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42. Diego Rivera, The Eiffel Tower, 1914.

Oil on canvas, 115 × 92 cm.

Private collection.

The Eight Year Search – 1911–1919

Angelina Beloff should have known better. When Diego said in a telegram that he had docked in Spain, he didn’t mean that he intended to rush to the next ship bound for Le Havre. In his mind, it meant that he had arrived in Spain, and it was time to visit old friends, take a tour of the Prado, and down a couple of casks of fine sherry during evenings in Madrid’s nightspots.

Angelina had rented a studio near the Montparnasse Metro station at 52 avenue du Maine, and sat down to wait. The wait extended into anxiety, until one day he calmly strolled in and told her of the great time he’d had in Madrid. There was no apology or remorse but she was so happy to see him that their life together picked up where it had left off, and their pact to marry resurfaced. There is no public record of an official civil or church wedding, and Diego always claimed their union was of the so-called “common-law” type. Whatever the mechanics of their relationship, it began in happiness for them both.

Angelina had rented the studio next to the Académie Russe for the hoard of young Russian artists who desired art training. She talked to them in Russian, taught a few classes, and enjoyed their company when Diego was deep into his work. He finished two paintings of the volcano Iztaccihuatl and sent them off to the Salon d’automne. They were promptly ignored. There was a buzz in the air still reverberating from the spring Salon des Indépendants he had just missed because of his sojourn in Amecameca. Cubism was being challenged and defended in every café on the Left Bank. Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Villon and André Lhote had exhibited Cubism in the Salon d’automne, while another band led by Albert GIeizes, Jean Metzinger, Henri Le Fauconnier and Robert Delaunay had dominated Les Indépendants. Neither Braque nor Picasso had entered either salon, but they were still considered the pioneers of the form.

“There are considerable differences in nuance between Braque and Picasso on one the hand and the other artists on the other,” wrote Tamon Miki of Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art. “…but each artist sought through his own individual method for a new order in plastic art, by departing from traditional visual senses, and by overlapping planes, piling and dividing them into massive, multi-surfaced fragments.”[13]

With a harrumph, Rivera collected his volcano pictures, stuffed them into storage (where they were eventually lost) and left Paris with Angelina for Spain and its Mexico-like scenery.

He trudged up into the Catalan mountains and began dabbing away in the Pointillist style – at least more modern than the Flemish Masters. After two months of eyestrain while emulating the coloured dots of Georges Seurat who had been dead for twenty years, Rivera came back to Paris and sent off two canvases to the spring Salon. They hung there like the museum pieces they were, and again he was roundly ignored. Diego Rivera became the artist who never encountered a style that he wouldn’t try. It is not difficult to imagine the cold panic that must have begun chilling his heart as he flailed about, an antique before his time, seemingly doomed to a trivial footnote in the history of art.

The pavement cafés of the Left Bank turned into his moveable office where he became a conteur – a storyteller. He held court among the painters, dilettantes, hustlers and poseurs who built up their stack of saucers on the outdoor tables listening to his stories of plunging into hordes of Díaz’ troops alongside Zapata and hiding bombs in his sombrero and paint-box. But as he played the fool, he also listened. His academy-sodden imagination began to stir as painters rhapsodised on the theories of Cubism – both freestyle and analytical, pre, post, proto and synthetic. They spoke of Mondrian and his apparent summing up of this faceting of nature into total abstraction – the logical conclusion. And though Rivera admired the Dutchman, he was still drawn to the familiar friend Ángel Zárraga, and Angelina Beloff studied El Greco’s Mannerist landscapes and elongated character studies.

In The Old Ones Rivera stretches the old men and places them against a background that folds up behind their El Greco-esque figures, bringing characters in the distance and buildings along the crest of a hill into the same picture plane, compressing the natural into an unnatural space. This painting and another, View of Toledo, are huge, six by seven feet in size. Could he have been thinking of the canvas wall murals of Puvis de Chavannes in the Pantheon rotunda? This meddling with spatial relationships led to other experiments. He and Angelina began trying different media besides linseed oil, looking for tactile solutions. A mix of lemon resin, essence of lavender and beeswax produced a particularly heady parfum graisseux with which to mix their paints.

There was a frantic air among the bohemians of Montparnasse as the once stabile world of simple painters, filters of the world around them, became a chaotic repository for the transmogrification of that world. The art-buying public had been challenged by the artists to mind-meld with the creators and peel back layers of manipulation to discover some “truth” buried in paragraph four of the latest manifesto. Rivera biographer Bertram Wolfe described this shift to the abstract revealed in the “Isms of art”:

“As we look back at these movements, we can begin to see Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, and all the other schools of Abstraction and formal experiment in modern art as contrary eddies in a common current. Together they mark the culmination of a long process of growing isolation of art from society; the result of art’s having been forced increasingly to turn in upon itself.”[14]

43. Diego Rivera, Still Life with an Anise Bottle or Spanish Still Life, 1918.

Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm.

Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato.

44. Diego Rivera, Still Life, 1913.

Oil on canvas, 84 × 65 cm.

The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

Back in Mexico, on November 11th, 1912 Francisco Madero had replaced the decamped president, Porfirio Díaz. The new regime saw no reason to cut off Mexican artists from their patrons and government bursaries, so Diego’s stipend was safe. Another benefit of the end of the Revolution was the expansion of Diego’s social circle to include the strange Dr Atl, the dandified Roberto Montenegro from San Carlos Academy days, and an artist-intellectual clothes horse who made Montenegro look like last week’s laundry, Adolfo Best Maugarde. While Diego struggled with his isolation from both the young lions of the Montparnasse avant-garde and the old toothless lions of the fly-blown Salons, at least he could speak a little Mexican with his compadres.

As Rivera struggled to make his academy-trained mind embrace the reality-splintering concepts of Cubism, on February 19th, 1913, General Victoriano Huerta staged a coup and sent the trusting intellectual Madero to prison. The general proclaimed himself President of Mexico with the support of United States ambassador and fellow alcoholic, Henry Lane Wilson. Supporting Huerta (called El Chacal – “the Jackal” by the Mexican campesinos and peons who knew him best), Lane sought to steer Mexico back to the days of Díaz when international big business had a free hand in the impoverished country. On February 22nd, Madero was being transferred from one prison to another when one of his guards pumped a revolver full of lead into the former president. On the same day – Washington’s Birthday – American President Woodrow Wilson and Mexican President Huerta toasted George Washington in the White House. During the time that Diego Rivera remained in Paris and travelled in Italy, his homeland once again went up in flames and was riddled with violence. The combined armies of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza opposed Huerta’s government. Villa fought to avenge Madero and to become the next president, Zapata led an agrarian revolt of the campesinos, and Carranza claimed he fought to create a democratic Mexico. During the ten years that followed the assassination of Madero – the Decada de Dolores (the Decade of Sorrow) – all three of Mexico’s legendary champions were assassinated. The last was the retired Pancho Villa, machine-gunned in an ambush in 1923.

13

Tamon Miki, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, October 2 – November 14, 1976

14

Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, Stein & Day, New York, 1963, paperback edition, 1969, p.81