talented artist; Marie Laurencin and her husband, a gifted and wealthy German painter who had refused to fight against France for the German bankers; and our old friend María Gutiérrez Blanchard, who was now doing original and beautiful work. We also met two of my countrymen, the writer Alfonso Reyes and the architect and art critic Jesus Guizo y Acevedo, whom a turn of Mexican politics had forced to remain in Madrid.

  While in Majorca, I had continued my experiments with cubism. I had attempted to achieve new textures and tactile effects by mixing substances like sand and sawdust in oils. Utilizing the results, I had done several interesting landscapes. In Madrid, I now painted some portraits with unusual textures, the most notable being ones I did of Guizo and Ramón de la Serna. All of these paintings contained innovations later employed by the surrealists. At that time, however, they were part of my cubist experiments.

  I also did a painting of a Madrid bull ring which still interests me today. This canvas and a landscape of Majorca are in the collection of Alfonso Reyes. Another Majorca landscape is owned by my first Mexican wife, Lupe Marín.

  During my stay in Madrid, Serna arranged a showing of the works of some of the refugee artists. He dubbed our group Los Integros, because of our wish to express ourselves with complete integrity. The peculiar subject matter of our paintings was thus also given a certain moral varnish, always necessary in Madrid.

  The public of Madrid, however, accustomed to a diet of precooked academicism, responded coldly to Serna’s exhibit. The reaction of the native artists and intellectuals veered between indulgent pity and outright contempt; the ordinary people laughed openly and made jokes about our subjects and techniques.

  Just after this unfortunate experience, I completed my portrait of Serna. The stir it created was quite unlike anything I might have imagined.

  Placed in the window of the gallery which had housed the exhibition of Los Integros, it immediately attracted crowds of arguing and jeering people. Men and women fought and pushed to get a closer view. Traffic on the boulevard came to a virtual standstill. Three days later, the Mayor of Madrid himself ordered the painting removed from the window.

  The portrait showed the head of a decapitated woman and a sword with a woman’s hair on its point, plainly the weapon which had beheaded the woman. In the foreground was an automatic pistol. Beside it and in the center of the canvas was a man holding a pipe in one hand, in the other a pen with which he was writing a novel. He had the appearance of an anarchistic demon, inciting crime and the general overthrow of order. In this Satanic figure everyone recognized the features of Serna, notorious for his opposition to every conventional, religious, moral, and political principle. But the Spanish people, I believe, responded to something more than an effective caricature. The portrait of Serna caught the prevailing spirit of violent disintegration. It gave a presence to their deepest fears with an intensity which their own academic painting had not prepared them for.

  After the spring of 1915, I left Madrid for Paris. I took with me all the paintings I had done in Spain except the Serna portrait, which I had given to Serna himself.

  YOUR PAINTING IS LIKE THE OTHERS’!

  ANGELINE REMAINED IN MADRID while I reconnoitered the situation in Paris. My new paintings caused a sensation in the art colony. Opinion was sharply divided, however. Some critics hailed my latest work. Others, notably the orthodox cubists, proposed excommunicating me because of the exoticism they found in it. And the latter were not entirely wrong. When I study the paintings of this period now, I realize that they distinctly show the influence of the pre-Conquest tradition of Mexican art.

  Even the landscapes I did from life in Europe were essentially Mexican in feeling. I recall that, at this time, I did a self-portrait in order to bring into focus the inmost truth about myself. The clearest revelation, however, came from a cubist canvas, “The Zapatistas,” which I painted in 1916. It showed a Mexican peasant hat hanging over a wooden box behind a rifle. Executed without any preliminary sketch in my Paris workshop, it is probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood that I have ever achieved.

  Picasso visited my studio to see my new paintings; he had, of course, heard of the controversy concerning them. He looked and was pleased, and Picasso’s approval turned practically the whole of opinion in my favor.

  Dealers now took me up. Yet, though I had “arrived,” I was still searching for a medium which would better express what I had seen and wished to communicate, a medium which used cubist freedom and invention, but without the tangle of conventions which cubism had now accumulated.

  What was behind this discontent with the work I was doing, which was souring my success? In part, it was the conviction that life was changing, that after the war nothing would be the same. I foresaw a new society in which the bourgeoisie would vanish and their taste, served by the subtleties of cubism, futurism, dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, and the like, would no longer monopolize the functions of art.

  The society of the future would be a mass society. And this fact presented wholly new problems. The proletariat had no taste; or, rather, its taste had been nurtured on the worst esthetic food, the very scraps and crumbs which had fallen from the tables of the bourgeoisie.

  A new kind of art would therefore be needed, one which appealed not to the viewers’ sense of form and color directly, but through exciting subject matter. The new art, also, would not be a museum or gallery art but an art the people would have access to in places they frequented in their daily life—post offices, schools, theaters, railroad stations, public buildings. And so, logically, albeit theoretically, I arrived at mural painting.

  My ideas found little favor with most of the painters with whom I discussed them. The few who thought there might be something in them said, “Theoretically, Diego, your stand may be correct, but where is the example? Your painting is exactly like that of the others.”

  How right they were! I had to demonstrate my ideas in the only one convincing way—in my work.

  My archeological museum, “a composite of Aztec, Mayan and ‘Rivera Traditional’ styles.”

  MY FOUR WIVES

  With my assistants in the Hospital de la Raza, (left to right) Manuel Martinez, Melquiades Ejido, Osoaldo Barra and Marco Antonio Borregia.

  A self-portrait, painted for Sigmund Firestone.

  Frida Kahlo and I, outside our home in Coyoacán.

  A visit from David Alfaro Siqueiros in Moscow. At my side is my wife, Emma.

  This photograph of me was taken in December, 1956, on the occasion of the unveiling of a plaque outside the house in Guanajuato where I was born.

  Contemporary newspaper photos covering the Rockefeller Center fracas. At left is the portrait of Lenin on which opposition to my mural was focused. At right, I am seated with my attorney, Philip Wittenberg.

&
nbsp; The reconstructed “Rockefeller mural” in the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City.

  “Water, Origin of life.” I am standing in the center of the Lerma reservoir, oa the inner walls of which I executed this unique underwater mural.

  Mural in the Hospital de la Raza, depicting the history of medicine in Mexico.

  “Sunday Dream,” an allegory of my life and the history of Alameda Park.

  Outdoor mural of the Teatro de los Insurgentes. Mexican history from pre-colonial time to the present, as reflected in scenes from Mexican plays.

  Portrait of Edsel Ford, my benefactor in Detroit

  A satirical cubist portrait of my Parisian period.

  A section of my mural in the National Palace, depicting the cultivation of corn.

  Battle scene in the Cortés Palace mural, Cuernavaca.

  My peace mural. Mexican workers collect signatures for peace petitions, while in the background, Stalm and Mao offer Uncle Sam John Bull, and Belle Marianne the choice of peace or destructive war.

  MARIEVNA

  I STARTED ON THE NEW PATH one beautifully light afternoon in 1917. Leaving the famous gallery of my dealer, Leonce Rosenberg, I saw a curbside pushcart filled with peaches. Suddenly, my whole being was filled with this commonplace object. I stood there transfixed, my eyes absorbing every detail. With unbelievable force, the texture, forms, and colors of the peaches seemed to reach out toward me. I rushed back to my studio and began my experiments that very day.

  Nevertheless, the beginning proved painful and tedious. In the process of tearing myself away from cubism, I met with repeated failures. But I did not give up. It was as if an invisible force was pushing me onward. During the worst hours, I would find comfort in the precept of my old Mexican tutor, Posada, to paint what I knew and felt. And I realized that what I knew best and felt most deeply was my own country, Mexico.

  In this agonizing period, I got no encouragement from Rosenberg, who was disconcerted to see me leaving the profitable highroad of cubism for a risky plunge into the unknown. Rosenberg expressed doubt, then disapproval, and finally rage. He threatened to close the art market to me if I persisted in my waywardness, and for a time, he actually succeeded in making his threat good.

  My contract with Rosenberg ran from 1915 to 1918, during which years he expected me to rise to the pinnacle of painting fashion, and he could not forgive me for wrecking his grandiose hopes. Poor man, he was simply incapable of realizing that I was on the way to doing something whose value could not be figured up in so many francs or canvases or years, in accordance with the manner of reckoning to which Rosenberg was accustomed.

  When Rosenberg saw that his arguments had no effect, he turned his mind and energies and one other, more substantial commodity, his money, to prejudice art critics and fellow painters against me.

  It was as a result of Rosenberg’s efforts that a chapter about my life came to be written. It appeared in a book by the poet André Salmon called L‘Art Vivant under the title “L’Affaire Rivera.” Salmon declared that I had departed from cubism because that school of expression had ceased to please me, and also because Picasso and Braque so thoroughly dominated the cubist movement that there was no important place in it for me.

  The first assertion was true enough. My path in modern painting had led from neo-impressionism into cubism and was now leading in a new direction away from cubism. Though I still consider cubism to be the outstanding achievement in plastic art since the Renaissance, I had found it too technical, fixed, and restricted for what I wanted to say. The means I was groping for lay beyond it.

  As for my being envious of Braque or Picasso, I will say this. I recognized and accepted Picasso’s mastery in cubism from the beginning. I readily proclaimed myself Picasso’s disciple. I do not believe it possible for any painter after Picasso not to have been influenced by him in some degree. I have always been proud that Picasso was not only my teacher but my very dear and close friend.

  Coming to my defense and advocating my right to paint as I wished, Guillaume Apollinaire wrote a novel in which, conscious of his approaching death and yet in complete control of his expression, he depicted the feelings of an artist in conflict with the vulgar world of the dealers.

  Apollinaire’s last novel was one of the most forceful and beautiful books I have ever read. It was unfortunately never published for, when Apollinaire died, Rosenberg and other dealers bought the manuscript from his widow and suppressed it, if they did not destroy it.

  My artistic problems, muddled enough by the intrigues of the dealers, were further complicated by the advent into my life of Marievna.

  After I had returned to Montparnasse from Spain and sent for Angeline to rejoin me, I began associating with a group of Russians who gravitated around the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Among these companions was a gifted young woman painter named Marievna Vorobiev. Outside the circle of her fellow Russians, Marievna seemed to have no friends in Paris. Pitying her loneliness, Angeline and I began inviting her to our home.

  By those who knew her, Marievna was regarded as a sort of “she-devil,” not only because of her wild beauty but also because of her fits of violence. When she took offense, she did not hesitate to kick or claw whoever she thought had injured her—suddenly, without argument or warning.

  I found Marievna terribly exciting, and one day she and I became lovers.

  In 1917, I left Angeline and lived with Marievna as my wife for half a year. Inevitably, it was an unhappy union, filled with an excruciating intensity which sapped us both. At last we agreed that it was impossible for us to live together any longer. Before we parted, however, Marievna asked for one last tryst. But this meeting proved frustrating because she had begun to menstruate.

  As I was leaving her hotel room, intending to return to Angeline, Marievna embraced me. A knife was hidden in her sleeve, and as I kissed her for the last time, she carved a wide gash in the back of my neck, in the same place where, years before, the mounted policeman of Díaz had struck me with his sword.

  All at once I began to hear many small golden bells ringing, each note clearer than the one before, the carillon ending with a cathedral-like chime whose reverberations seemed to penetrate to the center of my brain. And then dead silence.

  As I lay on the floor unconscious, Marievna cut her throat.

  Neither of us died, however. A few days later Marievna was again sitting at the café tables with a bandage around her neck which, the war having just ended, was quite in fashion. On the day of the Armistice, I saw Marievna celebrating the return of peace in the Paris streets, the cynosure of a throng of white, yellow, and black soldiers, all rejoicing in their escape from further risk of death.

  About six months after I had resumed living with Angeline, Marievna began taking a stand before the door of our house. She would display herself there day and night. It was not long before I was aware of the increased size of her abdomen and realized the purpose of her action. She was pregnant and she was accusing me of deserting her with child.

  When the child, a girl, was born, Marievna exhibited her as living proof of my infamy. She succeeded in turning many of my friends, Ehrenburg included, against me. Not content with this, when Mexican officials came to Montparnasse to coat themselves with esthetic varnish, Marievna complained to them about the terrible thing she said I had done.

  Ashamed of the awful behavior of their compatriot and enraptured by the beauty of Marievna’s work, they purchased many of her paintings to compensate her for the damage done to her by Rivera. She achieved similar results with sentimental American collectors. They began pestering me with appeals to repent and help her. Of course, I paid no attention to them. The child Marika, now grown up and married, is a lovely woman and an accomplished dancer. For many years, she too wrote me letters and sent me photographs in the hope of softening my flinty old heart. I never responded. The past was past. Even if, by the barest chance, I was really her father, neither she nor Marievna ever actually needed me.

  Som
e years after we parted, Marievna met and captured the hearts of both Maxim Gorky and his son. Marievna loved the virility of Gorky fils and the genius of Gorky père. In their contest for Marievna’s favors, father and son became permanently estranged. Because the son was a Bolshevik at that time, the father became an anti-Bolshevik, and it was years before he returned to Russia after it became Soviet.

  AN END AND A BEGINNING

  DURING THOSE six STORMY MONTHS with Marievna, I had done almost no work. Now I put all my energy again into my painting. Unfortunately, the painting I was now doing found no buyers. Angeline and I were down and out. Our flat was bitingly cold. When our little son, born just before my affair with Marievna, became sick, there was no money for doctors or medicine or, for that matter, for food, and the baby died.

  This innocent death terribly depressed me. I had looked forward to the birth of Angeline’s child. In 1917 I had done a series of three portraits of her to commemorate her motherhood, the first showing her before her pregnancy, her sensitive face tilted at an angle above her long, slender neck in a characteristic attitude for which our friend Serna had affectionately nicknamed her “The Bluebird.” The second showed her during pregnancy and accentuated the maternal roundness of her belly. In the third portrait, I painted her with our son Diego, Jr., her breast exposed, and the child suckling.