2 The Aesthetic of the Valley of Mexico
4 The Business of Pre-Hispanic Art
A FEW WORDS about my half-brother Alfredo’s background and life as a Latin American poet and journalist might be of interest to the English-speaking readers of this book.
Alfredo, born on August 11, 1917, died before the turn of the century.
We are a literary Costa Rican family on my paternal side, with five of us, in three generations, published writers.
Alfredo’s mother was from El Salvador. My father married her in spite of knowing she was ill with tuberculosis. She died in Costa Rica when Alfredo was about three years old and he was raised by our paternal aunts, Graciela and Odilie, until he went to Salvador to stay with his maternal family and finish his schooling. After a short visit to Costa Rica, he went to Mexico where he became a journalist, married Alba Chacón, a beautiful and bright Zapotec Indian woman with whom he had two children, Alfredo, his son (today a painter), and Cora (a successful actress and theatre director in Dallas).
Early in life Alfredo manifested great poetic talent. In Mexico he found his true home, developed his talents, and went on to write more than twenty books of poetry and prose. An amiable and well-connected man, he knew Spanish poets in exile such as José Moreno Villa and Leon Felipe. Pablo Neruda called his poetry “desbordante y solar” (boundless and solar).
The dedication on the 111th copy of the Rivera book he gave me reads, “To my brother Alvaro, who will translate this book into the English language. Mexico D. F. August 27 / 71.”
It is with deep regret that it is only now, in 2015, at the age of 88, that I have attempted to translate my beloved brother’s work. I dedicate my labors to his memory.
INTRODUCTION
IN SEPTEMBER OF 1948, Diego Rivera escaped being lynched by a mob of hotheads stoning his house in Coyoacán. In his mural at the Prado Hotel, in Mexico City, the artist had reproduced a phrase by the liberal writer Ignacio Ramírez (1818-1879) sufficiently strong to ignite the ire of malcontents.
The phrase that provoked the riot read, in bold letters: God doesn’t exist. The hotel management, frightened, ordered the mural to be covered up. The title of the mural was, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central Park. The then archbishop of Mexico, Doctor Luis María Martinez, for his part, refused to bless the new hotel and the clergy attacked Rivera from the pulpit. The word spread that the building was damned and destined to burn. Rivera was delighted.
Many years before, when the artist was in Toledo, Spain (1907), the legend spread among folk that “he fed on the bones of children.” That may have been what led to the famous attempt on his life.
He shook up the newspapers twenty years ago spreading the version that he was a cannibal. I heard him say, to a group of students in the state of Puebla, “human meat has a slightly sweet taste, superior to that of any edible animal.” The students were horrified. Diego laughed to himself.
When his third wife, Frida Kahlo, that extraordinary painter, died, her wake was held in the Palace of Bellas Artes, as a proper homage to her work. Diego arrived and ordered the unfurling of a flag with the hammer and sickle, and the Communists, headed by him, sang “The Internationale.” Such was the scandal that it led to the downfall of the director of the National Institute of Bellas Artes, the writer Andrés Iduarte. Rivera rubbed his hands in glee.
One time I asked him, “how would you decorate the Mexico City Cathedral?” The reply was devastating: “The day that Mexico’s cathedral is turned into a useful building, no longer the provider of opium to the people, and it is turned into a discussion center, a popular museum, a garrison, a library or grain cellar, I would love nothing more than to decorate it. If Mexican Catholics had any sense, they would ask their bankers of the Committee on Decorum to hire José Clemente Orozco or myself to work on a series of works that would turn the cathedral into a visual center of such importance that those hotels whose investors are the same bankers from the Committee, would do the most fantastic business of their lives.”
Because of such views, Diego Rivera was continuously insulted in the press, in public when he ventured to espouse one of his radical theories, and privately when traditional notions were offended by his declarations, manifestos or communications.
But when the government organized the exposition of his complete works, celebrating his fifty years of artistic labor, he was declared “one of the greatest painters in the history of Mexico and one of the few authentic world-wide greats of the present time.” The select minorities who witnessed the exhibition backed up that declaration as being no exaggeration.
When the papers announced the news of his death, the 25th of September 1957, the people, now en masse, put in an appearance before his remains. Multitudes invaded Bellas Artes where a funeral chapel was set up. Men of all ideologies and social position made the long trek from the center of town to the Dolores Cemetery, where he was buried in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men.
For three days, Diego Rivera owned the eight columns that newspapers reserve for sensational news. Columnists, editorialists and graphic artists paid him homage, praising his work. The same press that had hounded him now praised him unanimously. And Diego Rivera, the “dangerous Communist,” went to his grave covered by the national flag in the midst of the consternation of the whole country.
Rivera initiated the mural movement in our time, giving the work of art a public destiny since it is realized, not on the canvas of private collectors, but on the walls of buildings that are the property of the nation.
In 1922, he finished his first mural at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City with a philosophic theme he entitled The Creation. From that year to the year of his death, the measurement of the surfaces he painted comes to 30,000 square meters, an amount not realized by any other artist in the world.
The mural work represents the culmination of his experiences in the field of art, the maturity of his life, and the synthesis of the various schools of painting that he knew and mastered.
In his early youth, when he was a student at the San Carlos Academy, he quickly broke with the academic tradition and looked for the free expression of his ideas. He took up Spanish realism, was immensely moved by Cezanne, and managed to conquer, successively, the techniques of all modern tendencies: Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, all of which he enriched with new contributions during his travels in Europe, especially in Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon des Independents and the famous Salon d’Autumne.
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