For the depiction of Woman or
Eve the artist had taken as his model Guadalupe Marin, with whom he now began a liaison, following relationships with
other models. In June 1922 Rivera and the Guadalajara-born Lupe Marin were
married and took a house in Mixcalco Street, just outside the main square
of Mexico City, Zocalo Square. From their five-year marriage two
daughters, Guadalupe and Ruth, were born in the middle of 1924 and at the
beginning of 1927.
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Edward
Weston
Guadalupe Marin de Rivera,
first wife of Diego Rivera
1924
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In these first as in all his subsequent
frescoes Rivera's detailed knowledge of Mexican traditional art combines
with his skilful use of contemporary elements of plastic style. His work
of the next few years critically depicts the past as well as the present,
and conveys the Utopian conviction that man can creatively change society
to achieve a belter and more just future. Rivera uses Marxist theory in
shaping the themes of his murals, although his biographers Bertram D.
Wolfe and Lolo de la Torriente assert that he himself never read Marx and
was reluctant to accept dogma of any kind. However, through the
Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers. Painters and Sculptors (Sindicato
revolucionario de trabajadores tlecnicos, pintores y escultores), which he helped
to found in autumn 1922, he was soon confronted with communist ideology.
The Mexican painter David Alfaro
Siqueiros, whom Rivera had met in Paris at the beginning of 1919 and whose
view of the Mexican Revolution and the task of a truly Mexican art and its
social value he shared at the time, had returned from Europe in September,
to join the figures who formed the intellectual elite of the new artists'
movement - Carlos Merida, Amado de la Cueva, Xavier Guerrero, Ramon Alva
Guadarrama, Fernando Leal, Fermm Revueltas, German Cueto and Jose Clemente
Orozco. Like many other Latin American avant-garde groups, the newly
founded trade union, emulating its European counterparts, published a
manifesto, the text of which, expressing the common denominator of its
artist-members' ideals, Siqueiros had composed in Spain. In 1924 the
news-sheets that the union printed and distributed grew into the newspaper
El Machete, which later became the official organ of the Mexican
Communist Party. In its first form it served to proclaim the union's
position as an organic entity between artistic and political revolutions.
At the end of the year 1922 Rivera joined the Mexican Communist Party and
together with Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero he formed its executive
committee.
In March 1922 Vasconcelos announced the
major project of the first decade of the mural movement in Mexico, the
wall-decoration of the two inner courtyards of the Ministry of Education (Secretaria
de Educacion Publica or SEP); its new buildings had been opened the year
before. He placed Rivera in charge of the project. With a team of
assistants Rivera was to paint 117 spaces, a total surface area of almost
1600 square metres (over 17,000 square feet), on the arcaded walls of the
two inner courtyards, one lying behind the other, of the huge three-storey
complex. Work on the project, in which Rivera set out to supply a hitherto
non-existent national revolutionary iconography, took over four years to
eventual completion in 1928.
The thematic programme for the ground
floor of both courtyards, whose murals are works of simple design and
concentrated expressive power in classical figurative style, consists of
motifs of revolutionary ideals and Mexico's Indian heritage. The
smaller court, which Rivera called the "Court of Labour",
contains depictions of the everyday life of the Mexican people - working
scenes of rural, industrial and craft activities in the different
provinces and the struggle to improve living conditions. The larger "Court of Fiestas" contains scenes of traditional Mexican
folk festivals.
Since Rivera's daily remuneration
amounted to only two dollars a day. he now began to sell drawings,
watercolours and also paintings to collectors, predominantly North
American tourists. These were often sketches or preliminary designs for
murals. Mexican and indigenous motifs that occur in murals also appear in
the same or similar form in easel works: Tehuantepec Woman Washing
(1923) is akin in subject-matter to the mural Bathing
at Tehuantepec near the entrance to the elevator of the Ministry
building. Woman Grinding Maize (1924) is identical
with a detail of Potters on the east wall of the same building in
the "Court of Labour". In both scenes Indian women are depicted in one of
their everyday activities in Rivera's typical so-called "classical" style.
What begin as flattish figures become increasingly modelled and solid.
Multiple use of individual motifs is seen in the "Court of Fiestas" and
becomes frequent in the later cycles.
Tehuantepec Woman Washing
1923
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Woman Grinding Maize
1924
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In 1924, spurred by the political unrest
provoked by conservative groups, a party of upper school students carried
out an attack on the murals by Orozco and Siqueiros in the inner courtyard
of the Preparatoria and demanded the cessation of all mural projects.
Interviewed by the press about the incident, Rivera, seen as the most
prominent figure in the mural movement, who on completion of the work in
the Preparatoria had been appointed director of the Education Ministry's
Department of Plastic Arts, sharply criticized the attack. Vasconcelos,
now less and less in agreement with Obregon's policies, resigned from the
Ministry. For the moment, the conservatives had achieved their goal: the
mural project was stopped and most of the painters were dismissed. Many of
them, like Siqueiros, left Mexico City to seek work in the provinces. Only
Rivera, who had managed to convince the new education minister, Jose Maria
Puig Casauranc, of the project's importance, kept his post so that he
could complete the decoration of the Ministry.
On the first floor of the SEP building
are depictions of the coats of arms of the States of the Mexican
Federation, together with some less spectacular representations of the
theme of "Intellectual and Academic Work". On the second floor is another
narrative cycle; in Corrido of the Revolution, divided into two
sections, the Agrarian Revolution and the Proletarian
Revolution, extracts from a popular ballad are written on painted
strips, which wind like a garland through successive panels and link them
together. This plastic depiction of the corrido, a four-line
ballad-like musical genre familiar to all Mexicans, was a radical artistic
innovation that addressed a largely illiterate population and accustomed
it to receiving news by means of verses and of songs.
The Proletarian Revolution, which
consists of scenes of revolutionary struggle, the setting up of
cooperatives and victory over capitalism, opens with what is probably the
best known mural of the whole cycle,
The Arsenal-
Frida Kahlo Distributes Arms. In the only
landscape-format mural of the series Rivera portrays friends and comrades
of the circle around Julio Antonio Mella, the exiled Cuban Communist
living in Mexico. At the centre of the mural stands Frida Kahlo,
distributing arms and bayonets to the workers who have decided to fight.
Rivera had met Kahlo, who became his wife a year later, in 1928 through
the progressive circle of artists and intellectuals he depicted. She
joined the Mexican Communist Party in the same year, and Rivera shows her,
like the other Party members, with the red star of the Communist activist
on the breast. At the left edge of the painting David Alfaro Siqueiros,
Rivera's like-minded colleague, wears the uniform of an army captain,
which he had actually been in the revolutionary years around 1915; Mella,
who was murdered in the street in Mexico City on 10 January 1929 on the
orders of the Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado, stands at the right edge
next to his partner Tina Modotti, who hands bandoleers to comrades.
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The Arsenal- Frida Kahlo
Distributes Arms
1928
Political Vision of
the Mexican People
Ministry of Education, Mexico City
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