by Diego Rivera
A SECOND TIME WITH FRIDA
I HAD LITTLE TIME to think about the article because that very afternoon I received the bad news that Frida was extremely sick. Everything else flew out of my mind and I hastened to seek the advice of our good friend Dr. Leo Eloesser. Dr. Eloesser was very well known in California, both for his great professional skill and for the free service he gave to the poor. He advised me to arrange for Frida to come to San Francisco. He even telephoned her himself, informing her that he disapproved of the medical treatment she was receiving in Mexico.
When Frida arrived in San Francisco, she was suffering such severe pain that she could hardly move. Dr. Eloesser immediately placed her in St. Luke’s Hospital where, thanks to his ministrations, Frida rapidly gained. When she was up again, Dr. Eloesser advised a change of scene as the next step in therapy. He endorsed her choice of a visit to New York, which held many pleasant associations for her and where she had many friends. The excitement of New York kept her from dwelling on her unhappiness, and when she returned to San Francisco, she seemed her old self again.
Now I asked Dr. Eloesser what he thought had been making her ill and what could be done to help her stay well. The stresses and strains of the past months had borne on her heavily, but they were gone now, except for one—the fact of our separation. Dr. Eloesser explained to me that our separation had affected her gravely and might again weigh on her with bad results.
On hearing this, I resolved to try and persuade Frida to marry me again. Because of my love for her, I had already begged her several times to remarry me, but without success. Now Dr. Eloesser came to my aid. Our separation, he said truthfully, was having a bad effect upon both of us.
In fairness to Frida, he warned her, that though I loved her more than ever and while I ardently wanted her back, she should realize that I was an incorrigible philanderer and in that respect would never change. Some men, he explained, were simply incapable of sexual fidelity and from his medical knowledge of me, he could definitely say that I was one of these men.
Dr. Eloesser’s candor somewhat complicated my task of regaining Frida. But when she finally consented, it was with a clear appreciation of what she could expect. For her part, she asked for certain conditions: that she would provide for herself financially from the proceeds of her own work; that I would pay one half of our household expenses—nothing more; and that we would have no sexual intercourse. In explaining this last stipulation, she said that, with the images of all my other women flashing through her mind, she couldn’t possibly make love with me, for a psychological barrier would spring up as soon as I made advances.
I was so happy to have Frida back that I assented to everything, and on my fifty-fourth birthday, December 8, 1940, Frida and I were married for the second time.
MORE POPULAR THAN WENDELL WILLKIE
AFTER THE WEDDING, I returned to my work on Treasure Island and completed the mural three months after the exposition closed. A special day was set aside to present the work to the public. Thirty-two thousand automobiles crossed the span of the Bay Bridge to Treasure Island that day. At an average of three occupants per car, a possible total of 100,000 people came to the opening of this one-man exposition. I distinctly recall the comment of the Mayor of San Francisco as he looked over the surrounding sea of heads: “This Rivera is more popular than Wendell Willkie.”
Entitled “Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and South on This Continent,” the mural measured no less than eighteen hundred square feet. It was spatially my biggest work. Even so, I had originally intended to cover several times this amount of space so that the composition would encircle three walls of the City College Library, which Pflueger had designed with the idea of having me decorate it.
In this mural I projected the idea of the fusion of the genius of the South (Mexico), with its religious ardor and its gift for plastic expression, and the genius of the North (the United States), with its gift for creative mechanical expression. Symbolizing this union—and focal point of the whole composition—was a colossal Goddess of Life, half Indian, half machine. She would be to the American civilization of my vision what Quetzalcóatl, the great mother [sic] of Mexico, was to the Aztec people.
I depicted the South in the period before Cortés. The outstanding physical landmarks were the massive and beautiful snow-crowned Popocatépetl and Ixtaccíhuatl. Nearby were the temples of Náhuatl [sic] and Quetzalcóatl and the temple of the plumed serpent. Also portrayed were the Yaqui Deer Dancers, pottery makers, and Netzahualcóyotl, the Aztec poet-king of Texcoco who designed a flying machine.
The conquest of time and space was symbolized by a woman diving and the Golden Gate Bridge spanning San Francisco Bay. A Quetzalcóatl figure personified the continuity of Mexico’s ancient culture. This idea was elsewhere expressed in a portrait of Dudley Carter, an engineer who returned to a pure expression of plastics, using only primitive materials and implements, such as a hand axe. I also painted a portrait of my wife Frida, a Mexican artist of European extraction, looking to the native traditions for her inspiration. Frida represented the vitality of these traditions in the South as Carter represented their penetration into the North.
The kinship of the Mexican and American traditions was further represented by an old Mexican planting a tree in the presence of a Mexican girl, as an American boy looked on. Nearby I painted a portrait of Paulette Goddard, holding in her hands what she called in a press release, “the tree of life and love.” Representing American girlhood, she was shown in friendly contact with a Mexican man.
Just as the plastic tradition of the South penetrated into the North, the creative mechanical power of the North enriched life in the South. I depicted the greatness of the North in such engineering achievements as Shasta Dam, oil derricks, bridges set near the American peaks of Mount Shasta and Mount Lassen, and in portraits of such geniuses as Ford, Morse, and Fulton, the last two of whom were artists as well as inventors. The creative force of the United States and the emancipation of women were symbolized by a woman artist, a woman architect, and a sculptress.
In the lower part of this panel, I represented two scenes from that typical art form of the North, the movies. One was from Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator, showing in a tragicomic grouping Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin; the other from the Edward G. Robinson film Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Both works dramatized the fight between the democracies and the totalitarian powers. A hand rose up out of a machine as if to ward off the forces of aggression, symbolizing the American conscience reacting to the threat against freedom, in the love of which the history of Mexico and the United States were united. This concept was amplified in portraits of the great liberators—Washington, Jefferson, Hidalgo, Morelos, Bolivar, Lincoln, and John Brown.
Soon after the showing of this mural, a storm arose over the scene from The Great Dictator. As most people will recall, this movie was detested by reactionaries. The ladies of the Century Club, many of whom belonged to influential German-American families, publicly denounced the composition; and to insure my knowing their opinion, they sent a delegation of their oldest and most respectable members to berate me personally.
The local Junior Leaguers also held discussions of my mural, but they decided to approve it. They sent me a delegation of their loveliest and brightest young ladies to communicate their unanimous approval. Naturally, this group offset the ill effects of the previous one. It gave me considerable pleasure to hear one of the prettiest Junior Leaguers tell me, “We can’t understand how anyone can say that your concept in this painting is anti-American. We doubt if those who object to it have ever seen it. As anyone can plainly see, it’s as American as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”2
Before leaving California to return to Mexico, I painted two portraits, one in San Francisco and one in Santa Barbara. These were the last of my commissions in the United States up to the present time.
PIN-UPS, SALOON STYLE
HOME AGAIN, I immediately began preparat
ions for additional panels in the National Palace corridor, complementing the big fresco on the stairway. The theme of these new paintings was to be the history of Mexican agriculture from before the Conquest through the colonial era, and then from Mexico’s Independence from Spain to the present.
The research and documentation this entailed was so enormous that, to keep in practice, I did some easel paintings. The most interesting of these was a series of nineteen small oils, each depicting a separate movement in one dance by the wonderful-bodied American Negro dancer Modelle Boss. In addition to several newly commissioned portraits, I also completed my painting of Paulette Goddard, which had been interrupted by my forced vacation from Mexico.
I now began the actual labor on the National Palace mural, soon completing two whole panels. At the same time I managed to find time, after my day’s work, to do two other big frescoes in the new Cardiology Institute, with the history of cardiology as my subject.
On these panels, I used a scale of tones higher and brighter than any I had used before in fresco. The panel on the east wall represented cardiological knowledge in ancient times; the one on the west wall, modern developments in this science.
In both paintings, located in the main lobby of the Institute, I combined portraits of great cardiologists with notable events in the history of the study of the heart. Starting from ancient Greek, African, Chinese, and Aztec medicine, I projected a vision of future aspects of cardiology.
Another commission of these wartime years was a most unusual one: to paint a series of panels for the new Ciro’s night club in the Hotel Reforma. So that these paintings would harmonize with the atmospheric qualities of the room, I developed what I call my “saloon style,” a style expressing a mood of sexual freedom and exhilaration, through ensembles of form and color which marked a unique innovation in my career as a painter.
The subject matter of the Ciro’s panels consisted of isolated nudes of the kind then called “pin-up” girls which, however, I painted trying to retain the old plastic traditions. Pin-ups were to be found in many amusement places where the nouveau riche made merry on war profits. They were also hung on the walls and lockers of soldiers’ barracks, where women-starved boys prepared themselves for slaughter while the vulturous profiteers schemed to make more money out of their blood.
The simple meaning of these paintings has not yet been really understood, certainly not by the critics who made solemn—and to me, amusing—judgments on them. I did these paintings with a feeling of simple, sensuous joy. The women I portrayed at Ciro’s were to be appreciated as pin-ups—nothing more.
My models were not professional artists’ models. On the contrary, they belonged to the wealthiest families in Mexico. And they all confessed to the same reason for wanting to be painted nude on a barroom wall—a desire to be eternally naked in an excitingly lit room where men would uninhibitedly lust for them. Conscious of the passion her body aroused, each would always feel desirable, despite the changes and finally, the ravages of age. In my oils, she would remain forever youthful.
After completing this assignment, I was offered a job as art consultant by a big Mexican movie company. Despite the temptingly large salary, I rejected the offer, sensing that the job would contribute nothing to my growth as an artist.
A HOME FOR MY IDOLS
In 1945 I began to feel that I was nearing the end of my life’s adventure. My father had died at seventy-two, my mother at sixty-two, both of cancer. If, as I believed, heredity determined one’s life span, I must die of cancer soon, for I was nearing sixty. Fortunately, my theory proved mistaken.
My mind was preoccupied with two things which I wanted to do before the end. One was to paint Tenochtitlán, the ancient capital of Mexico, as it had originally been before the barbaric Spanish invaders destroyed its beauty. After a year and a half of preparation, I carried out this dream. One could not love a subject so deeply without painting it well, and I regard my painted vision of the ancient site as one of my masterpieces.
The second dream, one of thirty-five years’ standing, was renewed by the destruction wreaked everywhere by the war. It was to build a home for my anthropological collection, which I had started to assemble on my first return to Mexico in 1910.
So while the bombs menaced our very lives and made painting seem a thing of insignificance, Frida and I started a strange kind of ranch. Here we planned to raise our own food staples, milk, honey, and vegetables, while we prepared to build our museum. In the first weeks, we erected a stable for our animals.
The site we chose was near Coyoacán, right on top of a lava bed. Cactus sprang up profusely from the crevices in the stones. Nature had landscaped the area as if for our purpose, and I decided that our house should be in harmony with her work. Accordingly, we cut our stone from the basalt indigenous to the region. The structure would rise from the earth like an extension of its natural surface.
I designed the building in a composite of Aztec, Mayan, and “Rivera Traditional” styles. The squarely built exterior resembles an ancient Mexican pyramid of the pre-Cortés period.
The main floor is the museum where my sculptures of this period are displayed. The rooms here wind and open into each other like those of a labyrinth. Walled in unfaced stone, they are gray and dank. On the ceilings are white stone mosaics, mainly abstract in form. One of the mosaics, however, is of the rain god, Tlaloc, whose face I represented as a formation of two wriggling snakes.
The upper section is still to be completed. I intended it as my studio, where I could create my own sculptures to adorn the outside walls. But lack of time and money have so far prevented me from carrying out this part of my plan.
Surmounting all is a tower representing the god of air and open on all sides to the raw, cool drafts of mountain air. The cool and stony aspect of the place gives one the impression of being in an underground temple.
During the war, this building was “home” for Frida and me. After the war, it was converted exclusively into a home for my idols. Guided by Dr. Alfonso Caso, Mexico’s leading anthropologist, I passed many wonderful hours placing my statues in chronological order in the different rooms of the building. Dr. Caso and his associates were enthusiastic about my collection, declaring that while my dating of some pieces might be in error, I had shown an uncanny instinct for what was authentic and important. They rated the collection among the best in the world.
This venture, however, has almost impoverished me. The cost of maintaining the museum has been about $125 a week. With this outlay added to the $300 a month I gave Frida for household expenses for our home in Coyoacán and the forty dollars a month I paid for my daughter Ruth’s college tuition, I was left with hardly enough change to buy the daily newspaper.
People are under the impression that I am wealthy because I have sometimes paid as much as $250 for a single idol. But when I have made such a purchase, I have often, as a result, had to scrimp on necessities. Frida used to scold me sometimes for not keeping enough money to buy such prosaic things as underwear. But my idols have more than compensated me for their expense. Whenever I feel disgusted with some painting I have done, I have only to look at them and suddenly I feel good again.
By now, I have already spent more than fifty thousand dollars on the museum and still it is not complete. Most visitors are astonished to hear this low figure. However, I did so much myself: the architectural designs, the engineering, and even the overseeing of the actual work, thus cutting the cost of construction considerably.
Since beginning the project, I have put into it literally every penny I have earned above modest living expenses. Work on the museum halted during Frida’s illnesses, when the heavy medical and hospital bills virtually bankrupted me. However, when Frida was well and earning money from her own paintings, she would refuse to accept any money from me, and I would go on idol-buying sprees. All in all I have spent about one hundred thousand dollars on my collection—apart from the building itself.
I calculate that another
forty thousand dollars will be required to complete the building. My plan is to give the museum to the state, provided it appropriates the money needed to finish it. My only other stipulation will be that I be allowed to supervise the final construction. If I cannot arrange a mutually satisfactory agreement with the authorities, I shall dynamite the building with my own hands rather than have it put to some stupid use at odds with the purpose for which I designed it.
A SUNDAY IN ALAMEDA PARK
IN 1947 I was commissioned to do a mural in the main dining room of the new Hotel del Prado. The theme I chose was “A Sunday in Alameda Park.” In the painting, I attempted to combine my own childhood experiences in the park with scenes and personages associated with its history.
Though a public park, the Alameda, during my childhood in the regime of the dictator Díaz, was actually restricted to the “better classes.” The poor were kept out by the police. I had more than once seen these unfortunates being hustled past the gate, and these scenes, which had incited my first anti-Díaz feelings, remained vivid in my memory. I had gone to the Alameda with my family and listened to the band concerts on the pleasant green. Chairs could be rented at twenty-five and fifty centavos, prices which my father, himself not a poor man, found exorbitant.
Under the rule of Cortés, in the very earliest colonial days, the monastery of San Diego had stood at the west end of the park. The structure included a crematorium where victims of the Inquisition were burned alive. But the stench of decomposing human flesh became intolerable to the residents of the surrounding fashionable streets, and the Church had been obliged to move its holy incinerator elsewhere. In 1848, the victorious United States army had camped in the park after the treacherous General Santa Ana, sabotaging the Mexican defense plan, had handed over the country to the invaders on a silver platter. Alameda Park had also been the scene of historical political demonstrations, among them the one organized by Ignacio Ramírez, later a minister in the Juárez government, to rouse the Mexican people to arms against the French invaders seeking to install Maximilian as a puppet emperor in 1862.