Art: Sunday in the Park

In the dining room of Mexico City’s unfinished Prado Hotel stood Muralist Diego Rivera, critically studying a wall. President Alemán himself had ordered that the city’s toniest hotel be completed in time for November’s UNESCO conference, and all around Rivera’s paunchy figure carpenters and electricians bent noisily to the presidential will. But Rivera’s own share of the work, he at last decided, was done. An assistant handed him a round brush wet with yellow paint, and Rivera quickly added a few touches. Then he thrust his soft little hands into the pockets of his dungaree jacket and walked away. He was bone-tired but content. At 61, when everyone had said he was slipping, he had felt himself at a new peak of his powers. It had meant sometimes painting for 36 hours at a stretch; he had finished the 18 ft. by 36 ft. wall in a record-breaking 53 days’ work. But there had been no waste in his haste. The draftsmanship in his new mural was unfalteringly sculptural; the colors—especially the reds and yellows—were deep and clear; he had never painted a more fascinating cast of characters.

Out Came Poetry. He and the hotel architect had agreed that his theme should be “Sunday in the Alameda” (the city’s finest park, opposite the Prado). But Rivera, like his fellow triumvirs of Mexican art, Siqueiros and Orozco, was no man to waste a big hunk of wall on a merely pastoral theme. He had crammed his picture of the Alameda with the villains and heroes, the blood and dreams, of Mexican history. Said he: “Every one of the 148 figures in this mural I have known personally. I’ve shaken hands with most of them, and the others—Cortes, for instance—have peopled my brain for as long as I can remember. That is why it has been so good to do. I felt freer, more certain of myself in painting this than ever before. I put facts on the wall and to me, anyway, they came out poetry.

“I put old people dreaming of the past on the left side of the mural, and on the right—nearest the window—young people dreaming of the future. In the center I put people who were living in Mexico from 1895 to 1909. I’m there too because I was part of the life, I played in this park ao a boy. That’s the first girl I ever loved, pale and blonde—she was an American, 18 years old—standing near the Indian street girl. That street girl was the second love in my life. She’s more vivid to me now—our contact was more violent. And that lady with the pinwheels, way over on the right, is Lupe Marin, my first wife. Frida Kahlo, my third wife, has one hand on my shoulder. That thing in her other hand is the Chinese symbol for the unity of opposites. . . .”

Unappetizing Wall. Prado diners might find parts of Rivera’s mural rough on the digestion. Among the dreams of the past, floating above the park benches on the left, was a minutely gory torture scene from Mexico’s Inquisition, and the dreams of the future had room for what appeared to be acid caricatures of contemporary governmental officials. (Rivera explained that any resemblances were coincidental: “It’s only because living people frequently run to type.”) But few could fail to be charmed by the portrait of the artist as a messy little fat boy, standing smack in the center of his own creation. Young Rivera kept a dead snake and a bullfrog in his pockets, carried an eagle-headed umbrella and held hands with a grownup skeleton lady, dressed to kill. Just before he signed the mural, the aging artist’s finishing touch was to broaden the boy’s grin.