When I asked him how many hours a day he spent at work he replied, “The time varies a lot, but almost always I go for the longest possible amount, generally from 10 to 14 hours a day.”
I was able to verify this affirmation seeing how in 1950 he started work on his fourth mural at the National Palace, representing a scene with the agricultural god Yacatecuhtli. He began on a Thursday at seven a.m. and he didn’t rest until nine o’clock the next morning, with the exception of a seven-hour break, after which he worked the night through until close to dawn Saturday.
Everything about Diego Rivera was monstrous: the way he worked, the way he’d insult, love and suffer. But his monstrousness originated deep down in the flame of his heart, the bottomless tenderness of genetic clay. He is comparable to Luther. The two come from downtrodden social classes, proud to be “sons of peasants.” Their fathers were both miners connected to the middle classes. Rivera and Luther are “energies erupting from the earth, like craters suddenly exploding,” according to the expression of Alfred Weber when referring to the father of the German Reformation.
Diego Rivera springs like a geyser out of the Mexican soil and starts to paint the way an Aztec god would do it in the days of human sacrifice, bloodied and filled with amazing vitality. D. H. Lawrence compared Rivera with the terrible Tezcatlipoca, solar and ecumenical deity of ancient Mexico.
In truth, we can identify this painter with each of the deities that form the Aztec pantheon: with Tlaloc, god of water; with Quetzalcoatl, beneficent god of light; with the profound Coatlicue, goddess of earth and death, portrayed with eagle claws and a skirt of snakes.
The writer Fernando Benítez tells how, after being up on a scaffold for three days working on the hands of a colossal figure, Diego Rivera fell to the ground and was taken home more dead than alive. Explaining this accident, his assistants said he had been pushed by the hands of the god he had just finished painting. Once, referring to pre-Hispanic idols he said, “They are my nourishment.”
One day, talking with him about his family, I learned that it had included “bandits, priests, military men and revolutionaries.” Diego Rivera was born on the 8th of December 1886, from that severe mix, at eight o’clock at night, in the mining town of Guanajuato, Pocitos Street number 8.
It’s necessary to look at the initial branches of his genealogy. His grandparents come from many places: Italy, Russia, Portugal, Holland, from Veracruz and San Miguel de Allende.
His paternal grandparents were Anastasio de la Rivera Sforza, an Italian Jew born in Russia from an unknown mother, and Inés d’Acosta, a Portuguese Jew who emigrated to Holland. His maternal grandparents were Juan Barrientos, originally from Alvarado, Veracruz, and Nemesia Rodríguez Valpuesta, from San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. His parents were Diego Rivera, dead from cancer at age 75, and María Barrientos y Rodríguez Valpuesta, dead at 63, also from cancer.
Diego Rivera contains in his blood a cocktail of maps whose olive is Mexico. It should be imbibed slowly to avoid sudden intoxication.
As one of his critics has said, “He was born under the sign of events with contradictory symbolism: just as, in Mexico, General Porfirio Díaz reelects himself to a second term in office, in New York, the Statue of Liberty is inaugurated at the mouth of the Hudson.”
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The artist was 63 years old when I began interviewing him. He was then a corpulent man, with a big belly, wearing huge pigskin shoes, overalls, coats of ordinary material and checkered wool shirts. He was careless in his attire but moved with delicacy and elegance, with a smile on his face that could pass for mockery, irony or sadness. He weighed more than 90 kilos, and he carried that weight high up scaffolds, working whole days without coming down, struggling like a demon.
His breakfast consisted of bananas, pears, apples and a cup of green tea while in the evening he’d eat the standard Mexican meal: noodle soup, meat stew and dessert. He opted for an oriental way of eating, and in his last years he went from using knives and forks to chopsticks. I always thought that in some recess of his being there was a hidden bonze or a lama who “hung up his Himalayas” and came to America, perhaps in a Viking ship.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna, in a much admired article about the master, said that when he showed up in Madrid, “he had the look of an authentic living Buddha, with the sumptuous fatness of the Buddha,” and that his eyes evoked “the awful look of one of his forebears.”
That is true. The first thing that impressed one about his face were those bulging eyes, ready to pop out of their orbits. From so much absorbing light and the colors of the world, those windows of the soul had been damaged a bit so when the morning would stream in, they’d redden and weep. These pathetic eyes seemed to swing free of their location and follow the attentive observer. In his self-portraits, Rivera emphasized their condition, which is why those faces he came up with are so tremendously intense.
His right eye was operated on in 1934 because of an atrophied ulcer caused by a streptococcus infection. The lachrymal gland in the upper section of the orbit was removed so that thereafter it was unable to retain any fluid; it would tear from time to time. After many hours working with the strong colors he preferred, that sick eye needed rest but the painter wouldn’t give in. It is no exaggeration to say that when Rivera painted he wept.
In his eyes the passion for art was stigmatized. It was only after he died that his eyes settled back to a normal position, shrouded now by the darkness they may have always yearned for.
Rivera detested cigarette smoke. He papered his studio with huge posters stating the familiar “No Smoking, Please.” He worked in the midst of great shafts of light, and when it was artificial it was so strong as to be blinding when one first entered the room.
We shall always remember those “bug eyes, held back by bloated, salient lids like those of a batrachian,” as Frida Kahlo used to say.
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In 1949, the Mexican president opened the Diego Rivera exposition at the Museum of Plastic Arts at the Palace of Bellas Artes to commemorate fifty years of Rivera’s work. Hundreds of works were shown on that occasion, starting with his first drawing, (The Railroad, 1889) made at age three, and ending with photographs of his last murals from the National Palace.
Diego Rivera was revealed to his people, unfamiliar as yet with him, as a true master of all historical styles of art. Ignorant men, who are legion, used to call him “a nobody.” One of them, a boorish gentleman, decided one Sunday to visit the much talked about exposition and was struck dumb. He understood nothing, of course, but underwent a shift of consciousness. He had to take off his hat before an artist so often maligned.
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When it comes to technical matters, we shall refer only to his experiments and research into wax painting, better known as encaustic painting, whose most notable exponent was Delacroix (Lateral chapels of the Church of Saint Sulpice in Paris).
Rivera himself, following the exposition, discussed his own research into encaustic and al fresco techniques with the Mexican painter Juan O’Gorman. Here is the crux of the matter, revealing of the scientific and humanistic fervor of the artist: “I began to get interested,” he told his friend, “with wax and resin color around 1905, above all with the idea of substituting it for oil color, as Raphael did. In those days that was the novelty and excitement among painters working with the neo-impressionist tendencies, like the great Seurat and the Swiss-Italian Segantini. Nobody had found the procedure to cauterize and arrive at the proper encaustic means. So I resolved to go to the sources, which were Greek, Coptic, Egyptian and Roman, but these kept the secret of such painting a mystery. And so it was. There was nothing else to do but take recourse in Pliny’s writings on natural history. There is one chapter where he talks of painting methods. Montavert, Delacroix and others had consulted Pliny without success so I, with the audacity of one who knows nothing and lacks respect for classic authors, thought it might be a question