18. Diego Rivera, Suburbs of Paris, 1918.
Oil on canvas, 65 × 80 cm.
Private collection.
This gang of “intellectuals, artists and architects” – El Grupo Bohemio – who had struggled to finish college, worked hard at exploring a dissolute lifestyle. The timbre of this bohemian existence is demonstrated in Rivera’s fanciful story in his memoir titled An Experiment in Cannibalism, where he and his pals pooled their money to buy corpses from the morgue. He had read a story where a lunatic had fed the flesh of cats to other cats to be skinned for their pelts, and their coats became glossy and full. Would a diet of human flesh improve the health of humans? Diego claims to have tried it for two weeks and never felt better. He particularly “…savoured young women’s breaded ribs”. The experiment ended because of fear of social hostility rather than “squeamishness”.[7]
During this time he also came into contact with the curious character Gerardo Murillo, a faculty member and anarchist political agitator against Díaz. Murillo chose the name “Dr Atl” while living in Mexico. In Indian dialect, Atl is the name of the fourth sun – Nahui Atl – and means Water Sun, but Murillo was actually a rabble-rousing criollo, the same as the rest of the governing class.
Dr. Atl had been to Europe, and extolled the virtues of the post-Impressionists and rebels such as Gauguin and Paul Cézanne to El Grupo Bohemio in long discussions at their favourite cafés over many glasses of Pulque (an Indian drink made of fermented cactus juice) and beer. But, at most, Atl’s fire-breathing evangelism produced only a woozy fog of intellectual rhetoric, but no revolutionary deeds or marches in the streets.
Diego had other things on his mind more important than overthrowing governments. He wanted to win a contest that offered a grant of 300 pesos a month to live and paint in Europe. His rival was Roberto Montenegro, a well-brought-up handsome dandy with a skilled painting technique. He was as elegant and refined as Diego was lumpy and soup-stained. And yet, because of Diego’s life experience and omnivorous eclecticism, Diego was actually more worldly than the city-bred gentleman in the French-cut suit. But when the votes were counted Montenegro won, and headed for Paris with the grant money to meet Picasso, Juan Gris, sip absinthe and dissolve into the City of Light.
Diego accepted the decision and turned to his father who had made an accommodation with the Díaz regime he despised for the sake of his family. Now he could help his son with a tug on a few strings. The governor of the state of Veracruz, Teodoro Dehesa, a liberal member of the Díaz government, had come through earlier with 30 pesos a month for Diego’s art education. Now the boy had become the young man and his paintings and drawings were paraded once more before his benefactor. The demonstration of Diego’s skills and potential pried from the Don a travelling scholarship of 300 pesos a month.
More conservative than Roberto Montenegro, Diego decided to ease into the European adventure by beginning in Spain. To get to Madrid, he needed steamship fare. One of Dr Atl’s more useful functions was to help students organise shows of their work to raise money to supplement their grants. For this service he received a commission. He fed a dozen of Rivera’s oils and sketches into an exhibition. The sales from this show bought Diego a one-way ticket to Spain. Dr Atl also supplied Diego with a letter of introduction to the Spanish painter Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera, who had many rich and well-known clients. Atl became a shadowy figure who popped in and out of the volcanic mix of Mexican politics and the arts over the next decades and would figure many times in Diego’s future.
19. Diego Rivera, The Old Ones, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 210 × 184 cm.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
Discovering Europe
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