“In 1910, the painter was a fledgling academic master, a docile retriever, bringing back from Europe the artistic booty that his aging protector, Don Teodoro Dehesa, rightist governor of Veracruz had paid him to fetch.”[12]
Even as Diego greeted begowned and bejewelled guests at the grand opening of his show, Mexican art critics and a few international colleagues with Mexican investments choked back adjectives such as “bland,” “derivative” and the career killer, “lacking in originality”, to bring out “superb technique” and “a promising talent”. Grinning and glad-handing, Rivera watched Doña Carmelita Díaz write a cheque for six of his paintings to be sent to her house and seven more for the president’s palace. The sycophants of the social set elbowed their way into line to follow the example set by Doña Díaz. With his stipend from Don Dehesa secured plus this windfall, Diego had finally realised some significant income from his paintings – even if they did look like other artists’ work.
Two days earlier, on November 18th, 1910, only sixty miles from Mexico City, for an entire day the thunder of gunfire had rolled over the dusty hillsides surrounding the equally dusty town of Puebla. When the siege lifted, a band of Maderistas surrendered to a company of Díaz soldiers. Three of the Revolutionary band lay dead. On November 19th, Francisco Madero, the son of a rich family and bitter foe of President Díaz, rode south across the United States border in the company of well-armed men. Silently they crossed the stretch of desert ground that separated the two countries; spurs jingled, brass cartridges were ready in cross-belts and blue steel gun barrels flashed in the sun. They rode for a day then camped in a friendly village, waiting to be met by friends. The next morning, November 20th, Madero proclaimed that the Mexican Revolution had begun.
President Díaz declined to attend Diego’s opening because across Mexico bands of unskilled and illiterate peons and valued farm worker campesinos were mounting up and gathering in small bands that merged into armies. Pancho Villa, a one-time bandit, rode with Pascual Orozco, a Díaz army officer from the northern state of Chihuahua. Emiliano Zapata brought his mounted army up from the south toward Morelos, only a few miles from Mexico City.
In the city, Diego Rivera counted his money and his good fortune. As long as Porfirio Díaz remained president of Mexico, Rivera’s financial future was assured. The show had been a success and he had any number of commissions waiting for him. He could buy a ranch in the country and a studio in the city where he and Angelina could paint and live quietly, or party and travel around the world with their friends. Mexico City had become a party town and Diego threw himself into the celebrations. He had shaved his straggly moustache, but kept the beard to maintain his masculine gravitas. He became the guest of honour everywhere he walked through the door.
In the countryside, the Mexican army had been mobilised to combat the small posses of revolutionaries before they could grow into larger bands. Díaz’ tough shock troops, the Rurales, burned towns where sympathisers were found. More and more peons, armed with nothing more than sticks and machetes, flocked to Pancho Villa’s and Zapata’s growing guerrilla forces.
38. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Ruth Rivera, 1949.
Oil on canvas, 199 × 100 cm.
Juan Coronel Rivera Collection, Mexico City.
39. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1918.
Oil on canvas, 116 × 146 cm.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
40. Diego Rivera, Woman with a Red Shawl, 1920.
Oil on canvas, 80 × 75 cm.
Private collection, Mexico City.
Diego’s show was extended to December 20th, and then the Academy de San Carlos was cleaned out. Thirteen of the thirty-five paintings were sold, bringing the artist 4,000 pesos. He saw to it that borrowed paintings were returned to Don Dehesa in Jalapa, purchases were wrapped and delivered to Doña Carmelita Díaz, and the rest stored. After all the weeks of being feted in Mexico City, being the toast of the town, the conquering hero, he could no longer stay there. He knew he had to return to Paris and meet up with Angelina again, this time with some money in his pockets.
He gathered his bags and his paints, said his goodbyes and left Mexico City on January 3rd, 1910 – not for Paris, but, according to a letter sent to Angelina in March, for a small village two hours away by train named Amecameca. There he remained, painting landscapes, taking stock of his “success” and yearning for Angeline. All around him the Revolution gained strength. Peons ambushed and hacked to pieces platoons of Rurales for their weapons and ammunition. Armouries were looted. Small boys fired long rifles as they ran against the bayonets and artillery of Díaz’ regular army. Dabbing away in Amecameca, Rivera feared that the awkward imposition of the Revolution might interfere with the postal service, and his endearments might not reach his “Angel” in far off St Petersburg.
Having the documented evidence of Rivera’s movements and associations during this 1910 to 1911 period, the self-portrait he painted of the “revolutionary” and “patriot” Diego Rivera years later during this explosive time in Mexico’s history makes for wonderful fiction. In later years when he had once again become the artistic symbol of Mexico and needed to show his street credentials to the latest regime, his part in the Mexican Revolution between 1911 and 1920 became a lusty tale of adventure.
Beginning with his arrival in Mexico City for the exhibition of his work, the event became cloaked in mystical portent. First he claimed that his mother had not learned of his arrival in Mexico City. He wanted to “surprise” his emotionally fragile mother after four years absence. While she gushed tears and flung open her arms at his triumphant arrival, the reunion came to a sudden halt at the appearance of the mystical old crone, the Indian nurse to whom he’d been fobbed off to be healed as a child. She had dreamed of his arrival and walked for eight days to greet him. “Twice as tall and twice as beautiful as my real mother”, she and Diego confronted each other in the family house. Diego made his way upstairs to his former room and there, Blackie, his faithful dog, now crippled with age, greeted him. The aged mutt dragged himself up onto Diego’s lap, licked his master’s hand – and contentedly died.
It seemed as though a guiding hand of mystical protection keeping him out of the army’s gun sights and busy firing squads now ruled his life. Finding time while preparing his show, Diego plotted to assassinate Porfirio Díaz with a bomb concealed in his large sombrero. Unfortunately, a general and fellow plotter arrived on time for their lunch date to seal the deal, and dug into the frijoles. Diego arrived late to see the general thrashing out the last minutes of his life on the cantina floor after a generous poisoning by Díaz’ secret police. Being late saved Rivera’s life. He adopted that for future appointments.
The bomb components then migrated in his paint box to his exhibition, timed to detonate as the President admired Diego’s paintings. When the President’s comely wife showed up at the grand opening instead, the plot, like the bomb, fizzled out.
With his zeal to fight for the proletariat against the imperialists and capitalists unfulfilled, Diego saddled up and spent six months galloping into battle at the side of Emiliano Zapata and his southern army. Diego’s speciality was blowing trains off their tracks with explosives, but without harming a single passenger. However, as bullets whistled above the battle, Diego’s friends tore him from Zapata’s side and told the painter to leave Mexico or end up facing a Díaz firing squad as his name was on the presidential death list.
Regretting his departure from the class war of the peasants, he fled to Jalapa and bid a tearful farewell to his old patron, Don Dehesa. While there, waiting for the packet to France, revolutionary insurgents surrounded the capital. Diego served his patron one last time acting as a negotiator between the Don and the