Myth Understood

 

Rather remarkable, isn’t it, that the work of such a grand, ambitious and, for the most part, successful artist as Diego Rivera (1886–1957) could ever be overshadowed. Yet it is, in two senses. First, he’s become better known in recent years as the domineering, philandering husband of Frida Kahlo, whose lush, intense and Henri Rousseau-esque paintings have in turn been overshadowed by her status as a cult heroine. Second, Rivera’s works—fresco murals the most significant among them—have been somewhat occluded by his own larger-than-life persona, whose metastasis into myth was largely mediated by Rivera himself.

How fortunate, then, that a corrective has arrived in the form of a huge, beautiful and thorough book. Diego Rivera: The Complete Murals, by Luis-Martín Lozano and Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera (no relation), is a bit of a physical chore to read—I’ll say why below—but just an hour’s perusal of the sumptuous illustrations should convince anyone that Rivera, for reasons not confined to scale and sentiment, is one of the true greats.

Rivera, born in Guanajuato City, Mexico, to descendants of conversos—Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism in Spain—was an art prodigy whose father set him up in a little studio before the boy could even read. At 20, on a scholarship sponsored by the governor of Veracruz, Rivera went to Barcelona to study. Naturally, and perhaps inevitably, he made his way to Paris, where he hung out with several of the usual suspects—including a fellow Spanish speaker named Pablo something or other—and became a pretty good Cubist painter.

In 1918, Rivera met the art historian Élie Faure, who bade him go to Italy to study the Renaissance Old Masters. What impressed Rivera more than any gold-framed canvas in a Florentine palace, however, were the church murals in small towns: free, accessible to the public and instructive to the illiterate. Inspired, Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921. From 1922 to 1926, he painted more than 100 fresco panels in the courtyard of the Secretaría de Educación Pública in Mexico City. As the historian Bertram D. Wolfe says in a quotation in The Complete Murals, “It was precisely that series... that made the Mexican artistic movement famous in America and Europe, as well as making Rivera’s name famous in every corner of the Western world.”

Nadia Ugalde Gómez, one of the several “co-authors” who contribute shorter essays to The Complete Murals, writes, “By the early 1940s, Diego Rivera had painted murals in 15 sites in Mexico and the United States and earned an international reputation.” That’s putting it mildly. In addition to producing paintings exhorting Mexicans of all shapes and shades to consider themselves one people and to expel capitalism from their land, Rivera created frescoes for—hold on to your hats—the American Stock Exchange Luncheon Club, in San Francisco; Rockefeller Center, in New York (old John D. himself ordered the work destroyed when Rivera refused to excise a head of Lenin nested within it); and the Fords of Detroit. All this, mind you, while being a member of Mexico’s Communist Party, albeit one who was ordered home from an official trip to the USSR for his anti-Stalinist politics.

Whatever his schizoid attitude toward patrons, Rivera—as revealed by The Complete Murals to those of us who haven’t seen them all in the flesh—is a magnificent artist. Inventive form, check. Rock-solid compositions, check. Faultless technique, check. Images of particular persons elevated to the universal; luminous color in a medium doomed by most practitioners to chalkiness; and sheer physical impressiveness—they’re all there. The big surprise for me is what you might call Rivera’s “lovely” side; there are some drawings—a charcoal portrait of the photographer Tina Modotti on page 140, for instance—that are nothing less than swoon inducing.