Art: Honor Among Revolutionaries

Artists in the U. S. will, if necessary, argue all through the night about their work, but they seldom resort to gunfire. In Mexico, art is taken much more seriously. Last week a sober crowd of black-coated schoolteachers filled the auditorium of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City for a conference on Progressive Education. On the platform Painter David Alfaro Siquieros, one of the founders of the famed Revolutionary Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters & Sculptors (now defunct) that first brought Mexican mural painting to the world’s attention, was expounding his theories. Up from a rear row seat suddenly sprang the best-known member of that syndicate, Diego Rivera, who yanked a revolver from his hip pocket, pointed it straight at his old companion-in-paint.

Before Artist Rivera could pull the trigger, bystanders intervened. But honor had been impugned and a duel was in order. Half an hour’s furious talk on the part of the authorities convinced both principals that the duel should be one of words, to be held in the same place the following night.

Fighting point between the two muralists was the charge that neither was sufficiently Communist. A hearty laugh was this to thoroughgoing Reds, who have disowned Rivera and Siquieros time & again. Possibly the proletariat never had a more talented group of advocates than the members of the old Mexican syndicate. Besides Rivera and Siquieros it included Jose Clemente Orozco, Xavier Guerrero, Carlos Merida, Jean Chariot. All were real artists, sturdy individualists. All have made international reputations and a certain amount of money. With growing fame all have developed an unintelligent but thoroughly natural jealousy of each other. Because Muralist Siquieros was the author of the famed manifesto which launched the Revolutionary Syndicate, and because Muralist Rivera has gained the greatest publicity, feeling between these two has been particularly bitter.

News of the verbal duel last week found some 500 inflamed intellectuals the next night storming the doors for a chance to hear it. For fear of rioting, gates of the Palace of Fine Arts were at first locked. Angry crowds threatened to tear them down. Conferences ensued between police, the Ministry of Education and the principals. The gates were opened, and in swept a breathless and perspiring crowd to hear the two duelists fight over “What Constitutes Revolutionary Art?”

Muralist Siquieros fired the first volley:

Shot 1—Diego Rivera is now no more than an opportunist and an entertainer of tourists.

Shot 2—Diego Rivera’s art is not revolutionary because it fails to portray the Communist ideal.

Shot 3—Diego Rivera is no friend of the people because he accepted the late Dwight Whitney Morrow’s money to paint his famed murals in the courtyard of the Cortez Palace at Cuernavaca.*

With his pistol left at home, Muralist Rivera rebutted:

Shot 1—He had had no direct dealings with the tainted money of Dwight Morrow because all arrangements were made through a third party.

Shot 2—Because of the long time it took to finish the Cuernavaca murals and the high cost of materials, he, Diego Rivera, kept only a few hundred pesos a month for himself.

Shot 3—Perhaps his paintings were not Communist in the Russian sense, because his heart was in the Mexican revolution, which had started as a peasant revolution, and now with God’s providence had advanced to the bourgeois state.

*Several years ago Muralist Siquieros, realizing that Communist murals in the courtyards of government buildings do little good because the proletariat never gets inside to see them, established a new school whose main thesis is that murals, like billboards, should be confined to outside walls.