Art: Exit a Giant

With the death of Diego Rivera in Mexico City last week at 70, the Western Hemisphere lost its most commanding painter and one of its thorniest personalities. A huge, suave, slow-moving, spherical creature with great sophistication and prodigious energy, he made a practice of overwhelming women—and all opponents but the last. The rich enjoyed him as a comradely collector and bon vivant (he left a million-dollar estate plus a collection of pre-Columbian Indian art worth as much again). Beggars revered him as a man who courteously pressed folding money into their outstretched hands. Communist leaders kept booting him out of the party for insubordination and then taking him back because he was too voluble, intense and eloquent a liar to forfeit.* Churchmen abhorred him as a relentless enemy of religion.

No Boy. In his virtues, vices, boasts, buffooneries, lies and loves, Rivera was always flamboyant and noisy. Often he seemed only a big boy, but that was deceptive. And for the thousands of fellow Mexicans who referred to him affectionately as Diego, there were more thousands who called him Maestro. The second group honored Rivera’s art—uneven, grandiose, and yet perhaps the most impressive body of painting ever produced by one man in the New World.

The son of a rich Mexican revolutionary, Rivera liked to deny his aristocratic beginnings and Spanish blood. “I am one-third Indian, one-third Jew and one-third nobody knows—probably Chinese,” he liked to say, with a fine disregard of the arithmetic of genealogy. As a student he worked in Paris along the lines suggested by his friends Picasso and Braque.

One morning in 1918 he turned his wide back on the moderns. “I was just coming out of a cubist show,” he said later, “when a fruit vendor passed in front of me in the sunshine, pushing a little wagon full of peaches. The sight was so much more beautiful than all those dry, thin abstractions inside the gallery. It made me want to paint the richness we can see and feel.” He went to Italy, where the Renaissance had spread its richness across acres of church and palace walls. Inspired by Giotto, Uccello and Andrea del Castagno, he resolved to paint, as they had, for the millions: “I stick to my idea of a clear, firm, simple and precise art that everyone can understand.”

No Telling. Hundreds of Rivera’s greatest frescoes combine the sunshine of Renaissance humanism with Indian earthiness and cruel drama. Rivera was a great enough artist to bridge the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, and the 15th and 20th centuries. Most of his easel pictures —society portraits, nightclub nudes and tourist bouquets—are likely to pass away like grass now that Rivera is gone. The Indian museum-temple that he built to house his pre-Columbian collection will doubtless remain one of architecture’s more intriguing curiosities. His murals are his lasting monument. Provocative at worst, or blatantly propagandistic for Communism (as in the case of the destroyed apotheosis of Lenin painted for Manhattan’s RCA Building), they are enormously revealing at best—of peasant aspirations, Mexican heroes of history, the vigorous shapes and colors of the Mexican countryside.

Giotto’s murals are still young, which means that they will probably live until they crumble. Whether or not Rivera’s murals, too, will breathe life for generation after generation is unanswerable. An artist of Rivera’s stature might be compared to a rocket that dies boosting a satellite in the form of art. Symbolically enough, his last completed picture was of a baby holding a Russian satellite. He was buried with much honor, but naturally no church rites, in Mexico’s Rotunda of Illustrious Men. While Mexican Communists paraded the hammer and sickle. Fellow Painter David Siqueiros made the chief oration, larding it with Communist mouthings. “Even here,” cried one of Rivera’s daughters, Guadalupe, “you make your propaganda!” “Yes,” Siqueiros answered. “Just as Diego did.”

* For two years he sheltered his friende Trotsky from Stalin’s international assassins. After Trotsky was killed, Rivera explained away his own attacks on Stalin as “just a trick to mislead the stockholders of Bethlehem Steel.” He made a trip to Moscow two years ago for a cure for cancer, came back to report that “throughout Russia there are no secrets, no censorship restrictions. Every single person in Russia has television.”