Читать книгу Diego Rivera - Gerry Souter - Страница 4

Diego Rivera fictionalised his life so much, that even his birth date is a myth. His mother María, his aunt Cesárea and the town hall records list his arrival at 7:30 on the evening of December 8th, 1886. That is the very auspicious day of the feast of the Immaculate Conception. However, in the Guanauato ecclesiastical registry, baptism documentation states that little Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez actually showed up on December 13th.

Rivera’s own description of his natal day many decades later recreates a grand melodrama. His mother had already laboured through three pregnancies that ended in stillbirths. Expecting twins, she pushed out Diego and began to haemorrhage. Diego was scrawny and lethargic and not expected to live, so Doctor Arizmendi, a family friend, tossed him into a nearby dung bucket and went for the second child. Diego’s twin brother arrived and seemed to be the last straw for petite and frail María, who lapsed into a coma.

In despair, Don Diego Rivera sobbed over his lifeless wife. Preparations had to be made to deal with her corpse. Ancient Matha, who had been attending Doña María, watched her being laid out and bent to kiss her cold forehead. The crone suddenly stepped back. María’s “corpse” was breathing! The doctor immediately lit a match and held it under María’s heel. Taking it away, he saw a blister had formed. Doña María was alive. Some squawks came from the dung bucket showing little Diego too had a few kicks in him, and he was retrieved.

Doña María eventually recovered and went on to study obstetrics, becoming a professional midwife. Diego’s twin brother, Carlos, died a year and a half later while the puny Diego, suffering from rickets and a weak constitution, became the ward of his Tarascan Indian nurse, Antonia, who lived in the Sierra Mountains. There, according to Diego, she gave him herbal medicine and practised sacred rites while he drank goat’s milk fresh from the udders and lived wild in the woods with all manner of creatures.[1]

Whatever the truth concerning his birth and early childhood, Diego inherited a crisp analytical intellect through a convoluted blending of bloodlines, having Mexican, Spanish, Indian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian and Portuguese descent. His father, Don Diego, taught him to read “…according to the Froebel method”.[2]

Friedrich Froebel is considered to be the “father of the modern kindergarten”. This German educator coined the word Kindergarten (“children’s garden”) in 1839. He opposed the concept of treating children as miniature adults and insisted on their right to enjoy childhood, to have free play, arts, crafts, music and writing. Pointing out the moral in a story did not allow children to draw their own conclusions from what they had read. It is interesting that later non-objective, free-thinking European artists such as Braque, Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian were likely as not also educated in Froebel-based kindergartens.[3]

Diego Rivera was born into a Mexico that consisted of a class-tiered society dependent on blood lines and political affiliations. The period was called the Porfiriato after the administration of autocratic President Don Porfirio Díaz. The elder Rivera was a educated man, a school teacher and a political liberal who was known as a trouble-maker to the political party in office. He was also a crillolo, a Mexican citizen of privileged “pure” European descent. His military service with the Mexican Army that had disposed of French rule under Maximilian also accorded him a somewhat bullet-proof position among Díaz’ “loyal” opposition.

The revered President Benito Juárez had freed Mexico from French rule with Díaz fighting at his side. When Juárez died, Díaz seized rule from the ineffective chosen leader Sebastián Lerdo in 1876. The peasant land reforms of Juárez were shelved over time, and Díaz shifted loyalties to rich foreign investors and conservative wealthy Mexican families. He modernised Mexico with electric light, railways and trade agreements, and balanced the Mexican budget to great international acclaim. At the top tier of Mexican social life, the wealthy embraced French customs, food, entertainment and language. The Mexican peons, the farmers on the lowest tier, were left to starve and scrape a living.

To improve his lot financially, young Diego’s father invested in recovering ore from the played-out silver mines that surrounded Guanajuato. Once a booming industry, the silver veins had vanished and no amount of resuscitation could bring them back. The Rivera family went into debt. Diego’s mother, María, sold the family furniture so they could move to a squalid apartment in Mexico City and start again. María was a mestiza, small and frail, but shared her European blood with Indian forebears. She also had a home-taught education, which allowed her to pursue her medical studies and became a professional midwife.

Through all this strife, young Diego was the pampered son. He could read by the age of four and had begun drawing on the walls. Moving to Mexico City opened up a world of wonders to him. The city rose on a high plateau atop an ancient lake-bed at the foot of twin snow-capped volcanoes, Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl. After the dusty rural roads and flat-roofed houses of Guanauato, the paved thoroughfares of the capital with its elegant French architecture and the Paseo de Reforma rivalling the best of Europe’s boulevards, Diego was overwhelmed.

6. Diego Rivera, Beguine Convent in Bruges or Twilight in Bruges, 1909.

Charcoal on paper, 27.8 × 46 cm.

INBA Collection, Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato.

7. Camille Pissarro, Landscape with Pastures, Pontoise, 1868.

Oil on canvas, 81 × 100 cm.

Private collection, New York.

8. Diego Rivera, Landscape with a Lake, c. 1900.

Oil on canvas, 53 × 73 cm.

Daniel Yankelewitz B. Collection, San Jose.

9. Gustave-Courbet, The Weir at the Mill, 1866.

Oil on canvas, 54 × 64.5 cm.

Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.

By now he had a younger sister, María del Pilar, but a brother, Alfonso, born in Mexico City, died within a week. Life was hard in the poorer sections of the city and half of the infants died within a week of their birth. Typhus, smallpox and diphtheria resulted from poor sanitation, lack of running water and overcrowding. Diego suffered bouts of typhoid, scarlet fever and diphtheria, but his sturdy constitution and María’s medical training kept him going.

Diego’s father bit back his moral outrage at government corruption and mismanagement in order to provide for his family. He found work as a clerk in the Department of Public Health. He had discovered an undeniable truth in any revolutionary movement aimed at the lower classes of society: publishing articles aimed at helping the poor was foiled by rampant illiteracy – they couldn’t read. María began to find work as a midwife and they moved from their poor neighbourhood into better housing. Eventually they ended up in an apartment that occupied the third floor of a building on the Calle de la Merced (Market Street). This neighbourhood was created around two huge markets and their attendant scavengers, both human and rodent. But their colours, the variety of goods for sale, the bustle and mix of Indians, peons and customers from every class produced a rich texture that remained with Diego until his old age. For the young boy this upward change of status meant full time schooling. At eight he was enrolled in the Colegio del Padre Antonio. “This clerical school was the choice of my mother, who had fallen under the influence of her pious sister and aunt.”[4] He remained for three months, tried the Colegio Católico Carpentier – where he was downgraded for not bathing frequently enough, an unfortunate lifetime hygiene problem – and departed to the Liceo Católico Hispano-Mexicano. “Here I was given good food as well as free instruction, books, various working tools and other things. I was put in the third grade, but having been well-prepared by my father, I was skipped to the sixth grade.”[5]

10. Diego Rivera, Landscape with a Mill, Damme Landscape, 1909.

Oil on canvas, 50 × 60.5 cm.

Ing. Juan Pablo Gómez Rivera Collection, Mexico City.

The Lyceum system of schooling had come directly from French models as required by President Díaz. Having driven the French out of Mexico in 1867, Díaz spent the next years of his administration wiping out the democracy of Benito Juárez and re-establishing French and international cultures as examples of progress and civilisation for the Mexican people. The downside of this cultural importation was the denigration of native society, arts, language and political representation. The poor were left to die, while the rich and the middle class were courted because they had money and appreciated being able to keep it. The will of the ruling class was imposed on the poor using self-serving “scientific” principles developed by a panel of pseudo social scientists called los Científicos. This was government by Darwinian fiat.

In the same year that Díaz and Juárez were chasing the French out of Mexico, a book was published, Capital – A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 that represented a lifetime study of the political economy of the working class in a scientific manner. This work avoided the usual rabble-rousing demands of repressed workers substituting well thought out deductions that established the basic socialist premises of its author, Karl Marx. If there was ever an autocratic government ripe for a strong undercurrent of revolution supported by intellectual pillars of socialist ideology, it was Mexico. The Díaz government’s cultural and economic philosophy devolved strictly around the concept of creating wealth before addressing the issues of the poor, who were, unfortunately for the Mexican Científicos who set the policy, not dying off fast enough to offset their birth rate.

11. J. M. W. Turner, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, 1796.

Watercolour on white paper, 31.8 × 41.9 cm.

Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Services, Wolverhampton.

Into this conspiracy of the Mexican government, aided by the indifference of the Catholic Church to marginalise the peones and Campesinos (farmer land-owners) in favour of international investment that lined the pockets of the rich for trade franchises and slave labour, stepped young Diego Rivera – after scraping his shoes clean, of course. His father made use of his deep educational background at the expense of his personal politics and improved his government position to become a health inspector. The city’s population growth had allowed María del Pilar to grow her midwifery practice to the point of opening a gynaecological clinic. For the first time since the silver mine investment debacle in Guanajuato, the Riveras had actual options.

By the age of ten he had experienced the results of Mexico’s autocracy, but would confront the causes later. Making the most of his gift of drawing and endlessly sketching concerned his parents now. They sought practical applications of his frivolous hobbies. Diego liked to draw soldiers, so his father considered a military career, but the boy also spent much of his spare time at the railway station to draw the trains – so what about a job as a train driver? Subject matter aside, Diego’s mother defied her husband’s wishes that the boy enter the Colegio Militar and sent him instead to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts for evening school classes.

12. Diego Rivera, Notre-Dame, Paris, 1909.

Oil on canvas, 144 × 113 cm.

Private collection, Mexico City.

13. Diego Rivera, Midi Landscape, 1918.

Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 63.2 cm.

Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

14. Paul Cézanne, Aqueduct, 1885–1887.

Oil on canvas, 91 × 72 cm.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

Only a block away from the Zócalo, Mexico City’s large central square, Diego often crossed its beaten dirt surface, stepped over criss-crossing mule trolley tracks, dodged rumbling horse-drawn wagons full of freight and market goods on his way to class. One other distraction had to be the clank of a printing press on a street just off the square. The print shop at No. 5 Santa Inéz belonged to José Guadalupe Posada, a lithographer and engraver whose story-telling prints were the editorial cartoons and “photographs” of their time.

Using black and white line drawings and ambitious colour, Posada told the stories of daily events, extraordinary happenings, the bizarre, the satirical and the tragic, which appeared in the broadsheets – called hojas volantes (flying leaves) by their readers – of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, whose shop was next door to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. Every day and often into the night, the press clanked and rumbled again and again as pages were inked and the folklore and daily life of Mexico City was committed in such a vivid style to which Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and the other Mexican muralists all acknowledged their debt.

Diego struggled with this day and night school education for a year until at the age of eleven in 1898 he received a scholarship to move his studies full time to the San Carlos Academy. While the school was considered the best in Mexico, its curriculum was bound by dusty European artistic dogma compounded by the societal engineering of the government científicos that mandated strength over weakness in all life experiences. The art school also required classes in physics, mathematics, natural history and chemistry as well as perspective and figure drawing.

The professors were Spanish, practising the skills of the French academicians far from the avant-garde of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements. Of these professors, Diego, the youngest student in the class, remembered best Don Félix Parra, who had a rare appreciation of pre-Spanish Conquest Indian art, but whose own art was very conventional, and José M. Velasco, the renowned landscape painter who taught lessons in perspective. Santiago Rebull was the school’s principal and Diego’s instructor in the balance of proportion and composition. In his student days Rebull had studied in Paris with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, considered one of the greatest figure artists of all time. Ingres’ drawings were held up to Rebull’s students as models of perfection. The curriculum built around this perfection was a grind, consisting of two years spent copying reproductions of Ingres studies followed by two years of drawing from plaster casts before graduating to a live model.

15. Diego Rivera, View of Arcueil.

Oil on canvas, 64 × 80 cm.

Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz, Veracruz.

16. Diego Rivera, Suburbs of Paris, 1918.

Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 79.5 cm.

Private collection.

Diego was singled out by Rebull as promising, and given instruction in the so-called “Golden Section”, a mathematical system of composition developed by the ancient Greeks, that establishes a harmonic ratio between two unequal parts. Its principles were widely distributed in Luca Pacioli’s three-volume work Divina Proportione published in 1509. In the Elements, Euclid of Alexandria (c. 300 B. C.) defined a proportion derived from a division of a line into what he calls its “extreme and mean ratio”. Euclid’s definition reads:

A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.

In other words, in the diagram below, point C divides the line in such a way that the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the ratio of AB to AC. Some elementary algebra shows that in this case the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the irrational number 1.618 (precisely half the sum of 1 and the square root of 5).[6]

This mathematical formula applied to fine art appealed to the engineer in Diego Rivera, who enjoyed mechanical systems such as trains and machines, often taking apart his toys to see how they worked. His practice of employing the Golden Section served him well later as he composed his huge murals over wall surfaces of all dimensions. This academic training including the use of colour optics imposed by “advancing” (warm) and “retreating” (cool) colours and the manipulation of line segments to achieve depth in a two-dimensional plane all became valuable tools in Rivera’s vast spaces.

By the age of eighteen in 1905, Diego Rivera was enjoying his final two years at San Carlos and had changed considerably from the docile, shabby eleven-year-old fat boy wearing short pants with pink socks who, back in 1898, sometimes cut class to go fishing in the smelly canals. Where once he shambled about in dishevelled anonymity, now he dressed like a young gentleman in jacket and boiled shirt with a wing collar and four-in-hand necktie. His hair was no longer a bird’s nest but was slicked back with pomade. A straggly moustache sprouted on his upper lip to affect the appearance of maturity upon the youngest student in class. He had won a medal competing in a drawing contest and an award of twenty pesos a month from the Ministry of Education, and then, took the “King’s Shilling”.

By 1906, Rivera had completed eight years of study at San Carlos and graduated with honours, appearing in his final student show with twenty-six works. His efforts had paid off with an excellent reputation among the government people he had to impress to keep grant money coming in. This was accomplished, but the money for study in Europe did not arrive for six months, allowing young Diego to live the life of a bohemian artist among his school chums.

17. Paul Cézanne, The Château Noir, 1903–1904.

Oil on canvas, 73.6 × 93.2 cm.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

18. Diego Rivera, Suburbs of Paris, 1918.

Oil on canvas, 65 × 80 cm.

Private collection.

This gang of “intellectuals, artists and architects” – El Grupo Bohemio – who had struggled to finish college, worked hard at exploring a dissolute lifestyle. The timbre of this bohemian existence is demonstrated in Rivera’s fanciful story in his memoir titled An Experiment in Cannibalism, where he and his pals pooled their money to buy corpses from the morgue. He had read a story where a lunatic had fed the flesh of cats to other cats to be skinned for their pelts, and their coats became glossy and full. Would a diet of human flesh improve the health of humans? Diego claims to have tried it for two weeks and never felt better. He particularly “…savoured young women’s breaded ribs”. The experiment ended because of fear of social hostility rather than “squeamishness”.[7]

During this time he also came into contact with the curious character Gerardo Murillo, a faculty member and anarchist political agitator against Díaz. Murillo chose the name “Dr Atl” while living in Mexico. In Indian dialect, Atl is the name of the fourth sun – Nahui Atl – and means Water Sun, but Murillo was actually a rabble-rousing criollo, the same as the rest of the governing class.

Dr. Atl had been to Europe, and extolled the virtues of the post-Impressionists and rebels such as Gauguin and Paul Cézanne to El Grupo Bohemio in long discussions at their favourite cafés over many glasses of Pulque (an Indian drink made of fermented cactus juice) and beer. But, at most, Atl’s fire-breathing evangelism produced only a woozy fog of intellectual rhetoric, but no revolutionary deeds or marches in the streets.

Diego had other things on his mind more important than overthrowing governments. He wanted to win a contest that offered a grant of 300 pesos a month to live and paint in Europe. His rival was Roberto Montenegro, a well-brought-up handsome dandy with a skilled painting technique. He was as elegant and refined as Diego was lumpy and soup-stained. And yet, because of Diego’s life experience and omnivorous eclecticism, Diego was actually more worldly than the city-bred gentleman in the French-cut suit. But when the votes were counted Montenegro won, and headed for Paris with the grant money to meet Picasso, Juan Gris, sip absinthe and dissolve into the City of Light.

Diego accepted the decision and turned to his father who had made an accommodation with the Díaz regime he despised for the sake of his family. Now he could help his son with a tug on a few strings. The governor of the state of Veracruz, Teodoro Dehesa, a liberal member of the Díaz government, had come through earlier with 30 pesos a month for Diego’s art education. Now the boy had become the young man and his paintings and drawings were paraded once more before his benefactor. The demonstration of Diego’s skills and potential pried from the Don a travelling scholarship of 300 pesos a month.

More conservative than Roberto Montenegro, Diego decided to ease into the European adventure by beginning in Spain. To get to Madrid, he needed steamship fare. One of Dr Atl’s more useful functions was to help students organise shows of their work to raise money to supplement their grants. For this service he received a commission. He fed a dozen of Rivera’s oils and sketches into an exhibition. The sales from this show bought Diego a one-way ticket to Spain. Dr Atl also supplied Diego with a letter of introduction to the Spanish painter Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera, who had many rich and well-known clients. Atl became a shadowy figure who popped in and out of the volcanic mix of Mexican politics and the arts over the next decades and would figure many times in Diego’s future.

19. Diego Rivera, The Old Ones, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 210 × 184 cm.

Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.