My Art, My Life

by Diego Rivera

  Throughout this return crossing, the weather was ideal, and I took advantage of it to complete some canvases and water colors I had started in the Soviet Union.

  Enroute, there occurred an incident of perhaps only a minute’s duration which had a profound effect upon me. Gracielo, Siqueiros, and I were on deck watching a brilliant sunset. A glaring red ball suddenly bounded over the horizon of the sea and came to rest in a greenish-white bank of clouds. A few seconds afterwards another sphere shot into our view, then still another.

  Siqueiros cried, “Look, Gracita! Look, Diego! Those things are really small balls. If we could get them in our hands, we could play with them. Real balls, I tell you!”

  At that moment the conception of the National Palace stairway mural, which I had begun to plan in 1922, flashed to completion in my mind—so clearly that immediately upon my arrival in Mexico, I sketched it as easily as if I were copying paintings I had already done.

  The National Palace stairway rises broadly and majestically from a wide inner court, then forks at the first flight to right and left. For the wall of the right staircase, I envisioned Mexico before the Conquest: its popular arts, crafts, and legends; its temples, palaces, sacrifices, and gods. On the great six-arched central wall, I would paint the entire history of Mexico from the Conquest through the Mexican Revolution. At the triangular base, I would represent the cruelties of Spanish rule, and above that, the many struggles of my people for independence, culminating in the outer arches, in the lost war with the northern invaders, and the final victory over the French. The four central arches would show aspects of the Revolution against Díaz and its reverberations in the strife-torn years of Madero, Huerta, Carranza, Obregón, down to the ugly present of Plutarco Calles.

  On the wall of the right staircase, I would paint the present and the future. Naturally, I was less certain of the course to which the present tended than of the past. I would consume much time circling backward to find the right point from which the future could be projected until, after six years, my preliminary perspectives would be sharpened by the destruction of my mural in Rockefeller Center.

  During this third sea voyage to my homeland, I became sure of my future artistic medium. I also spent time clarifying my impressions of my sojourn in Russia. I began to understand the opposition of the Soviet painters toward me as a working painter in their country. And that helped me to understand better my place as a Mexican painter in mine.

  H. P.

  SHORTLY AFTER MY RETURN HOME in 1928, I was given a rather unusual and enjoyable commission: to design the scenes, props, and costumes for a ballet titled “H. P.” (the abbreviation for horse power). I had been recommended for the job by the composer Carlos Chávez, my association with whom was to have a ludicrous and unhappy ending several years later. My designs for “H. P.” included a cocoanut tree, a bag of money, horse power, downtown New York, a girl and boy from Tijuana, a banana, an American girl, a pineapple, sailors, sugar cane, a captain, tobacco, and cotton—quite a lot, in fact. “H. P.” was first performed in 1932 at the Philadelphia Academy of Music with Leopold Stokowski conducting. Afterwards I did an album of the costumes in color, which was purchased by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and donated by her to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  THE ASSASSINATION OF JULIO MELLA

  TOWARD THE END OF 1928, the personal lawyer of President Calles paid me a visit in my home, No. 8 Tampico Street. He had come to urge me to end my ardent personal campaign on behalf of the revolutionary general and guerilla fighter Rodriguez Triana. Triana, a foe of Calles, was an outstanding contender for leadership of the peasants’ and workers’ bloc, sponsored by the Communist Party.

  When Calles’ representative had finished expounding his client’s wishes, I told him quite calmly that I would support any political candidate I believed in.

  “Think about it carefully, Diego,” he said. “If you don’t curtail your activities, the Old Man is likely to give the order to stretch your throat.”

  I answered, trying to conceal my anger, “All right, tell Calles I know he has plenty of ropes and lots of hangmen. But tell him also that he’s mistaken if he thinks I can be frightened off. Don’t forget to report what else I’m going to tell you, either. I shall continue to do what I wish until the Communist Party itself throws me out for using the Party to make myself dictator of Mexico. I mention this possibility because I long ago asked for the privilege of leading the first uprising against Calles.”

  I suppose my outright defiance was more than the poor man had expected. He made a hurried exit. I was not hanged; I am still living and painting.

  As for Calles, he was later kicked out of power by my good friend Lázaro Cárdenas, recent President of Mexico. With appropriate civilian and military rites, he long ago descended into hell, where his smoldering body has an honor guard of reactionaries, his former enemies when he pretended to be a revolutionary.

  Throughout the following year, I was intensely involved in Party activities, the most memorable of which was in connection with the defense of Tina Modotti, who was placed on trial for the murder of Julio Mella. During this hectic period, I nevertheless managed to paint some frescoes in the Ministry of Health building, about which I shall speak first.

  These panels, done in the building’s Assembly Hall and covering over 350 square feet of wall and ceiling, comprised six large female nudes symbolizing Purity, Strength, Knowledge, Life, Moderation, and Health itself.

  Purity sat on the ground near a stream of clear water flowing over her hand. On the ceiling above her, looking downward, flew Life. Strength rested on the ground, full-bosomed, with sturdy thighs and powerful hands. Knowledge sat with her feet doubled under her, dreamily gazing at an open blossom in her hand. Near her and almost touching her face, was a snake coiled around a tree. Health was a seated figure with hands raised. Moderation was a tall, big-boned woman lying down, her eyes closed. In her hand she gripped a snake below the head from which darted its forked tongue; its body was clasped between her knees.

  Afterwards I designed four stained-glass windows for this same building. I tried, by blending the tints of colored glass, to create as plastic an effect as possible. To this end, I also used pieces of glass cut into curved segments to give the complete composition a symmetry of mobile lines.

  Julio Mella was a Cuban revolutionary leader who had fled the dictatorship of President Gerardo Machado. Mella had come to Mexico seeking refuge, and here he had met Tina Modotti, an excellent painter and photographer. I had been friendly with Tina before my trip to Russia; in fact, this friendship had been the final cause of Lupe’s divorcing me.

  Long before my return to Mexico, Tina and Mella had become lovers.

  In 1929, Julio Mella was assassinated, on President Machado’s orders.

  The Mexican government, however, chose not to see a political motive in the crime. It took the position that the murder was a crime of passion and indicted Tina, whose political views were offensive to the regime, as the murderess. The government’s case was based solely on the fact that Tina had been Mella’s most recent mistress. From this it deduced that Tina had tired of Mella, and had decided to bring their affair to an end by killing him.

  Because the case was being used to give a bad name to the Communist Party, its leadership took up Tina’s defense. It commissioned me to dig up the true facts behind Mella’s murder. With the assistance of friends, I was able to establish that the assassin of Julio Mella had been a Cuban gunman in the pay of the Machado government, sent by the chief of its secret service explicitly to perform the crime. My evidence, presented in court, ripped apart the net of speculations in which the prosecution had hoped to entrap Tina. The detective in charge of the investigation was forced to resign. And the Cuban government’s involvement in the intrigue was officially recognized in an order obliging the Cuban Ambassador to leave the country for one year.

  This was my last Party assignment. Before the year was over, I was to be expelled from th
e Party.

  I AM EXPELLED FROM THE PARTY

  As AN ARTIST I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.

  However, the immediate cause of my expulsion from the Communist Party was not a painting that I had done, but one I had failed to do.

  Toward the end of 1929 I was at work on one of the central arches of the National Palace stairway. My original sketch had shown a figure representing the Revolutionary Fatherland, holding a peasant in one arm and a worker in the other. In the course of the actual painting, I altered certain details which, in turn, made my symbolic representation of Mexico seem not quite right. For the figure of the Fatherland, I substituted a portrait of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, a former Governor of Yucatán, who had proved himself a true man of the people.

  Because of this change in my plan, charges were brought against me by a committee headed by Joseph Freeman. Of Freeman I will only say that when his time for clarification came, he also failed to satisfy the Party and was thrown out as, in fact, he had always deserved to be.

  My alteration in my mural was, of course, only one of a list of points which the Party had collected in my disfavor. Another was my public disapproval of the Party’s line regarding labor unions. The Party then favored dividing the unions into Communist and non-Communist ones, but I had maintained that this policy was unwise and that the working class should be kept united in unsegregated associations. A few years after my expulsion, the Party reversed itself and took the line I had been condemned for.

  Still another point against me was a statement I had made to the effect that I trusted no one and nothing and never could. My accusers asserted that a good revolutionary must have trust in his fellow men in order to inspire their faith and good will.

  However, I think that what brought me most in disfavor with the Party was a view I had aired which was in direct contradiction to an expressed belief of Stalin’s. Stalin had asserted that the capitalist countries would not attack Russia but would themselves be converted to communism on realizing its inevitable triumph. I had declared that an attack would come.

  Years later, after the Nazi invasion, Stalin realized how wrong he had been. He died, however, without forgiving me for having been right.

  On these and other charges, I was declared unworthy of Party membership.

  As time went on, my former comrades labeled me a Trotskyite—a political designation I found wryly amusing. For the Trotskyites had always reviled me as a Stalinist. Even after my expulsion from the Party, they regarded me as a secret agent of Stalin.

  Their charges against me went back to World War I, during which, they declared, I had collected diseased lice from dying men and dispersed them among the Italians and Poles from paper bags. Before 1920, according to my Trotskyite biographers, I had been poor and obscure. Then, somehow, I had come into a fortune in gold—of which I made a gift to Stalin. I had once, said these authorities, been married to a distant cousin of Stalin’s wife. Later, when I helped Trotsky come to Mexico, they declared it was in order to shadow him and report to Stalin everything Trotsky did.

  After Trotsky’s assassination, they spread a rumor that Trotsky had previously broken with me out of fear that I would kill him, but that he had made his move too late. All the details of Trotsky’s death were so expertly interpreted into evidence against me that sometimes even I almost believed the lie.

  For a Communist, there is only one way to relate to the Party—maintain the Party’s line against everything and everybody, never for a moment doubting its correctness. To hold a personal opinion at variance with the Party’s line means doubling one’s burden. It means that, while continuing to fight the enemies of the revolution, one incurs the enmity of friends to whom the slightest difference of view appears as a betrayal.

  This is no criticism of the Party. Had I stayed within the bounds of Party discipline, I would have voted for my own expulsion. Nevertheless, I differed in certain particulars with the Party and its leadership and could not be convinced that I was wrong. I defended my views up to the very moment the Party ousted me. In revoking my membership, the Party was merely carrying out its duty.

  I have always believed that one who has been expelled from the Party should be allowed to seek readmittance if he has reasonable grounds for re-entering. His expulsion from the Party does not necessarily mean a fundamental change in his thinking.

  After 1929, I continued to regard myself as a Communist in spite of my expulsion. Three times I applied for reinstatement in the Party. The first time my application was ignored. The second time it was weighed, and I was advised to try again in another year. I was encouraged to reapply a third time, also, by an opinion voiced by certain Party members that I might be useful to the Party.

  This third time I clearly set forth my attitude towards the Party in the documents of my application, which were published. I emphasized that my readmittance would encourage Party intellectuals who stood for free, progressive expression and attract new members to the Party who were opposed to excessive discipline. For a long time there was no answer—neither acceptance nor rejection. I kept on hoping that my application would finally be approved and at last, in 1955, I received word that it had been.

  I believe that my readmittance into the Party was directly related to the new basis of leadership in the Communist Party in Russia. Now that absolute one-man leadership has been done away with, anyone sincerely interested in working for Communist objectives is welcomed. The personal prejudices of a head man no longer have weight. This is as it should be.

  CUERNAVACA

  I WENT ON with my mural in the National Palace, and by the time I completed the arches, I judged it the finest thing I had ever done. I am still proud of this stairway mural. It is not for me, of course, to forecast the verdict of future times. Yet, like it or not, no one can deny that it represented a new approach to mural painting.

  The murals before it had all set isolated figures and groups of figures against large and quiet backgrounds. In this mural, I borrowed the architectonic movement of the stairway itself and related it to the dynamic upward ascent of the Revolution. Each personage in the mural was dialectically connected with his neighbors, in accordance with his role in history. Nothing was solitary; nothing was irrelevant. My National Palace mural is the only plastic poem I know of which embodies the whole history of a people in its composition.

  It is also the work which has consumed most of my time. I might leave it to paint other murals, but I kept returning to it—the last time in 1955—to make additions and changes. Because all its details are organically related, there are few alterations I can make that do not affect neighboring details. To my friends it has become a joke to say, “Have you heard the news? Diego has finished painting the stairway.”

  In 1930, I was called away from my work in the National Palace by Dwight W. Morrow, United States Ambassador to Mexico, to paint a wall of the Palace of Cortés at Cuernavaca, in the State of Morelos. I was given complete freedom of choice as to subject matter and a fee of 30,000 pesos (about $12,000) from which, however, I had to pay my assistants and buy my own materials and equipment.

  I chose to do scenes from the history of the region in sixteen consecutive panels, beginning with the Spanish conquest. The episodes included the seizure of Cuernavaca by the Spaniards, the building of the palace by the conqueror, and the establishment of the sugar refineries. The concluding episode was the peasant revolt led by Zapata. In the panels depicting the horrors of the Spanish conquest, I portrayed the inhuman role of the old, dictatorial Church. I took care to authenticate every detail by exact research, because I wanted to leave no opening for anyone to try to discredit the murals as a whole by the charge that any detail was a fabrication. In some of the panels my hero was a priest, the brave and incorruptible Miguel Hidalgo, who had not hesitated to defy the Church in his loyalty to the people and to truth.


  The panels were done on all three walls of an outer colonnade. Under the main panels I experimented with a pseudo bas-relief trim. I gave myself the task of integrating the movement of the figures with the rhythm of the architecture, with the movement of history in time and space, and with the movement of the landscape ascending from the valleys to the mountains. I was very happy with the outcome.

  My commission from Morrow had been arranged by my friend the American architect William Spratling. Spratling had come to live in Mexico and was seeking some way of earning his livelihood in my country. I expected him to accept the customary agent’s commission but he would not. Aware of his needs, I used an indirect means to make the payment. I asked him to buy me a house in Taxco, and then I signed the property over to him as a gift.

  Of the 23,000 pesos remaining to me after the purchase of the house, I spent 8,000 on the restoration of the colonnade, which was literally falling down. That left me 15,000 pesos on which to live, pay my assistants, and buy supplies during the seven months it took to do the murals. When the work was finished, I was flat broke.

  FRIDA BECOMES MY WIFE

  JUST BEFORE I WENT to Cuernavaca, there occurred one of the happiest events in my life. I was at work on one of the uppermost frescoes of the Ministry of Education building one day, when I heard a girl shouting up to me, “Diego, please come down from there! I have something important to discuss with you!”

  I turned my head and looked down from my scaffold.

  On the ground beneath me stood a girl of about eighteen. She had a fine nervous body, topped by a delicate face. Her hair was long; dark and thick eyebrows met above her nose. They seemed like the wings of a blackbird, their black arches framing two extraordinary brown eyes.