Giant
Diego Rivera. By Bertram D. Wolfe. (Robert Hale. ars.) "AT times he would literally tear his hair and beat his head against the walls of his studio, then fly from himself to some café where he would give vent to his spleen and his despair in boastful, ill-humoured, fantastic talk with Mexican and Spanish painters and writers." This biography by an Ameri- can is not likely to increase Rivera's reputation. It presents an outsize twentieth-century artist, saturated with bombast self-consciousness and self-torture, and encumbered with a heavy regalia of wives and mistresses, photographs of whom are scattered through the pages among reproductions of the paintings. The tone is unusually shrill, even for spicy Bohemian recollections. That an imposing figure wades out of such a flood is a surprise.
Rivera was born in Mexico in 1886. He has Mexican, Spanish, Portuguese-Jewish and Indian blood. He came to Europe to study in 1907, with the help of the Governor of Vera Cruz. At twenty " he was already more than six feet tall, and weighed close on three hundred pounds. A huge bulk of a body would fill the cafe doorway, then seem to fill the room itself with its massive presence." He studied in Spain, and then went to live in Paris, where he met painters like Picasso and Modigliani. There are reproduc- tions of the work he did at this time—sincere and sensitive pastiches, holding a respectable place in the rank and file of cubist painting. They suggest a basis for some of the powerful qualities if not the energy and scale of his later frescoes—his important work. A good deal of the book is occupied with the story of his successful fight for walls, and more and bigger walls, to decorate.
He seems always to have believed in the likelihood of immediate good through revolution. In 1922 he joined the Communist Party of Mexico, and soon became a leader in it. He helped to edit a paper, " vast, bright and gory," and he has been a good fighter for his opinions. He began his first great mural in 1923, and he has done many since, in Mexico City, New York, Detroit and elsewhere. In 1932 he did a huge decoration for the Rockefeller Center in Radio City. This ended in tragedy. Both Rivera and Nelson A. Rockefeller seem to have had their eyes open when they made an unpromising bargain for a fresco of " Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future." The trouble arose when a portrait of Lenin appeared in the mural which, in the sketch, had been made impersonal by having a cap pulled down over the eyes. Rockefeller pointed out that this might offend many people, as it was in a public building. Rivera would not submit to substituting an unknown man. The row was terrific. Letters and telegrams flew in all directions ; artists sympathetically withdrew their works from exhibitions ; newspapers splashed warlike headlines, and the whole work was covered over and finally destroyed by Rockefeller's orders. The artist became a martyr, and spent the money (which Rockefeller had paid in full) in painting other propaganda murals for nothing where the public could see them.
The importance of Rivera is that he is a clear example (one of the only ones) of a modern painter who has revolted against painting for himself and discriminating people only, and has had enough force, single-mindedness and advertising genius to get himself across to a big public. His force and limitation is that his painting generalises. He is enthralled with humanity, but individuals quickly bore him. His biographer makes it a virtue: "the pursuit of resemblance he has always found too easy, nor was he deeply enough interested in the trivia which distinguish one average, sophisticated, urban, middle- class individual from another." That is why there is more humanity in two square feet of a portrait of a milliner by Rouault, or even of a house at Bath by Sickert, than in two thousand square feet of a Rivera fresco. The tragedy of modern art is that it cannot communicate its core of sense to a wide enough public. Rivera has not solved the problem— he has by-passed it. By far the most impressive of his r50 or so works reproduced here (and well reproduced) are the portraits of Mexican-Indian children done in recent years in the course of a tremendous output. This is not because the murals will not reproduce: it is because the portraits have 110
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