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1932
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From Recognition to Renown |
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After their return from the United
States, Rivera and Kahlo moved into the new studio-house that had been
built in 1931 by Rivera's friend, the young architect and painter Juan
O'Gorman. This building, comprising two square blocks in Bauhaus style, in
the San Angel Inn quarter then lying outside Mexico City to the south,
today houses the Diego Rivera Museum-Studio. Frida Kahlo lived
in the smaller blue block, linked by a metal overhead walkway to the
larger block which was decorated in Mexican pink. Here on the top floor
Rivera set up a spacious studio with plenty of light which provided him
with ideal conditions for painting easel works over the next few years.
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Diego Rivera
Museum-Studio, 1939 |
Diego Rivera and Frida
Kahlo Museum-Studio, 1939 |
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Both politically and artistically,
Rivera was now in a difficult situation. He had been rejected by the
Soviet Union, the political ideals of which had played a central part in
the themes of his murals for a number of years, because he would not
espouse the Stalinist ideal of Socialist Realism. He had been expelled
from the Moscow-oriented Mexican Communist Party as a
counter-revolutionary artist who would not toe the line. And finally, he
had been disillusioned by his experiences in the United States, the land
of modern industry; the destruction of his mural in the Rockefeller Center
wounded him profoundly.
In November 1934 Rivera returned to his
work on the main stairwell of the National Palace in Mexico City, and
successfully completed it a year later.
He had been commissioned in 1929, by the then interim president, Emilio Portes Gil, to paint the three arched wall areas of the stairwell. Here he
painted Epic of the Mexican People, three thematically linked murals having the effect of a triptych, allegorically
depicting the history of Mexico in a chronological sequence of
paradigmatic episodes. Beginning work in 1929 on the north wall, he
depicted Pre-Hispanic Mexico - The Early Indian World
as a paradisal time; on the main wall he painted (1929-1931) History of
Mexico from the Conquest to 1930, showing the cruelty of the
Spanish Conquest and Christianization, the dictatorship of the
oligarchic regime, and the conclusive Revolution; in Mexico Today and
Tomorrow (1934-1935) on the south wall he pointed to a
future in accordance with Marxist ideals. No spot could have been more
fitting for such a theme than the seat of executive power of the Mexican
State, which the Conquistadores set up where the palace of the last Aztec
ruler, Montezuma, had stood before they destroyed it. Used by Cortes as his HQ, the
building later became the residence of the Spanish viceroys and then the
seat of government for successive Mexican heads of state. The National
Palace occupies the entire east side of the main square of Mexico City,
Zocalo Square, on the north side of which the colonial Cathedral is built
on the foundations of the principal temple of the Aztecs. Rivera founds
his view of the past in a historical-dialectical materialism, which stands
closer to Hegelian idealism than to Marxism. In this monumental series the
artist's conception of history is more forcefully articulated than in any
other work.
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Epic of the Mexican People
1929-1935
Pre- Hispanic Mexico - The Eatly Indian World
1929
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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Epic of the Mexican
People
1929-1935
Mexico Today and Tomorrow
1934-1935
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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Epic of the Mexican
People
1929-1935
Hiftory of Mexico from the Conquest to 1930
1929-1931
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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Epic of the Mexican
People
1929-1935
Hiftory of Mexico from the Conquest to 1930
1929-1931
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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Epic of the Mexican
People
1929-1935
Hiftory of Mexico from the Conquest to 1930
1929-1931
Palacio Nacional, Mexico City
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Some years later Rivera painted another
fresco series in the National Palace, on the arcaded upper floor of the
middle inner courtyard. The subject-matter of Pre-Hispanic and Colonial
Mexico (1942-1951) is predominantly
pre-Columbian culture, based on his preparatory studies of Mexican
pre-colonial codices.
Rivera's artistic development as a
mural-painter is strikingly demonstrated in the three distinct narrative
styles of this series in the National Palace. In the murals on the
stairwell main and north walls the conception of reality and the
historical scheme are conveyed in a unified pictorial language; in those
on the south wall, however, a polemical style appears, indicating the
artist's radicalization after his experiences in America. The style of the
third phase seen in the murals on the upper floor is markedly more focussed on narrative, and presents
pre-colonial societies as in a showcase, as idealized forms of ancestral
life.
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Pre-Hispanic and Colonial
Mexico
1942-1951
The Conquest or Arrival of Hernan
Cortes in Veracruz
1951
National Palace, Mexico City
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Pre-Hispanic and Colonial
Mexico
1942-1951
Totonac Civilization
1950
National Palace, Mexico City
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Pre-Hispanic and Colonial
Mexico
1942-1951
Huastec Civilization
1950
National Palace, Mexico City
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Pre-Hispanic and Colonial
Mexico
1942-1951
The Great City of
Tenochtitlan
1945
National Palace, Mexico City
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Having completed the murals in the main
stairwell of the National Palace in November 1935 and, with the exception
of one small-scale project, having no further mural commissions
outstanding, Rivera now devoted himself to easel painting. Between 1935
and 1940, using the most diverse techniques, he depicted customs and
scenes from the everyday life of the Mexican people, as in The Pinole
Seller, in which he created what seemed Mexican
archetypes. These are paintings reminiscent of Rivera's work during the
1920s.
By 1926 he had begun a new genre,
painting and drawing portraits of mostly Indian children or mothers; it
was evident that he had a fondness for these models and liked to express
it. He could convey an extraordinary degree of intimacy and tenderness
between his models, as in Portrait of Modesta and Inesita. Indian children, especially attractive subjects for most American
buyers, recur almost throughout Rivera's oeuvre, particularly in drawings, watercolours and small oils of the latter half of the 1930s. Technically
these predominantly small-sized works, easily transported, from time to
time left something to be desired; Rivera almost mass-produced them,
selling many to tourists for income with which to fulfil his collector's
passion for pre-Columbian objects.
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The
Pinole Seller
1936
Museo National de Arte, Mexico City
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Portrait of Modesta and Inesita
1939
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My
Godfather's Sons
1930
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Self-Portrait Dedicated to Irene Rich
1941
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The year 1939 brought an unusual
commission. Sigmund Firestone, an American engineer and art-collector who
had got to know the artist couple on a trip to Mexico, commissioned from
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera not, as might be supposed, portraits of his
family, but a self-portrait from each artist. The pair of pictures are
identical in size, of similar palette and of almost exactly the same
composition, with a plain yellow-coloured background. In both works a
painted piece of paper, a traditional feature of nineteenth-century
Mexican portrait-painting, which Frida Kahlo was particularly fond of
using in her work, bore a dedication to their friend. At the same time the
American actress Irene Rich asked Rivera for a self-portrait; it shows the
artist from a slightly different view-point but in the same clothing and
pose . If these works were photographs, they would be assumed to
be pictures taken from different positions at the same moment or one
shortly after the other.
At various stages of his career and in
various techniques, Rivera painted many self-portraits: rarely
full-length, most often head and shoulders. It is the face that holds
virtually the whole interest, without the distraction of background. In
none of these self-portraits is there any attempt to idealize, a tendency
that may be seen in his commissioned portraits of others; all are
distinguished by an extreme realism. The artist knew, particularly in his
older years, that he did not strike a handsome figure. In
The Tooth of Time
(1949) the different stages of his life are
recalled in the background behind the grey-haired head and furrowed face.
Not only does Frida Kahlo affectionately compare her partner to a frog in
Portrait of Diego (1949), but Rivera himself frequently features
his large protruding eyes in small caricatures of himself as a frog or
toad. In the self-portrait as a boy in the mural in the Hotel del Prado
(1947) he carries a toad in his jacket pocket; short notes and
messages are not infrequently signed "el sapo-rana", "the toad-frog".
In 1935 Rivera began a relationship with
Frida Kahlo's younger sister Cristina, and the former temporarily moved to
a separate residence and considered a separation; but then the couple came
together again through common political interests.
Rivera's differences with the Mexican Communist Party continued after his
return from the United States, and he was once again reproached for
representing the conservative position of the government. He repeatedly
clashed in public with David Alfaro Siqueiros, now as ever an energetic
advocate of the Stalinist line. Relations between the two artists reached
a showdown when they engaged in heated argument at a political meeting,
each armed with a pistol. In response to Siqueiros's charge that he was an
opportunist, Rivera for the first time revealed his reasons for breaking
with the Mexican Communist Party and his new orientation towards the
Trotskyist opposition. In 1933, during his stay in New York, he had got in
touch with the Communist League of America, the central Trotskyist
organization in the United States, and painted some frescoes for both it
and the New Workers' School run for the "Communist Party Opposition" by his
friend Bertram D. Wolfe. Since then he had become committed to the
Trotskyists and their political aims, and in 1936 he became a member of
the International Trotskyist-Communist League.
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1939
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Rivera and Kahlo now asked the Mexican
president, Lazaro Cardenas, to grant Leon Trotsky political exile.
Cardenas had been elected in 1934 and had introduced a programme of
political liberalization. The reforms carried through by his government
involved the first land redistribution in Zapata's sense since the
Revolution. Foreign firms that had acquired control of oil in Mexico were
expropriated and the entire oil industry was nationalized. Refugees from
the Spanish Civil War were welcomed. The president was prepared to grant
Trotsky asylum on condition that he did not become politically active in
Mexico.
In January 1937 Leon Trotsky and his
wife Natalya Sedova were received at the Kahlo family's "Blue House" in
Coyoacan, and stayed on there for the next two years. The couple sought
other accommodation in April 1939 when Rivera broke with Trotsky after a
number of personal and political arguments, the latter declaring that he
no longer felt any "moral solidarity" with the artist and his anarchistic
ideas. Before this break, however, Rivera and Trotsky had held joint
political meetings, and Manifesto: For a Free Revolutionary Art,
written by Trotsky, had been signed by Rivera and Andre Breton. Breton,
one of the leading lights of the Surrealist movement and a sympathizer
with the Trotskyist League, had met Trotsky through Rivera when staying
with the latter on a visit to Mexico with his wife, Jacqueline Lamba, in
the spring and summer of 1938. The three couples, Breton and Lamba,
Trotsky and Sedova, and Rivera and Kahlo, became friends and took trips
together in the Mexican provinces. Rivera's contact with Breton without
doubt lies behind the composition of two paintings of clearly Surrealist
character, Tree with Glove and Knife and The Hands of Dr
Moore, which were shown in 1940 at the International Surrealist
Exhibition organized by Breton and other Surrealist artists and writers at
Ines Amor's Gallery of Mexican Art.
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Diego Rivera and Frda
Kahlo
at a demonstration, 1936
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Diego Rivera, Leon
Trotsky, and Andre Breton,1938
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The Hands of
Dr Moore
1940
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The Temptations of
Saint Antony
1947
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