The Painter Behind the Icon

Diego Rivera is Mexico’s most famous artist, but that isn’t the half of it. Forty-two years after his death--at a moment when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is preparing to open a major traveling retrospective exhibition, “Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution”--his powerful artwork and magnetic aura still loom so large that his country tends to be seen in terms of his imagery.

In Mexico, where Rivera became the most visible leader of the revolutionary muralist movement--and thus is identified with the revolution itself--his work appears on everything from public buildings to children’s schoolbooks. Elsewhere, his reputation has suffered somewhat as a result of shifting politics, artistic tastes and the machinations of the art market. Nonetheless, he is widely recognized as the quintessential Mexican artist.

Yet Rivera’s status as a national icon has marginalized his artistic legacy. As Mexican and American scholars agree, Diego Rivera the mythological Mexican giant has dwarfed Diego Rivera the real cosmopolitan Modernist--a hard-working artist who was part of the European avant-garde long before he painted murals and whose signature work is a synthesis of many different styles and cultural influences.

Attempting to set the record straight--or at least present a more complete picture of Rivera’s artistic evolution than the popular snapshot offers--the exhibition of about 100 paintings, drawings and prints tracks the artist’s aesthetic evolution, illuminates his formal achievements and places his work in the context of international art history.

“This is not about Diego Rivera as muralist,” said Luis-Martin Lozano, a Mexico City-based independent curator who organized the show with William H. Robinson, associate curator of paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Agustin Arteaga, director of the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. The point, Lozano said, is to build a broader understanding of the artist who is known by art specialists for fusing Renaissance, Modernist and Mexican styles in his own brand of social realism--and by tourists for ambitious public projects, such as frescoes depicting a compressed history of Mexico at the National Palace in Mexico City.

Traveling under the auspices of Mexico’s National Council for Culture and the Arts (through the National Institute of Fine Arts) and the Cleveland Museum of Art, in partnership with the Ohio Arts Council, the show opened in Cleveland in February. After leaving Los Angeles, it will appear at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (Sept. 19-Nov. 28) and the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City (Dec. 17-March 19).

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Rivera, who lived from 1886 to 1957, has long been a source of controversy and scholarly debate. During his lifetime, conservatives denounced his mix of art with social commentary, while leftists reviled his “bourgeois” infatuation with folk themes and his willingness to work for wealthy capitalist clients. Today, art historians argue about whether he was a Modernist or a Classicist, and whether he was an innovator or a reinterpreter of Cubism.

In addition, Rivera muddied many issues concerning his life and art by making contradictory statements or inventing his own history of his artistic evolution. A notorious, self-aggrandizing yarn spinner, he told so many tall tales about himself that his contemporary biographer, Bertram Wolfe, despaired of finding truth in a “labyrinth of fables.” The beat goes on in a recent biography, “Dreaming With His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera,” in which author Patrick Marnham devotes a considerable amount of space to debunking Rivera mythology.

Among the farfetched stories in the artist’s autobiography--written with Gladys March and published in 1960, three years after his death--is a claim that he was a military-strategy prodigy who briefly joined the Mexican army at age 11. He also claimed that his study of art in Mexico City included a course on human anatomy at a medical school, where he restricted himself to a diet of human flesh for two months. Women’s legs and breasts were delicacies, he wrote, but he particularly relished “women’s brains in vinaigrette.”

This sort of thing adds spice to the study of art history. But fame fanned by a fabulous imagination has its downside. In the case of Rivera, his celebrity has focused attention on one aspect of his work--the murals--and created a popular two-dimensional image of an extraordinarily complex character who embodied as many different facets as his relatively little-known Cubist paintings.

Indeed, paradoxes abound in accounts of Rivera’s life and work. He spent about 14 years in Europe, from 1907-21, eagerly absorbing the lessons of the avant-garde and cultivating friendships with Picasso and other prominent artists, but later claimed he had only gone abroad to prepare for his career in mural painting. His best-known artwork glorifies the common man and romanticizes Mexican peasants, but he also painted nude female “pin-ups” as hotel decorations and churned out society portraits and sentimental pictures of children in his later years--if only to pay the bills. As for his political life, he was a staunch defender of Lenin and broke with pro-Soviet Communism, but portrayed Stalin along with leaders he admired in “Proletarian Unity,” the central panel of a mural at the New Workers School in New York.

Some of these conflicts may never be resolved, but a move is underway to reexamine Rivera’s work and reevaluate his place in art history. And that’s exactly what’s going on in the exhibition. The collaborative international venture is a landmark event, Lozano said, because it allows Mexican art historians to present their views of Rivera.

While showing that Rivera’s murals evolved from his academic training in Mexico and his exploration of European Modernism, as well as from indigenous aspects of Mexican culture, the exhibition also demonstrates that Mexican Modernism began in the late 19th century, not with murals painted in the 1920s and ‘30s, Lozano said. Indeed, part of the rationale for the exhibition is to demonstrate that Mexico cannot be dismissed as a colonial outpost in Western art history, he said.

The process of reconsidering Rivera became visible in the United States in 1986, with a major traveling retrospective exhibition organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts to celebrate the centennial of the artist’s birth, said Ramon Favela, the leading authority on Rivera. A professor at UC Santa Barbara who identifies himself as “a Chicano forensic art historian of Modern, Latin American and contemporary Chicano art,” Favela has been working for the past 25 years on a catalogue raisonne (complete, fully documented list) of Rivera’s work, including about 3,000 paintings, murals, drawings and ceramic objects. He has also written a two-volume biography of Rivera, to be published by the University of California Press in 2001.

Favela, who was consulting curator for the Detroit show and is represented in the current exhibition by an essay in the catalog, said all efforts to tell the complete story of Rivera are hampered by lack of access to a potentially important archive in Mexico City. “It was due to be opened in 1977, 20 years after Rivera’s death, but there have been various legal obstacles,” he said. “The official story is that there are still people living who may be libeled or damaged by access to the archive.”

As a result, Favela said, the efforts of both scholars and journalists have been stymied. The current exhibition will be educational, he said, emphasizing that he had no desire to criticize it. “But basically there’s nothing new in it,” he said. “It’s a lot of refried beans--secondary sources because no one has had access to the archive, so there’s nothing new to be told to the world, other than people’s theories.”

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Nonetheless, Rivera seems to be a hot topic. This fall--close on the heels of Marnham’s successful book--Abrams will publish a Rivera biography by journalist Pete Hamill. Scholarly projects, in addition to Favela’s upcoming major publications, include “Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist” by David Craven, published in 1997. Several books on muralists that incorporate discussions of Rivera are in the works as well.

The market for Rivera’s work is also strong. Forgeries are a big problem, said Favela, who authenticates Rivera works for Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses. But prices for Rivera’s work are rising. Seven paintings by Rivera have commanded more than $1 million apiece at auction since 1990, while the record auction price paid for a Rivera painting jumped from $600,000 to $3 million. His 1940-41 portrait of actress Paulette Goddard, with whom he had a love affair, is expected to bring $500,000 to $700,000 at a sale of Latin American art at Christie’s New York on June 2.

All this activity signals a new life for an artist whose fortunes once seemed to have fallen. His Cubist pictures have often been dismissed as mere reruns of Picasso, and Rivera himself issued conflicting assessments of their importance, but increasingly scholars view him as a creative contributor who infused Cubism with his own sensibility. As a muralist, he was a star in the United States in the early 1930s, when he received commissions for big projects in San Francisco, Detroit and New York. But work was stopped on a major mural at Rockefeller Center in 1933, when it became clear that the central figure depicted was Lenin, and the mural was destroyed the following year.

“During the Cold War, his reputation declined to the point that he was perceived as a propagandist,” said Cleveland curator Robinson.

Another factor in his fall from grace is that aesthetic tastes changed with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, said Edward J. Sullivan, a specialist in Latin American art who chairs the department of fine arts at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

“Also, in this country, he became known through his late work, his big-eyed children and portraits, the tourist pictures he did in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” Sullivan said. “He was a little over-productive and that killed his reputation among orthodox Modernists.”

As to the timing of the current Rivera revival, scholars offer several reasons. “Formalist criticism is passe,” Robinson said. “Also, there’s been a lot of emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism, and that has helped.”

Sullivan characterized the renewed interest, in part, as “a millennial thing,” propelled by end-of-the-century fever to reconsider many aspects of history: “I think there’s a slow process of revisiting a lot of this material now to reinsert it into its position in the history of 20th century Western art.”

“Rivera was so enormously significant in Mexico and in the United States that he is certainly a target of that interest. He was a seminal figure in the development of American realism, social realism and wall painting. The WPA project is a product of Rivera’s stimulus, as well as other muralists, but he is by far the best known, with important murals in Detroit and San Francisco. And of course the Rockefeller Center debacle is still remembered by many.”

Lynn Zelevansky, curator of Modern and contemporary art at LACMA, who coordinated the local presentation of “Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution,” said that Rivera’s “contribution has been obscured at least in part because of the lack of popularity of leftists after the war,” but also by misperceptions.

“He was an intellectual, a sophisticate who was as comfortable in Paris, New York and Moscow as in Mexico City,” she said. “In his years in Europe he knew almost everybody. I really hope this show will do a lot to dispel the notion of him as a kind of indigenous artist. His great contribution was in the melding of the most sophisticated, Modernist, vanguard formal thinking with what he could glean from the indigenous cultures of Mexico.”

At the same time, Zelevansky views the exhibition as an opportunity for audience “self-recognition,” leading to better understanding of how Rivera’s work fits into America’s cultural evolution. “This show is an opportunity to look at ourselves through Rivera, who is very much part of the legacy we share with Mexico,” she said.

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“Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., next Sunday to Aug. 16. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon-8 p.m.; Fridays, noon-9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. General admission, $7; students and seniors, $5; children 5 and under, free. Second Tuesday of each month is free to all. (323) 857-6000.

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A Calendar special section on the Rivera show, plus a guide to Latino visual and performing arts in Southern California.