Diego Rivera

Gerry Souter

Description

They met in 1928, Frida Kahlo was then 21 years old and Diego Rivera was twice her age. He was already an international reference, she only aspired to become one.An intense artistic creation, along with pain and suffering, was generated by this tormented union, in particular for Frida. Constantly in the shadow of her husband, bearing his unfaithfulness and her jealousy, Frida exorcised the pain on canvas, and won progressively the public’s interest. On both continents, America and Europe, these commited artists proclaimed their freedom and left behind them the traces of their exceptional talent.In this book, Gerry Souter brings together both biographies and underlines with passion the link which existed between the two greatest Mexican artists of the twentieth century.

Sujets

• Painting
• Modern
• Art
• Modern history
• Culture of Mexico
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Rivera
• Peinture

Informations

• Publié par: Parkstone International
• Date de parution: 04 juillet 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781783107759
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Author: Gerry Souter

Layout:
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© Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA
© Parkstone Press International, New York, USA
Image-Bar www.image-bar.com
© Victor Arnautoff
© Georges Braque, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ ADAGP, Paris
© José Clemente Orozco, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ SOMAAP, México
© Estate of Pablo Picasso/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA
© Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av. Cinco de Mayo n°2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.
© David Alfaro Siqueiros, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA/ SOMAAP, México

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers.
Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

ISBN: 978-1-78310-775-9
Gerry Souter



Diego Rivera
His Art and His Passions
1. Diego Rivera , The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City , 1931.
Fresco, 568 x 991 cm. San Francisco
Art Institute, San Francisco.
Contents


Foreword
From Training to Mastership
His First Steps
Discovering Europe
¡ Vuelva a México ! Homecoming
His New Exil to Europe or His Artistic Quest
The Eight Year Search – 1911-1919
The Revelation of Italian Frescos – 1920-1921
Between Painting and Politics
Mexican Muralists
Fame, Diego and Frida
A Communist Cheered by Americans
The Last Years or the Return to the Country
Back Home in Mexico
Adiós Frida, Vaya con Dios Adiós Diego, Vida larga al artista de la gente
Index
Notes
2. Diego Rivera , Self-Portrait, 1916.
Oil on canvas, 82 x 61 cm.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.


Foreword


I was aware of Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, long before I encountered the many other “Diego Riveras” that roamed the world between the beginning of the twentieth century and the late 1950s. As a photojournalist and graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, I took advantage of travel assignments to visit great works of art whenever possible. In Paris there are the treasures of the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou. In Mexico, there is Diego Rivera – everywhere. At home, I have the advantage of being only five hours by car from the Detroit Institute of Arts and the incredible murals Rivera created for this American industrial centre.
While his easel paintings and drawings constitute a large body of both his early and late work, his unique murals explode off walls in virtuoso performances of mind-staggering organisation. On those walls the man, his legend and myths, his technical talent, his intense story-telling focus and self-indulgent ideological convictions all come together.
As I researched my book Frida Kahlo – Beneath the Mirror , I found many photographs of Diego, first the smiling successful artist with his petite bride, and then as a tired old man following Frida’s coffin to the crematorium. Though their union was compelling, there was no way I could make my mind accept its consummation, both physical and intellectual, nor could I understand what drew beautiful women and powerful men to what appeared to be a shambling caricature. Revisiting his work and standing in front of it as the phantasmagoria of his imagination glowed from the walls, his appeal as a larger-than-life character and creator quickly replaced one’s first impression of a placid man.
Large, damp, soft-boiled lunarian eyes set in a moon face above a mouth designed for self-gratification peer expectantly from beneath heavy lids to create a frog-like portrait that sits upon a flesh-padded, tear-drop shaped body. But this large man who filled doorways and caused chairs to groan ominously had small, childlike hands. He appeared soft and lazy, but his endurance often stretched to eighteen hours a day on a scaffold with brush in hand in front of his mural walls. His personal life was a chaos of politics, seductions, parties, travel, marriages and creating his own myth, but his work at the wall was, of necessity, precisely choreographed to co-ordinate his creative execution with the time-driven demands of plaster fresco.
3. Frida Kahlo , Xochítl, Flower of Life , 1938.
Oil on metal, 18 x 9.5 cm. Private collection.


In his memoir Rivera, the struggling young artist, praised Picasso to the skies for liberating painters from the grip of stagnation. To his friends he accused Picasso of stealing elements of Cubist technique from him and seethed as Picasso advanced while he remained bogged down in Paris still without a style of his own. He was a life-long believer in the ideal of Communism and mostly in denial concerning its ruthless reality. Who could possibly embrace the strict ideology of Communism and still work for rich capitalists? Today, we need only look at China and the entrepreneurial Eastern European states following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. During the volatile twenties, thirties and forties Rivera’s political insights operated on the level at which most contemporaries viewed him – those of a great big child. He gathered friends wherever he went – Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Russia and the United States – yet jealousy of his successes and the divisive political insinuations he brushed into his art created bitter enemies and left a shambles in his wake. For years he habitually carried a large-calibre Colt revolver ostensibly to fight off attempts on his life.
Diego Rivera played many roles, some better than others, but deep inside – and more than a third of his life had passed before he realised this truth was Mexico, the language of his thoughts, the blood in his veins, the azure sky above his resting place. Finally, when all the Sturm und Drang of a life lived at the gallop settled and he had achieved his master’s gift of technique and fully embraced his creative goals, there was Mexico, her history and her stories. Those stories and the life of Diego Rivera mingle as a swift-flowing river gathers the earth into its stream.
Gerry Souter
Arlington Heights, Illinois
4. Frida Kahlo , Self-Portrait, c. 1938.
Oil on metal, 12 x 7 cm. Private collection, Paris.
5. Diego Rivera , Landscape, 1896-1897.
Oil on canvas, 70 x 55 cm.
Guadalupe Rivera de Irtube Collection.


From Training to Mastership


His First Steps

Diego Rivera fictionalised his life so much, that even his birth date is a myth. His mother María, his aunt Cesárea and the town hall records list his arrival at 7:30 on the evening of December 8th, 1886. That is the very auspicious day of the feast of the Immaculate Conception. However, in the Guanauato ecclesiastical registry, baptism documentation states that little Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez actually showed up on December 13th.
Rivera’s own description of his natal day many decades later recreates a grand melodrama. His mother had already laboured through three pregnancies that ended in stillbirths. Expecting twins, she pushed out Diego and began to haemorrhage. Diego was scrawny and lethargic and not expected to live, so Doctor Arizmendi, a family friend, tossed him into a nearby dung bucket and went for the second child. Diego’s twin brother arrived and seemed to be the last straw for petite and frail María, who lapsed into a coma.
In despair, Don Diego Rivera sobbed over his lifeless wife. Preparations had to be made to deal with her corpse. Ancient Matha, who had been attending Doña María, watched her being laid out and bent to kiss her cold forehead. The crone suddenly stepped back. María’s “corpse” was breathing! The doctor immediately lit a match and held it under María’s heel. Taking it away, he saw a blister had formed. Doña María was alive. Some squawks came from the dung bucket showing little Diego too had a few kicks in him, and he was retrieved.
Doña María eventually recovered and went on to study obstetrics, becoming a professional midwife. Diego’s twin brother, Carlos, died a year and a half later while the puny Diego, suffering from rickets and a weak constitution, became the ward of his Tarascan Indian nurse, Antonia, who lived in the Sierra Mountains. There, according to Diego, she gave him herbal medicine and practised sacred rites while he drank goat’s milk fresh from the udders and lived wild in the woods with all manner of creatures. [1]
Whatever the truth concerning his birth and early childhood, Diego inherited a crisp analytical intellect through a convoluted blending of bloodlines, having Mexican, Spanish, Indian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian and Portuguese descent. His father, Don Diego, taught him to read “…according to the Froebel method”. [2]
Friedrich Froebel is considered to be the “father of the modern kindergarten”. This German educator coined the word Kindergarten (“children’s garden”) in 1839. He opposed the concept of treating children as miniature adults and insisted on their right to enjoy childhood, to have free play, arts, crafts, music and writing. Pointing out the moral in a story did not allow children to draw their own conclusions from what they had read. It is interesting that later non-objective, free-thinking European artists such as Braque, Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian were likely as not also educated in Froebel-based kindergartens. [3]
Diego Rivera was born into a Mexico that consisted of a class-tiered society dependent on blood lines and political affiliations. The period was called the Porfiriato after the administration of autocratic President Don Porfirio Díaz. The elder Rivera was a educated man, a school teacher and a political liberal who was known as a t