Art: Rivera in Reforma

Into the still unopened Hotel Reforma, soon to be one of Mexico City’s swankest, burst swart, baggy-breeched Diego de Rivera at the head of a group of 20gesticulating young men. Before they could commit much of a nuisance, alarmed neighbors summoned police who questioned Rivera and his loudest companions, found that the group was fortified with not one but five revolvers.

Probably the ablest, certainly the best known living fresco painter is paunchy Diego Rivera, twice a member of the Communist Party, once expelled for disobedience. Because the owner of the Hotel Reforma, Alberto J. Pani, onetime Mexico’s Secretary of Finance, was a friend, Artist Rivera agreed to decorate his hotel for 4,000 pesos, just enough to pay his expenses.

Muralist Rivera contributed a series of brilliant panels in true fresco of oppressed Indians, galloping bandits, donkey-faced professors, starving peons. One panel expressed Muralist Rivera’s opinion ofdictatorships, showed a gawping creature with the Roosevelt smile, Mussolini chin, Hitler brow and mustache, waving a flag composed of the Nazi, U. S. and Japanese colors. Below him an officer in Mexican uniform with a calf’s head was dancing with an Indian woman.

Hotel Keeper Pani waited for the fresco to dry and set, then with superficial overpainting removed the calf-faced officer, changed the colors of the flag, changed the features of the composite dictator. Muralist Rivera once had an entire fresco panel by Jean Chariot chopped off a Mexican wall because it did not match his own work on the same building, but when his mural in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center was destroyed two years ago (TIME, Feb. 26, 1934 et ante), he raised such a howl that sympathizers enabled him to repaint it in Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts. Last week Muralist Rivera was even louder :

“In the case of the Rockefeller affair,” he shouted, ”Mr. Rockefeller asked me to change the paintings. I refused. He paid me and destroyed the paintings as was his legal right. This is worse because the changes were made surreptitiously over my signature. Falsification of work which I have signed is like forging a check.”

Said Hotelman Pani: “We changed the paintings with our own hands as we had a perfect right to do.” At week’s end the murals came down entirely, mirrors took their place.