In January 1907 Diego Rivera took ship
for Spain. Later the artist described his euphoria: "I remember, as if I
saw it from another point in space, outside myself, a dimwit of twenty, so
vain, so full of the blackheads of youth and dreams of being master of the
universe, just like all the other fools of his age. The age of twenty is
simply ridiculous, even when you're talking of Genghis Khan or Napoleon .
. . Diego Rivera, standing erect on the foreship of the Alfonso XIII,
looking at the ship and how she cleaves the water, her wash foaming
behind her, bawling out passages from Zarathustra in the face of
the profound and melancholy silence of the ocean, is the most pathetic and
kitschy thing I know. That was me . . ."
For two years after his arrival in Spain
Rivera absorbed the most diverse influences, incorporated into his work
what he found useful, and espoused many of the most important aesthetic
movements and trends of the day. In Madrid he started working in the
studio of the leading Spanish Realist Eduardo Chicharro у Agiiera, to whom
Murillo had given him a letter of introduction. This symbolist painter of
Spanish costumbrista (regional genre) subjects took Rivera as a
pupil, and encouraged him to travel in Spain in the years 1907 and 1908.
The intellectual curiosity of the young
painter, and his capacity for learning equally from old masters and from
contemporary trends, is reflected in the variety of styles with which he
experimented in the next few years. In the Prado he studied and copied
works by Goya, especially the late "Black Paintings", El Greco, Velazquez
and the Flemish masters. When Rivera met the Dada writer and critic Ramon
Gomez de la Serna, one of the outstanding figures of Madrid's literary and
artistic bohemia, he began to move in Spanish avant-garde circles, whose
leading artistic representatives, Pablo Picasso, Julio Gonzalez and Juan
Gris, had actually lived in Paris for the last few years.
In spring 1909 Rivera followed his new
friends to France, after which he returned to the peninsula for only short
and sporadic periods, although continuing to be in close touch with
Spanish artists and intellectuals. In Paris too he studied the museum
collections, visited exhibitions, attended lectures, and worked in the
free schools of Montparnasse and on the bank of the Seine.
In the summer of 1909 he visited
Belgium; in Brussels, home of the Symbolist artists, he painted House
over the Bridge, and met a young Russian painter six years older
than himself, Angelina Beloff. Born in St Petersburg of
liberal middle-class family, she had been trained as a teacher of art at
the St Petersburg Academy, and was now on her way to Paris, where for
twelve years she was to live as Rivera's first partner.
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Diego Rivera with Angelina Beloff,
1909
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Angelina Beloff, 1909
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House
over the Bridge
1909 |
Portrait of Angelina Beloff
1917 |
After a short visit to London, during
which he became acquainted with the work of Turner, Blake and Hogarth,
Rivera returned to France with Beloff at the end of the year. On a trip to
Brittany he painted among other works Head of a Breton Woman and
Breton Girl, showing his interest in
scenes typical of Spanish costumbrista painting. The technique of
chiaroscuro, learnt from Dutch seventeenth-century paintings in the Louvre,
is in evidence here.
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Head of a Breton Woman
1910
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Breton Girl
1910
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After the young artist had exhibited
with the Society of Independent Artists for the first time in 1910, he
returned in the summer of that year to Madrid. His grant expired in
August, at a time when he was preparing for his return to Mexico and
arranging transport of the works painted during his spell in Europe, which
were to be exhibited at the San Carlos Academy as part of the celebrations
of the centenary of Mexican independence being organized by Porfirio Diaz.
At the same moment Francisco I. Madero, the opposition's rival
presidential candidate, with his "San Luis Potosi Plan" exhorting the
people to seize arms, proclaimed the Mexican Revolution, which continued
for the next ten years. Despite the political turmoil now unleashed, which
forced Diaz's resignation in May 1911, the exhibition was a great artistic
as well as financial success for Rivera. The proceeds from the sale of his
pictures enabled him to decide on a journey to Paris in June 1911; he was
to spend ten further years in Europe, not to return to Mexico again until
the age of 34. The story that turns up in later biographies of his
fighting alongside the peasant guerrillero Emiliano Zapata, during the
brief period that he spent in Mexico at the beginning of the Revolution,
remains unproven.
In Paris Rivera set up house with
Angelina Beloff, and in the spring of 1912 went with her on a visit to
Toledo, where he met a number of Latin American artists living in Europe
and struck up a close friendship with his fellow-countryman Angel Zarraga.
The two made a study of the work of the Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga у
Zabaleta, and Rivera also felt strongly drawn to El Greco's painting,
which he took as his particular model. He accentuated the angles in his
landscapes of Toledo and his genre works, elongated his figures and picked
up El Greco's characteristic feeling for space. In View of Toledo
Rivera even used almost exactly the same viewpoint as
the Spaniard in his work of 1610-1614 of the same title. This painting displays the beginning of Rivera's interest in the
juxtaposition of spatial shapes and surfaces, which was eventually to lead
him to Cubism.
After returning to Paris, Rivera and
Beloff moved in autumn 1912 to 26 rue du Depart, a building in which
various Montparnasse artists had studios. Through the
work of his neighbours here, the Dutch painters Piet Mondrian, Conrad
Kikkert and Lodewijk Schelfhout, whom contact with Paul Cezanne had
brought to artistic maturity, Cubist influences reached Rivera. It was in
the year 1913 that his transition to analytical Cubism took place, when he attained an
understanding of Cubism that he then developed in some two hundred works
over the next five years. His attempts, following his first Cubist works,
to find a style containing both Cubist and Futuristic elements reached
their apogee towards the end of 1913 in the oil painting Woman at a
Well. In this as well as in most of the works that
followed it, he uses a brilliant palette, unusual in earlier Cubist works
by his contemporaries.
Rivera achieved a convincing, more
static presentation of simultaneity with a kind of compositional grid,
which he used in 1914 in works like Sailor at Breakfast. In this painting the grid is made up by the figure of a man with long
black hair and a moustache seated behind a table, wearing the
white-and-blue-striped shirt and cap with red pompom of the French sailor,
on which the word "patrie" is inscribed; he holds a glass in one hand and
on a plate before him lie two fish. This and other works of the time
clearly reflect the artist's friendship with Juan Gris, whom he had met at
the beginning of 1914. The synthetic Cubism of the Spanish artist from
whose pictorial language Rivera learned much is especially to be seen in
his use of the compositional method evolved by Gris. In his work of this
period Rivera attempts the Spaniard's typical grid covering the whole
picture, each individual area of the composition showing a different
object and perspective being consistently preserved within each area. The
mixture of paint with sand and other substances, the thick, opaque
application of paint and the use of a collage-like technique are further
reminders of Gris.
