"'My homecoming aroused an aesthetic
rejoicing in me which is impossible to describe," wrote Diego Rivera
later. "It was as if I had been reborn; [. . .] I found myself at the
centre of a plastic world, in which colours and forms existed in total
purity. Everywhere I saw a potential masterpiece - in the crowds, the
markets, the festivals, the marching battalions, the workers in the
workshops, the fields - in every shining face, every radiant child. [. .
.] The first sketch I did filled me with astonishment. It was really good!
From then on I worked confidently and at peace with myself. All inner
doubt, the conflict that had so tortured me in Europe, had disappeared. I
painted as naturally as I breathed, spoke or sweated. My style was born
like a child, in a moment, with the difference that this birth took place
at the end of a painful, 35-year gestation."
Thus Rivera describes his new-found identity and the emergence of his new
style, in his old surroundings which were suddenly so new to him.
On his return to Mexico, Rivera was
immediately enlisted by Jose Vasconcelos to help carry out the
government's cultural policy; after ten years of civil war the minister of
education was in search of a new form of artistic presentation for his
programme. He had begun to put interested artists of the country to work
to use his Mexican ideology and humanist ideals in a programme of
wall-paintings, and was determined, through the comprehensive cultural
reform movement that he proclaimed, to support the social and racial
equality of the Indian population which had been the ideal of the
Revolution and, after centuries of Spanish-Christian blocking of Indian
cultural integration, to reclaim independent Mexican national culture. The
educational use of wall-paintings was an important instrument of his
policy; by this means he wished to demonstrate a break with the past,
although not with tradition, and above all, to establish a rejection of
the colonial epoch and nineteenth-century European culture.
In November 1921, together with other
artists and intellectuals like himself just returned from Europe, Rivera
was invited by Vasconcelos on a trip to Yucatan to visit the
archaeological sites of Chichen Itza and Uxmal. Vasconcelos accompanied
the group, and called on its members to familiarize themselves with the
artistic heritage of Mexico, since this would form the basis of their
future work. In response to the promptings of Vasconcelos, whom he
accompanied on further trips to the provinces, and in search of new
possibilities of expression by means of which he could communicate
with the population of his country,
Rivera began to conceive plans for an art that would serve the people, and
show it its own history in wall-paintings.
In January 1922, six months after his
return from Europe, Rivera began work on his first mural, Creation, in the National Preparatory School (Escuela Nacional
Preparatoria), the upper school of the former College of San Ildefonso in
Mexico City. His work here was the prelude and touchstone of the so-called
Renaissance of Mexican mural painting. While a number of other artists
worked on the walls of the inner courtyard, Rivera spent about a year in
completing the experimental fresco in the Bolivar Amphitheatre at the
school. For this first as for almost all his later
murals Rivera, a skilled draughtsman, developed his design in preparatory
drawings in charcoal and red chalk, in the manner of the artists of the
Italian Cinquecento. While in the easel works that Rivera painted in the
first months after his return to Mexico themes from Mexican everyday life
are predominant, in this mural he depicts Christian and European subjects,
a vivid Mexican colourf ulness and various Mexican figure-types in order
to provide contrast. This is a work in which Nazarene stylistic elements
are evident, and in the execution of which Rivera found his Italian
studies of great use.