The next day, he presented himself at the studio of one of Madrid’s premier portrait painters, Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera. Diego proffered his letter of introduction from Dr Atl and was led to a corner of the studio he could call his own. The other students scrutinised the fat Mexican farm boy and were unimpressed. A heady perfume of paint and turpentine, open tins of linseed oil, raw canvas and pine wood for stretchers filled the room, and he set to work at once. He painted for days, arriving early and leaving late. Gradually, with his sheer brute concentration and resolve, the value of his stock rose among his fellow classmates and he became part of their social circle.
In his Rivera biography, Dreaming With His Eyes Open, the author Patrick Marnham offers an insightful appraisal of Rivera’s time spent in Spain and the value of the young artist’s first attempt to assert himself and discover his own style.
“Throughout the nineteenth century,” Marnham writes, “with brief liberal interregnums and spasmodic revolts ruthlessly suppressed, Spain dozed under four Habsburgs – one Ferdinand and one Isabella – and two Alfonsos. Alfonso XIII was still on the throne at the time of Rivera’s arrival.”
Spain had been passed by in the cultural, economic and political structure of a very vital Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Only Barcelona maintained a tenuous touch with the rest of Europe, and Picasso had studied there at the School of Fine Arts before bolting in 1900. He had hurried through Madrid, spent a day at the Prado, and penned a letter to a friend stating, “In Spain we are not stupid. We are just very badly educated.” Diego, in his search for the headwaters of the mainstream in modern painting, “…had sailed up a backwater.”[8]
As he settled into the rhythms of Madrid and the surrounding countryside, he appreciated the comfort factor of speaking the language – or something at least approximating to Castilian Spanish – and having his hotel only a stone’s throw from the Prado, which housed one of Europe’s finest collections of paintings. When not working with maestro Chicharro in the studio, he set up his easel opposite the finest examples of El Greco with the elongated figures towering above him, or feeling the heat come off Goya’s passionately restrained portraits of the Spanish rich and roughly-brushed stalwart peones massed before ranks of soldiers with bayonets. The vivid colours and brushstroke impasto came to life on the original canvases as opposed to the pale chromolithographs decorating walls in Mexico City. He slaved over these masterpieces, unlocking the secrets of their line, colour and dynamic compositions.
23. Diego Rivera, Portrait of John Dunbar, 1931.
Oil on canvas, 199.5 × 158 cm.
Private collection.
24. Diego Rivera, Study for The Jug, 1912.
Gouache on paper, 28.5 × 23 cm.
María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection, New York.
25. El Greco, The Visitation, 1610.
Oil on canvas, 96 × 72.4 cm.
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D. C.
And, here in Madrid, an interesting quirk of content appeared amidst his self-generated themes. No religious paintings by young Diego have been recovered or noted. Among the wealthy and those aspiring to higher positions, the purchase of art had contributed to a boom for painters, decorating walls with bucolic rural scenes, family portraits and the scarred and bloody body of Jesus on the Cross. Holy scenes from the Bible were big sellers and the more slickly rendered the better. Diego, however, who had bad memories of the Church and its effect on his mother’s impassioned judgments, and of his father’s anti-clerical teaching and writing, eschewed the gaudy morality plays of Madrid’s commercial painters. He continued as he was, a young Mexican man living off a free ride and working hard to find his own vision and style.
Chicharro’s reports to Don Dehesa, Governor of Veracruz and Diego’s sponsor, were glowing and the paintings regularly sent to Dehesa reflected the reports’ praise. Some of Chicharro’s student exhibitions drew critics who singled out Rivera as a “promising talent”. Diego’s brush with the Madrid avant-garde found him embroiled in an anti-modern art movement (el Museísmo) which demanded the abandonment of modern art for the 300-year-old El Grecos. Hardly a plunge into the future, but Rivera’s painting during his isolated two years in Spain was conventional, slick and bland.
While Picasso was creating the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, Rivera ground out The Forge, The Old Stone and New Flowers and The Fishing Boat. The paintings were handsome if only because of their superb technique, but they would also have looked at home in any mercado tourist shop. To be charitable, Rivera did manage to keep his meal ticket coming from the Governor of Veracruz. And he met a girl.
At the Café de Pombo, a hang-out for the Spanish avant-garde, Diego spent time with the two Ramóns and María Blanchard. Ramón number one was Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a critic and soon-to-be Dada poet. Ramón number two was Ramón del Valle-Inclán, a Spanish novelist who had lost his left arm to the swing of a cane in a brutal café brawl. He was a grand storyteller, and Diego thoroughly absorbed his enthralling gift of prevarication, adding touches to expand his own myth-making machine. María Blanchard’s real name was María Gutiérrez Cueto, and she was one of Chicharro’s painting students. She was bright, five years older than Diego and four feet tall with a subtle hunchback caused by an accident to her spine in her youth. She dressed in the English tourist style and made a striking contrast to her towering mountain of a friend (and lover, according to Rivera in later years). In 1908 she headed for Paris, leaving Diego to finish up his second year in Spain. He prowled the Basque countryside looking for material, and entered some of his paintings in another exhibition where his friend Ramón Gómez de la Serna gave him a booster review.
The bohemian lifestyle of this merry band eventually laid Diego low, so he stopped drinking and went on a vegetarian diet – a purge he resorted to again later in his life. He took hikes and began reading very serious books: Aldous Huxley, Emile Zola, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Voltaire and Karl Marx. He devoured books on mathematics, biology and history, drowning his over-indulged body with intellectual stimulation.
26. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 59 × 45 cm.
Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz, Veracruz.
27. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Woman at her Toilet, 1883.
Oil on canvas, 75 × 63 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
28. Paul Gauguin, Vaïraumati Tei Oa (Her name is Vaïraumati), 1892.
Oil on canvas, 91 × 68 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
29. Diego Rivera, Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1923.
Oil on canvas, 63 × 52 cm.
Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato.
30. Diego Rivera, Flower Vendor, 1926.
Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 109.9 cm.
Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu.
31. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Concha, c. 1927.
Oil on canvas, 62.3 × 48.3 cm.
Honolulu