|
1950
|
Dream of Peace and Unity: the Last
Journey
|
|
|
|
When in 1950 Frida Kahlo had to spend
nine months in hospital after several spinal column operations, Rivera,
who was having a very productive phase, took a room in the hospital and
stayed there almost every night. While continuing with the frescoes in the
National Palace he illustrated, together with Siqueiros, the limited
edition of Pablo Neruda's great epic poem Canto General and
designed its cover.
|
Pre-Hispanic America
(Book cover for Pablo Neruda's "Canto General")
1950
|
|
|
Early in 1951 Rivera received a new
mural commission - the decoration of a waterworks scheme in Chapultepec
Park, which would collect water from the Lerma as drinking water for
Mexico City. The new type of construction of this distribution system was
intended to conform not only to practical and technical but also to
aesthetic standards, and set the artist a great challenge in the
decoration of the cistern basin, its floor and walls, and a tunnel. The
mural Water, Origin of Life would for the most
part be underwater, and so Rivera used an experimental technique with a
combination of polystyrene and a rubber solution. The theme was homage to
the life-creating power of water. In the well in front of the pumping
station he executed the relief Tlaloc the Rain God, using a pre-Columbian mosaic technique with variegated stones.
|
1948 |
|
Rivera's work in stone mosaic, a
technique that he had first adopted at "Anahuacalli" in 1944 then in
Chapultepec Park, was continued in a project planned on a larger scale in
1951/52 but only executed in small part. The commission was for the
decoration of the outer wall surface of the new Mexico University stadium,
for which Rivera depicted the evolution of sport in Mexico from the
pre-Columbian period to modern times and designed various motifs relating
to sport in numerous preparatory drawings. Only the central part of the
frontal piece of the whole design was actually executed in mosaic relief,
the funding of the project being cancelled at this point.
|
Water, Origin of Life
Figure Symbolizing the African Race
1951
|
Water, Origin of Life
Figure Symbolizing the Asiatic Race
1951
|
Water, Origin of Life
The Hands of Nature Offering Water
1951
|
Tlaloc the Rain God
1951
|
|
|
During President Miguel Aleman's term of
office (1946-1950) Mexico openly turned towards Western capitalism,
departing from the traditional Mexican line and moving towards cultural,
economic and political modernization. Despite this, Rivera continued to
paint murals from an unequivocal Mexicanist viewpoint, as in History of
the Theatre in Mexico on the facade of the Insurgent
Theatre, where he symbolized the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. Even
when in 1950 he was chosen with Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and Orozco to
represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the National
Prize of Plastic Arts, the most important state prize, given annually to
Mexico's foremost artists, Rivera did not renounce his opposition to state
policy.
In 1946 he had applied for readmission
to the Mexican Communist Party. His application was rejected, as was his
later reapplication with Frida Kahlo. But while Kahlo was accepted in
1949, yet another application by Rivera was rejected in 1952. Early in
July 1954 Rivera took part with Kahlo in a declaration of solidarity with
the government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Participation in a protest
against the CIA's intervention in Mexican affairs was the last public
appearance of Rivera's partner. Frida Kahlo died on 13 July at the age of
47. During the vigil over her body in the Palace of Fine Arts her
political friends, with Rivera's agreement, spread the Communist flag over
the coffin. In the sensation caused by this incident, Rivera's renewed
petition for readmission to the Mexican Communist Party was successful.
His first work after renewal of party membership was the large painting
Glorious Victory, depicting the fall of Arbenz in poster style. Rivera
sent this propaganda painting on tour to several countries of the Soviet
bloc; it disappeared after the last showing in Poland.
|
|
History of
the Theatre in Mexico
1953
|
|
|
To this same year belongs the easel work
The Painter's Studio, showing Rivera's work-room, with
a model lying stretched out on an easy-chair surrounded by
threatening-looking figures of Judas. This work's title indicates the increasing importance of
the artist's studio as a workplace in these years. Not only his age but also the state of his health made
work on monumental walls in the open more difficult for him, and so in his
last years easel painting became his favoured medium.
|
Diego Rivera in his
studio
1956
|
The Painter's Studio
1954
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Since the end of the 1940s he had worked
on commissioned portraits, and during this period their number increased.
The fact that the artist so committed to Marxism attracted admirers even
in distinguished society is surely one of the most surprising of all the
contradictory facets of Rivera's life. He was a favourite artist not only
with American collectors who had been buying his portraits of Mexican
children in Mexico ever since the late 1920s, but also, in the 1950s,
above all with prosperous Mexicans, who commissioned portraits of their
wives and children from him. These works are those of an artist who now
painted "bourgeois pictures for the bourgeoisie", showing us "a kind of
X-ray image of a new class at the very moment it was coming into
existence, a class that acquired wealth through the onset of
industrialization, and employed 'the Mexican' as a cosmetic element, a
facial paint which was the exclusive fashion of filmstars, politicians'
wives and a few intellectuals".
Two typical such portraits are Sra. Dona Elena Flores de Carrillo, wife of the then rector of Mexico University, and
her daughter Elenita Carrillo Flores.
Almost all periods of Rivera's career
include portraits. Besides numerous portrayals of historical figures in
the murals, which served primarily political purposes, he began to paint
portraits of persons close to him, friends and acquaintances, at a very
early stage, during his years in Europe. In these works he sought to bring
out the subjects' fundamental characteristics. Sometimes he emphasized
certain parts of the body in an almost expressionist way, as in the
extraordinary Portrait of Lupe Marin, depicting
his former wife sitting in front of a mirror, a recurring motif in his
portraits. In this one the artist seems intentionally to refer to various
artists of the past: in the exaggerated proportions and the very pose, to
El Greco; in the mirrored reflection, to works by Velazquez, Ingres and
Manet; while the complex structure of the
composition, with its intersecting and linked planes and axes, points to
Cezanne.
Having immortalized Lupe Marin and his
daughters Guadalupe and Ruth in the gigantic historical mural in the Hotel
del Prado, in 1949 Rivera painted the large-sized full-figure Portrait
of Ruth Rivera. The subject stands in the manner of a
figure from Classical Antiquity, wearing a white tunic and thonged
sandals, in front of a round mirror which reflects her profile in
brilliant yellow, strikingly resembling the Maya profiles seen in
pre-Columbian sculpture and reliefs.
|
|
Sra. Dona Elena Flores de Carrillo
1953
|
|
Elenita Carrillo Flores
1952
|
Portrait of Lupe Marin
1938
|
Diego Rivera with his daughter Ruth
1949
|
Portrait
of Ruth Rivera
1949
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The mythological impact that this
painting makes is in sharp contrast to most of Rivera's other female
portraits where, as in
Portrait
of Cuca Bustamante
(1946), the subject is
frequently shown in brightly coloured Mexican costume or there is a
heightened Mexican ambience with exotic flowers and fruit. In paintings of
the latter category, parallels are often drawn between background
attributes and the women portrayed: the pose and the white, close-fitting
evening dress of Natasha Gelman, for example, wife of a famous and
prosperous film-producer, take up the elegant form of the calla lilies
providing the prominent background, which at the same time symbolize the
nature of the fine woman. The figure of Machila Armida,
a good friend of Kahlo and Rivera, said to have conducted a number of
light-hearted affairs, is portrayed in Macuilxochitl as a machila
flower in a "testimonial of love", as the inscription in the picture has
it, and surrounded with exotic fruits and flowers. She herself becomes a
part of this splendour, for the colours of her green dress, red mantilla
and pink skin, reminiscent of the paintings of Renoir, are identical with
those of the flowers and fruit. In these works Rivera refrains from his
penchant for historical narrative and reveals himself as an extremely
sensual painter, letting his feelings and fantasies flow freely into his
compositions.
|
 |
 |
Shortly after he was found to have
cancer, on 29 July 1955 Rivera married the publisher Emma Hurtado. To her in 1946 he had ascribed the rights in all his
paintings and drawings that were not the property of a client, for display
in the Diego Gallery which she had opened for the purpose of selling his
work. With his new wife he made a trip to the Soviet Union later in 1955
to undergo an operation and cobalt treatment; he had a great belief in
Soviet medical achievements and hoped for a cure of his cancer. On his
return journey he visited Czechoslovakia, Poland and East Germany,
becoming a corresponding member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin.
|
|
Portrait
of Cuca Bustamante
1946
|
Portrait of Natasha Zakolkowa Gelman
1943
|
|
|
Some of the drawings he made on this
trip were later used in oil paintings, among them Ice Lingering on the
Danube at Bratislava (1956). Whether May Day Procession in Moscow was the original title for another oil painting dating
from this period, however, is questionable. Rivera returned to Mexico at
the beginning of April and so did not again attend the Moscow May Day
celebrations. The colourful procession depicted in this work is more
likely to have been a peace rally in these years of the Cold War, and the
giant blue balloon which is carried by the demonstrators, displaying the
word "peace" in various languages, would seem an indication of this. In
its entire composition and palette, it is a thoroughly optimistic picture,
and seems to express Rivera's own mood after receiving cancer treatment in
the Soviet Union, an awareness of life that also enters a number of
drawings of doves of peace belonging to this year. The artist appears to
sense that his life is approaching its end, and feels a need to make peace
with the world.
On Rivera's return to Mexico, Dolores
Olmedo, a good friend, placed her house in Acapulco on the Pacific coast
at his disposal, and here he spent the next few months in recuperation.
Besides some mosaic decorations in stone with pre-Columbian themes for his
hostess's house, he painted a large number of sunsets - small-size oils in
extraordinary colours, views from the terrace onto Acapulco Bay (ill.
p.91). In these almost miniature-like works too, the emphasis is on peace,
on the artist's love for life, nature and his country, his need for
harmony and tranquillity.
|
|
May Day Procession in Moscow
1956
|
|
After his return to the capital Emma
Hurtado exhibited these new works in her gallery in what, together with a
show in honour of his seventieth birthday, was his last exhibition. Rivera
spent the birthday itself quietly with family and close friends. The
writer Efrafn Huerta, who accompanied him on that day on a visit to his
birthplace. Guanajuato, wrote later: "Diego wept, and there was a scarcely
discernible trembling of the lips. We were in Guanajuato, opposite the
house where he was born seventy years ago. And since then I have felt
admiration for men who can weep. Twenty years ago I saw him run the length of Cuba Street
chasing a fascist after a very stormy meeting in Santo Domingo Square. And
since then I've known that he is a brave and worthy man. Digno [Worthy]
Rivera, he ought to be called. Or an M between his names would make a
perfect name for him: Digno Mexicano Rivera [Worthy Mexican Rivera]."
Carlos Pellicer
1942
|
On 24 November 1957 Rivera died of a
heart infarct, in his studio at San Angel Inn. Hundreds of Mexicans
attended his funeral, as they had Frida Kahlo's. The terms of his will
were not observed. He was buried in the Rotunda of Famous Men (Rotonda de
los Hombres Ilustres) in the Civil Pantheon of Mourning (Panteon Civil de
Dolores); his ashes were not mingled with those of Frida Kahlo in the
"Blue House" which, like the building and collection at "Anahuacalli", he
had bequeathed one year after his wife's death to the Mexican people as a
museum. The writer Carlos Pellicer, a friend of his
since 1922, had taken on the task of turning the two houses and their
collections into museums.
|
In the course of time Rivera's work came
to be seen as inseparably linked with Socialist Realism, and it must be
conceded that his political standpoint and the themes of his murals would
seem to support this. The style of his mural work, however, and indeed,
his whole aesthetic, founded on his studies of Italian Renaissance
frescoes, classical proportion, pre-Columbian sculptural forms, Cubist
handling of space and Futurist representation of movement, ultimately have
little in common with Socialist Realism. His work contains not only
observation of social circumstance but also complex allegorical and
historical narrative. Consideration of his oeuvre as a whole clearly
indicates that, out of the many different techniques he mastered. Rivera
evolved his own completely individual style. His view of the world, of the
humanistic role that he saw for the artist and art in society, were
intuitive above all. and produced a universal art that still retains its
force today.
|
|
Evening
Twilight at Acapulco
1956
|
|
|
|
