“Then I remembered that in the Caucasus and Asia Minor, way before Pliny, petroleum was obtained by placing the hide of lambs on fields exuding petroleum. But there was another issue pending, the most important: how to cauterize it. About this Pliny said ‘For fine work, painters use the torches of gold and silversmiths.’ That reminded me of the silversmiths of my childhood in Mexico, how they used a lamp loaded with petroleum, blowing into its flame with a metal blowgun and sending it to a base of clay where the metal they wanted to melt lay. In other words, the mysterious torch that confused Leonardo da Vinci was nothing other than a common lead blowgun. I tried this approach over ground colors in an emulsion of copal oil and wax dissolved in an essence of petroleum and was able to obtain the result used by the old masters, reincorporating the encaustic procedure into modern art.”
What about the aesthetics of his painting? Let us hear what the philosopher Samuel Ramos has to say:
“Diego Rivera’s aesthetic begins with the assumption that art must be the expression of an ideological content determined by the social conditions of the moment in which the artist lives. The notion of art for art’s sake is, for Rivera, a mask hiding the pursuit of interests other than artistic. The political basis he has given his work blinds his opponents, keeping them from seeing and judging its plastic values. As a human being, Diego Rivera has involved himself in the social struggles of our time; he has actively joined leftist causes. His painting involves a political thesis. His entire mural achievement is the visual objectification of a socialist idea based on Mexican history. It is not proper to discuss his political notions when considering Diego Rivera’s painting. What can be discussed is whether the procedure of using painting as the instrument of an ideological expression can be legitimized from an aesthetic point of view.
“If someone looks into Rivera’s work for the ideal of beauty as formulated at a certain period of European art, which has been turned into a kind of universal model, that person is wasting his time. It seems to me that the true universal conscience of art ought to be one that denies the right to grant privileges to a specific form of beauty at the expense of others, recognizing the existence of multiple forms through which different epochs, different peoples and diverse individuals, have found that same spiritual pleasure that confers unity to the perception of what we call beauty. What distinguishes Rivera’s painting from its European counterpart is precisely an original manner of seeing and grouping the diverse plastic elements provided by a reality as peculiar as that of the Mexican people, heretofore unknown in the world of art. Its aesthetic value is realized by the authenticity with which the painter has known how to capture the personal features of his people and his environment, as well as by the fidelity of the artist to his own manner of seeing and thinking.”
Relating to the initial influences on Rivera, his spiritual connection to the great masters and the discovery of his own world, let us see what Germaine Wenziner has to say:
“No sooner had he arrived in Europe than he visited the museums, diving into Assyrian and archaic Greek art. He stopped in front of the blues of Fray Angelico, wandering long among the primitives. He leaped into the sobriety of Courbet, yet surrendered more deeply to the charm of the Moulin de la Galette, was unsettled by the musical structures that Renoir had created between the palpitating life in his drawings and his vibrant chromatics. Every art manifestation shook him. He suffered the authoritarian presence of David’s portraits, returned to the impressionists, the neo-impressionists. Afterwards, discovering Seurat, he thought he’d go crazy. Nevertheless, it was Cézanne who made the deepest impression. What affects one the most in studying the life of Diego Rivera during that period is his extraordinary expenditure of energy and the excitement in this foreign painter ready to discover everything that the pictorial universe could be hiding. His genius was like a demon punishing him without respite.”
Crespo de la Serna lists some key moments when Rivera found his creative conscience. Certainly his encounter with the work of Cézanne at the boutique of Ambroise Vollard, “an impact that in spite of his flight to other artistic premises and his devotion to El Greco, left an important mark on his spirit and even more on the on-going gestation of his art.” His dealings with Cubism “in which he managed to attain a clear presence and which he later transformed into a constructivist system based on previous experiences.” His visit to Italy (frescoes from the Renaissance, the work of the primitives, etc.) “from which he derived his resolve to paint murals in the future.” Lastly, “his re-discovery of the Mexico intuited in his childhood and adolescence, when he returned to his country for the second time in 1921.”
After his cubist period, Rivera left Paris a mature artist.
“Fifteen years away from his homeland,” says Wenziner, “had made him a more absolute Mexican than he had ever been. Like Flaubert, who, during a trip, conceived Madame Bovary as a type of woman different from those of other places, in the same way Diego Rivera, during his stay in Paris, meditated and conceived his great Mexican masterpieces.”
This re-discovery of Mexico gave the painter a unique originality, thanks to which he reached the stage of a definitive awareness as an artist, painting his land with a chromatic and incomparable force. So, this entire process, all this evolution from his beginnings to the time of his major conceptions, was presented in the exposition of 1949, the supreme triumph of his life in front of his people. He actually filled all the salons of the Palace of Bellas Artes. The amazed public went from one period to the next, confirming silently the total revelation of his genius. Afterwards…afterwards came what we may call an evening with the sun on the horizon. Rivera gave himself up to painting with the fury of the possessed, just painting, painting. He painted at all hours of the day and night, at home, in his studio, in the street, in villages. He continued the frescos at the Palacio Nacional, developed projects, scenographies, jottings…you name it! It was like an antediluvian waterfall, that enormous fountain that emerges from the cracks of creation, a mastodontism of paint.
Suddenly, the giant swayed. The logical breakdown arrived, the first cancerous manifestations. He said nothing, just went on working. Nevertheless, he made a trip to the Soviet Union, seeking a cure. In the USSR he was overwhelmed by tributes and brought back with him a new exposition, which he exhibited successfully in his own home. He declared that he had been cured and that he had never felt better. On December 8, 1956, he celebrated his seventieth birthday, and his admirers proclaimed him “the greatest genius in contemporary plastic art.” There was a popular gathering in front of his “Pedregal Pyramid” [the place where he lived and worked, —Tran.], and people brought flowers and song. Children, old folks, workers, professionals from all disciplines, came to congratulate him. In the middle of the twentieth century, people climbed up and down the stone steps of that imitation of an Aztec temple. It was exciting. It looked as if all the demiurges of the Mexican Valley had made a date to meet at that place. The museum-pyramid of Rivera, located in the Pedregal of San Pablo Tlepetlapa, is a monumental structure of vast proportions, an actual materialization of Rivera’s spirit. The ground floor is dark; one wanders through it as in restless dreams, those dreams that tell us things we can’t remember but feel afterwards. The palaces of the princes of the Anahuac must have been like this, colossal, depressing, full of a threatening, rocky solidity. But as one goes up to the floors above, one receives the consolation of light and, witnessing the smiling landscape, a confrontation with limitless beauty.
Everywhere, from corbels and niches craftily located, the visitor is faced by the horrendous visages of ancient deities. One touches with one’s eyes the huge past in a magical act of extreme simplicity.
Today that sumptuous tomb, that Mexican Gizeh is empty, as if without substance. It contains more than 40,000 sculptures, but it is missing its key treasure: the body of Diego Rivera. It is a castle without ghosts, a legend without the dead; something unimaginable because it doesn’t project a shadow. But the day will come when, from the Rotunda of Illustrious Men (where municipal pride deposited