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20. Diego Rivera, Portrait of a Spaniard (Hermán Alsina), 1912.

Oil on canvas, 200 × 166 cm.

Private collection.

Diego Rivera was twenty years old when he arrived aboard the steamship King Alphonse XIII in Santander, Spain on January 6th, 1907. He must have been disappointed. The faces that looked back at him from the dock looked exactly like those he had left behind in another life far, far away. Their language was almost the same – except the Madrid natives lisped the letter d, turning it into th, in the elegant Castilian manner. On the train from Santander he would hear Galician that had the odd Graeco-Latin twists of Portuguese and Catalan spoken by the tourists from Barcelona. Two men smoked and swapped pulls from a wicker-wrapped bottle as they spoke in low, guttural Basque. Later, when he set up his easel in the studio of Chicharro y Agüera, his nickname would be “the Mexican”.

All he had to do was open his mouth in Madrid and he became the country boy. Diego Rivera hid behind a straggly beard, but he couldn’t hide the soft, frog-like eyes, the sloping shoulders accustomed to stooping so as not to stand out in crowds. He could not hide the six-foot bulk that supported his large head, which required a wide-brimmed sombrero to shade it because ordinary hats were too small.

When Rivera arrived in Madrid, he was the sum of everything he would be for the rest of his days. His life, as the gypsies say, was written in the lines of his palm. His work ethic was brutal, his politics were as yet unformed but inclined toward the lowest level in the trickle-down economy in which his father had been broken by the bosses. His art had no direction, but he was also an empty vessel anxiously waiting to be filled. Diego was ready to learn about women, but he already possessed sensitivity, a gentle nature and an ability to lie with great sincerity as he created stories that would become the myths of his life. He would always have women.

Best of all, Diego had discovered that his imagination need not be restricted to the images he created with his brushes and paints. Since he had been a small boy finding refuge from his frail mother’s drive to lift the family from the ruins of his father’s financial failure and ideological naivety, and both his parents’ desire to steer their lumpish son into some useful trade, he had turned to his sketchbook and its linear fantasies. As his skills grew and were recognised as a true gift, the fantasies he had created in childhood pictures of soldiers and trains and heroic deeds became habitable. At each stage of his formative years Diego met new people, involved himself with new groups and with each new telling of his stories his own role in them became greater. His father showed the sketches he made of battles and the disposition of troops to amazed generals. He stood shoulder to shoulder with strikers to be struck down by a soldier’s sabre and thrown into prison. His clever copying of Goya and El Greco paintings in the Prado were passed off as real and now reside in collections. He spent fine evenings with his bohemian chums feasting on “young women’s breaded ribs”.

Diego Rivera became his own myth. Later, as his fame grew, he inserted himself in his murals together with his patrons, historical characters, Communist ideologues, friends, those who inspired him and the women he was currently courting. He was there at last with his creations, forever the observer, forever part of history. The extent of his fabulous life became clear when he dictated his memoirs to Gladys March who, from 1944 to 1957, took down each fabrication word for word, with a straight face.

21. Diego Rivera, Portrait of the Poet Lalane, 1936.

Oil on canvas.

Private collection.

22. Diego Rivera, Portrait of a Military Man.

Museo Regional de Guadalajara, Jalisco.

But standing outside the Madrid railway station at the age of twenty, his palette was hardly more than a tabula rasa. After days spent in discomfort on the train from Santander, still reeking of unwashed travel, wine and stale tobacco from the crowded coach, his waistcoat and trousers still speckled with drips and crumbs of food purchased on the journey, he hoisted his bags and located the Calle Sacramento and the Hotel de Rusta. An artist friend from the San Carlos Academy lived there and recommended the cheap pension. There he crashed and slept.

The next day, he presented himself at the studio of one of Madrid’s premier portrait painters, Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera. Diego proffered his letter of introduction from Dr Atl and was led to a corner of the studio he could call his own. The other students scrutinised the fat Mexican farm boy and were unimpressed. A heady perfume of paint and turpentine, open tins of linseed oil, raw canvas and pine wood for stretchers filled the room, and he set to work at once. He painted for days, arriving early and leaving late. Gradually, with his sheer brute concentration and resolve, the value of his stock rose among his fellow classmates and he became part of their social circle.

In his Rivera biography, Dreaming With His Eyes Open, the author Patrick Marnham offers an insightful appraisal of Rivera’s time spent in Spain and the value of the young artist’s first attempt to assert himself and discover his own style.

“Throughout the nineteenth century,” Marnham writes, “with brief liberal interregnums and spasmodic revolts ruthlessly suppressed, Spain dozed under four Habsburgs – one Ferdinand and one Isabella – and two Alfonsos. Alfonso XIII was still on the throne at the time of Rivera’s arrival.”

Spain had been passed by in the cultural, economic and political structure of a very vital Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Only Barcelona maintained a tenuous touch with the rest of Europe, and Picasso had studied there at the School of Fine Arts before bolting in 1900. He had hurried through Madrid, spent a day at the Prado, and penned a letter to a friend stating, “In Spain we are not stupid. We are just very badly educated.” Diego, in his search for the headwaters of the mainstream in modern painting, “…had sailed up a backwater.”[8]

As he settled into the rhythms of Madrid and the surrounding countryside, he appreciated the comfort factor of speaking the language – or something at least approximating to Castilian Spanish – and having his hotel only a stone’s throw from the Prado, which housed one of Europe’s finest collections of paintings. When not working with maestro Chicharro in the studio, he set up his easel opposite the finest examples of El Greco with the elongated figures towering above him, or feeling the heat come off Goya’s passionately restrained portraits of the Spanish rich and roughly-brushed stalwart peones massed before ranks of soldiers with bayonets. The vivid colours and brushstroke impasto came to life on the original canvases as opposed to the pale chromolithographs decorating walls in Mexico City. He slaved over these masterpieces, unlocking the secrets of their line, colour and dynamic compositions.

23. Diego Rivera, Portrait of John Dunbar, 1931.

Oil on canvas, 199.5 × 158 cm.

Private collection.

24. Diego Rivera, Study for The Jug, 1912.

Gouache on paper, 28.5 × 23 cm.

María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection, New York.

25. El Greco, The Visitation, 1610.

Oil on canvas, 96 × 72.4 cm.

Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D. C.

And, here in Madrid, an interesting quirk of content appeared amidst his self-generated themes. No religious paintings by young Diego have been recovered or noted. Among the wealthy and those aspiring to higher positions, the purchase of art had contributed to a boom for painters, decorating walls with bucolic rural scenes, family portraits and the scarred and bloody body of Jesus on the Cross. Holy scenes from the Bible were big sellers and the more slickly rendered the better. Diego, however, who had bad memories of the Church and its effect on his mother’s impassioned judgments, and of his father’s anti-clerical teaching and writing, eschewed the gaudy morality plays of Madrid’s commercial painters. He continued as he was, a young Mexican man living off a free ride and working hard to find his own vision and style.

Chicharro’s reports to Don Dehesa, Governor of Veracruz and Diego’s sponsor, were glowing and the paintings regularly sent to Dehesa reflected the reports’ praise. Some of Chicharro’s student exhibitions drew critics who singled out Rivera as a “promising talent”. Diego’s brush with the Madrid avant-garde found him embroiled in an anti-modern art movement (el Museísmo) which demanded the abandonment of modern art for the 300-year-old El Grecos. Hardly a plunge into the future, but Rivera’s painting during his isolated two years in Spain was conventional, slick and bland.

While Picasso was creating the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, Rivera ground out The Forge, The Old Stone and New Flowers and The Fishing Boat. The paintings were handsome if only because of their superb technique, but they would also have looked at home in any mercado tourist shop. To be charitable, Rivera did manage to keep his meal ticket coming from the Governor of Veracruz. And he met a girl.

At the Café de Pombo, a hang-out for the Spanish avant-garde, Diego spent time with the two Ramóns and María Blanchard. Ramón number one was Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a critic and soon-to-be Dada poet. Ramón number two was Ramón del Valle-Inclán, a Spanish novelist who had lost his left arm to the swing of a cane in a brutal café brawl. He was a grand storyteller, and Diego thoroughly absorbed his enthralling gift of prevarication, adding touches to expand his own myth-making machine. María Blanchard’s real name was María Gutiérrez Cueto, and she was one of Chicharro’s painting students. She was bright, five years older than Diego and four feet tall with a subtle hunchback caused by an accident to her spine in her youth. She dressed in the English tourist style and made a striking contrast to her towering mountain of a friend (and lover, according to Rivera in later years). In 1908 she headed for Paris, leaving Diego to finish up his second year in Spain. He prowled the Basque countryside looking for material, and entered some of his paintings in another exhibition where his friend Ramón Gómez de la Serna gave him a booster review.

The bohemian lifestyle of this merry band eventually laid Diego low, so he stopped drinking and went on a vegetarian diet – a purge he resorted to again later in his life. He took hikes and began reading very serious books: Aldous Huxley, Emile Zola, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Voltaire and Karl Marx. He devoured books on mathematics, biology and history, drowning his over-indulged body with intellectual stimulation.

26. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1909.

Oil on canvas, 59 × 45 cm.

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

27. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Woman at her Toilet, 1883.

Oil on canvas, 75 × 63 cm.

Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

28. Paul Gauguin, Vaïraumati Tei Oa (Her name is Vaïraumati), 1892.

Oil on canvas, 91 × 68 cm.

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

29. Diego Rivera, Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1923.

Oil on canvas, 63 × 52 cm.

Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato.

30. Diego Rivera, Flower Vendor, 1926.

Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 109.9 cm.

Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu.

31. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Concha, c. 1927.

Oil on canvas, 62.3 × 48.3 cm.

Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu.

32. Paul Gauguin, Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), 1891.

Oil on canvas, 70 × 46 cm.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

After sticking it out for two years, Chicharro, Ramón Valle-Inclan and Rivera, apparently flush with winnings gathered from a Spanish casino, took a train to Paris, chipped in for a horse cab to the Place Saint-Michel and found rooms at number 31, the Hotel de Suez on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. This hotel near the Latin Quarter was crammed with penniless American and Spanish art students living off meagre stipends from various sources. No sooner had Diego put down his bags than he was out the door, down the hill and across the Seine heading for the Louvre.

The Paris art scene must have overwhelmed him. In the two months he spent in the city, very little time was wasted as he got out his paints and brushes, joining other Paris-struck painters on the banks of the Seine. He wandered through the galleries peering at the works of Pissarro, Monet, Daumier and Courbet. Gallery and museum walls glowed with colour and ways of seeing and techniques so foreign to his well-ordered provincial realism. He must have been desperate to try and locate a path to a style he could call his own. One painter stood out who had decorated the walls of the amphitheatre or “hemicycle” in the Sorbonne across rue St Jacques from a number of panels in the rotunda of the imposing Pantheon – formerly the church of St Genevieve – residing behind its portico of Corinthian columns. Both buildings were a five-minute walk from the Hotel de Suez.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French artist who was born in Lyon in 1824 and died in Paris in 1898. He studied with Eugène Delacroix and rose to prominence in the world of the Paris Salon. He embraced the allegorical tradition of representing abstract ideas of honour, triumph of the spirit, despair and sacrifice with classical figures arrayed on dreamscapes that symbolised the subtext of their actions. He accomplished his painting on large canvas surfaces that were fixed to the walls. His work appealed to both the post-Impressionists and the Symbolists as he simplified forms and used non-naturalistic colours to evoke moods.

This first taste of public mural painting by a contemporary artist also drew Diego into the influence of the Symbolists – whose work at a later time might be called “psychedelic realism” and eventually metamorphosed into Surrealism. Puvis de Chavannes, though the radical post-Impressionists praised him, was elected by acclamation to the presidency of the National Society of French Artists and was made a Commander of the Légion d’honneur.

Rivera claimed that the work – and respect – of Puvis so inspired him, that he drew another expatriate Mexican artist, Ángel Zárraga, and the artist who had beaten him to the Mexican government bursary, Roberto Montenegro, into a scheme to create murals for the Palacio de Bellas Artes under construction in Mexico City.

However, his feverish absorption of French art had to be shelved for much of June as he ended up on his back, sick with chronic hepatitis, a malady that would return again throughout his life. The illness did give him time to plan a trip to Brussels. Enrique Friedmann, a Mexican-German painter, accompanied him.

As summer settled over Europe, Rivera and Friedmann travelled from the Brussels museums of Flemish masters to the small city of Bruges, thought by many to be the home of Symbolism. While there, he began the painting House on the Bridge, one of many paintings he completed in Bruges, rising at dawn and painting until the light was gone. His cumulative impression of the city appeared to be that of stillness and death – a complete absence of people, landscapes of still waters and uninhabited structures. A steam barge floats without its crew. La Maison sur le Pont carries no traffic. A Night Scene sketch is silent.

This introspection mirrors his early Mexican landscapes and picks up his feelings of being the observer, the outsider looking in, seeing through his gift of artistic translation. He confided later how he felt as a Mexican among Europeans, experiencing “…my Mexican-American inferiority complex, my awe before historic Europe and its culture.”[9]

While living on the cheap, Rivera and Friedmann wandered into a Bruges café to grab a bite before catching some sleep in the railway station waiting room as though they were waiting for the next train. A sign outside the café offered “Rooms for Travellers”. Hoping for a good deal they entered and took a table, a brioche and two coffees. Rivera was eating when he looked up and discovered María Blanchard, his girlfriend from Spain, grinning at him from the café’s doorway. He stood and held his arms wide. Next to her stood a “…slender blonde young Russian painter…”[10] named Angelina Beloff.

Angelina was seven years older than Diego and her life paralleled his on many levels. Her father, Michael, had given up his occupation as a lawyer to work for the government in order to put food on the table at their home in St Petersburg. Her devoted mother, Catherine, was a Finnish Swede who wanted Angelina to become a doctor, but when Angelina wanted to switch to art school, Catherine gave her support. Angelina’s art studies were rigorously academic, and when her parents died suddenly she received a small pension from the Russian government. Using that money, she moved to Paris and took up studies with the more experimental and demanding Henri Matisse. His bold ideas seemed too outré and she fled to the more conservative Academia Vitti and the classes of a Spanish academician named Anglada Camarasa. He carved out his work with palette knife and hog bristle brush until the impasto resembled a bas relief. Angelina mused “…he must have sold his paintings by the pound…”[11] to his wealthy clientele.

It was at Camarasa’s class that she had met María Blanchard. They became friends and journeyed together to Bruges. Arriving on a cold wet day, they found the café with “Rooms for Travellers.”

The four young artists hooked up and stayed together, painting and sampling what pleasures their meagre budgets could afford in the Belgian countryside. The foursome was truly international. Diego spoke Spanish, some French and no Russian, María spoke better French and Spanish, Angelina spoke Russian and French but no Spanish, and Friedmann spoke German, Spanish and French. They all spoke a smattering of English.

A Polish art student from Paris joined their group and the five painters busied themselves, with Diego not stopping even when the sun went down. Angelina declined to join Diego and María working in the dusk on a house that would become Diego’s Beguine Convent in Bruges or Twilight in Bruges. When María returned to their rooms above the café she was obviously upset; Diego had asked her to be a go-between and convey his love to Angelina who spoke no Spanish. Though Diego and María were “just friends” at this point and not “lovers”, the request put a chill into the friendship between the two girls that he could not understand.

On an apparent whim, the group took a “small freighter” to London and visited the Hogarths and Turners in that city’s museums. The cosmopolitan group enjoyed an unproductive, carefree existence as Diego gradually fell even more in love with Angelina. He also encountered a city larger than he had ever experienced. Along with the labyrinth of streets and buildings came the attendant urban poverty that had driven Karl Marx to pen the Communist Manifesto in 1848 with Friedrich Engels. This crushing poverty of the London slums – much worse than the poverty of the poor in Mexico City – deeply affected the young painter, but he did not translate any of it, save for a few sketches of a workers’ strike, to his art.

33. Diego Rivera, Arum Vendor, 1924.

Pencil on paper (study for lacquer project), diameter: 50 cm.

Juan Coronel Rivera Collection, Mexico City.

34. Diego Rivera, Child with a “Taco”, 1932.

Lithograph, 42 × 30.3 cm.

Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

35. Diego Rivera, The Rural Teacher, 1932.

Lithograph, 31.8 × 41.7 cm.

Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

Beloff travelled with him to London’s museums, docks, and tourist spots and gradually became attracted to the lumbering young man with the big eyes and awkward charm. Unfortunately she had no allusions as to his art. Rivera’s technique was brilliant, but he chose the subject matter of a forgettable academician. He studied the work of one allegorical realist after another while around him swirled the modern art of Matisse and Cézanne, the flurry of manifestos coming from the Futurists’ overheated presses in Italy, the beginnings of work by two painters named Braque and Picasso cobbling together something called “Cubism”. All Diego wanted was wall-space in the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, a grossly conservative group show of slick academicians, tripping over each other to please rich patrons.

When they returned to Paris, Angelina kept her reflections to herself, because both María Blanchard and Diego owed paintings to their sponsors to keep their stipends coming. They set to work with María keeping to her Fauve style while Diego did his best alternating his painting with study of Puvis de Chavannes’ murals. The Seine chose that time to spill over its banks with a historic flood. No one could cross the bridges to the Right Bank, telephones and electricity were down and many streets were flooded. The Hôtel de Ville, whose interior walls had been decorated by Puvis, was unreachable because of high water, leaving Diego only the Pantheon and Sorbonne for study.

Being trapped by the flood gave him time to produce an etching, Mitin de Obreros en los Docks de Londres; he finished the House on the Bridge begun in Bruges and started a new painting, Le Pont de la Tournelle, in which he transposed the remembered London mist with its unique pinks and greys to the banks of the Seine. This painting shows workers unloading wine barrels from a barge onto the quay. To Rivera it represented a first look at what was emerging as his own style and it signalled the arrival of his empathy for the toil of the worker. He credited this new class sensitivity to his relationship with Angelina Beloff and the writings of Karl Marx.

The Salon des Indépendants accepted six of his paintings: four Bruges landscapes, La Maison sur le Pont and Le Pont de la Tournelle. By 1910, this Salon had frittered away some of its avant-garde reputation, but acceptance would look good in the Mexico City local newspaper.

Diego Rivera was a nobody in the high-pressure Parisian world of fine art, patronage and financial success – and he knew it. He needed credentials and recognition from more than the provincial governor of Veracruz. He also needed constant pats on the back to buy up his confidence. His image of himself as a Mexican bumpkin lost in the halls of culture européenne continued to haunt him.

He had reached a point in his technique where he could paint in any manner he chose, paint like any artist he chose; any artist but himself. He had been abroad for four years and while he had grown considerably into his twenty-four years, he was still homesick.

The centenary of the 1810 Mexican Revolution demanded a celebration, and Porfirio Díaz intended to impress his foreign investors and the wealthy criolos who kept him in office. Besides the inevitable speeches, bullfights, fireworks and marching bands, the arts were to be celebrated with orchestras, operas and displays of original Mexican art. Diego had received enthusiastic permission from Governor Dehesa to return home with his latest work. With his paintings accepted by the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, he might even expect a warm welcome from his President. And there was the foreign press to consider.

While he had earlier planned this return to Mexico without a thought, now he had Angelina and their developing relationship on the boil. They were deeply involved, but both understood the pressures and realities of their situation. They needed to keep their stipends alive without additional obligations, both financial and emotional. Neither knew if their autocratic governments might be toppled by internal or external strife at any time and their bursaries discontinued. Being the emotionally stronger of the two and the more pragmatic, Angelina suggested that they spend a year away from each other in their respective home cities. Diego could re-establish himself as the hometown artist who “made good” in Europe, while she explained him to her Russian brothers.

After endearing pledges of love and loyalty she boarded a train heading north, while Diego’s railway carriage rolled down the tracks towards Brittany and the sea. He needed some painting and solitude before the ocean voyage bore the conquering hero home, thankfully carrying his shield and not on it.

36. Diego Rivera, Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1925.

Red chalk and pastel, 64.5 × 50 cm.

Vicky and Marcos Micha Collection, Mexico City.