Diego Rivera

In 1929 Diego Rivera, then an artist of world renown, was to acknowledge his country's debt and his own to the greatest of his Mexican masters by painting Posada on the walls of the National Palace and by preparing, in collaboration with Paul O'Higgins and Frances Toor, a monument in print for this great artist of the people who had died nameless even as he had lived. They reproduced in a monograph all that could be recovered of Posada's massive work, and in the introduction Diego Rivera compared him to Goya and Callot and pronounced him as great as they. To those whose judgment requires support from the accumulated mass of the printed and respectable word, the comparison may seem far-fetched. But if the reader will get the pictures themselves and let them talk in their own never faltering tongue, he will concede the right of Jose Guadalupe Posada to an honored place among the immortals of art.

Anybody could see by looking at Diego Rivera that he fitted ill into this traditional system of foreign study. Clearly he did not belong to these elegant, graceful, thin-limbed, sartorial masterpieces that adorned the principal cities of Latin Europe as representatives of Mexican "society." Even in Spain , with its deeply marked, strongly chiseled, seamed, and weathered faces and its variety of strongly characterized regional types, everyone ceased playing cards or dominoes, drinking, even talking, when he entered a cafe, and stared in wonder at this impressive monster of a man. Despite his mere twenty years he was already more than six feet tall and weighed close to three hundred pounds.

Diego Rivera felt as cheated as the expectant peasants when the revolution was called off before its tasks had been accomplished. Puzzled, disappointed, he felt the glow of excitement die down within him, the world lose the preternatural brightness of its outlines. He bethought himself again of Paris and of painting. The new government increased the number of scholarships for promising writers and artists; having, along with his father, espoused the Liberal cause, there was no difficulty in renewing his pension. By the end of 1911 he was back in Paris - this time to stay in Europe for a decade.

His account of the period we have just been following may well serve to close this chapter. It seems to me to err only in the direction of excessive simplification. When one looks back over a traversed road, one is likely to give it greater directness in terms of its goal and end-results than it actually had in the journeying. In his autobiographical preface to the German edition of his works, Diego Rivera sums up in this wise the effect upon him of his brief Mexican interlude.