Rivera. Gerry Souter
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drowning his over-indulged body with intellectual stimulation.
After sticking it out for two years, Rivera, apparently flush with winnings gathered from a Spanish casino, took a train to Paris. No sooner had Diego put down his bags than he was out the door, down the hill and across the Seine heading for the Louvre.
Still Life
1913
Oil on canvas, 84 × 65 cm
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
The Paris art scene must have overwhelmed him. In the two months he spent in the city, very little time was wasted as he got out his paints and brushes, joining other Paris-struck painters on the banks of the Seine. He wandered through the galleries peering at the works of Pissarro, Monet, Daumier and Courbet. Gallery and museum walls glowed with colour and ways of seeing and techniques so foreign to his well-ordered provincial realism.
However, his feverish absorption of French art had to be shelved for much of June as he ended up on his back, sick with chronic hepatitis, a malady that would return again throughout his life. The illness did give him time to plan a trip to Brussels. Enrique Friedmann, a Mexican-German painter, accompanied him.
The Eiffel Tower
1914
Oil on canvas, 115 × 92 cm
Private collection
As summer settled over Europe, Rivera and Friedmann travelled from the Brussels museums of Flemish masters to the small city of Bruges, thought by many to be the home of Symbolism. While there, he began the painting House on the Bridge, one of many paintings he completed in Bruges, rising at dawn and painting until the light was gone. This introspection mirrors his early Mexican landscapes and picks up his feelings of being the observer, the outsider looking in, seeing through his gift of artistic translation.
Portrait of Kawashima and Fujita
1914
Oil and collage on canvas, 78.5 × 74 cm
Private collection
One day, while living on the cheap, Rivera and Friedmann wandered into a Bruges café to grab a bite before catching some sleep in the railway station waiting room as though they were waiting for the next train. A sign outside the café offered “Rooms for Travellers”. Hoping for a good deal they entered and took a table, a brioche and two coffees. Rivera was eating when he looked up and discovered María Blanchard, his girlfriend from Spain, grinning at him from the café’s doorway. He stood and held his arms wide. Next to her stood a “…slender blonde young Russian painter…” named Angelina Beloff.
Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla)
1915
Oil on canvas, 144 × 123 cm
Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City
After a period in London, the then inseparable four returned to Paris, where Diego finished the House on the Bridge begun in Bruges and started a new painting, Le Pont de la Tournelle, in which he transposed the remembered London mist with its unique pinks and greys to the banks of the Seine. This painting shows workers unloading wine barrels from a barge onto the quay. To Rivera it represented a first look at what was emerging as his own style and it signalled the arrival of his empathy for the toil of the worker. He credited this new class sensitivity to his relationship with Angelina Beloff and the writings of Karl Marx.
Portrait of Martín Luís Guzmán
1915
Oil on canvas, 72.3 × 59.3 cm
Fundación Cultural Televisa, Mexico City
The Salon des Indépendants accepted six of his paintings: four Bruges landscapes, La Maison sur le Pont and Le Pont de la Tournelle.
He had reached a point in his technique where he could paint in any manner he chose, paint like any artist he chose; any artist but himself. He had been abroad for four years and while he had grown considerably into his twenty-four years, he was still homesick.
Portrait of a Woman, Mrs. Zetlin
1916
Gouache on paper, 16 × 13 cm
Claude and Pierre Ferrand-Eynard Collection, Paris
Homecoming
On October 2nd, 1910, Diego came down the steamship gangplank at the port of Veracruz wearing a broad grin for his waiting father and his sister. Alongside his family stood representatives of the Society of Mexican Painters and Sculptors and, with shutters clicking and notepads poised, members of the press edged forward. Diego Rivera, the newspapers would proclaim, was the new poster child for the efforts of President Porfirio Díaz to bring European culture and values to Mexico.
Self-Portrait
1916
Oil on canvas, 82 × 61 cm
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
To further stamp the imprimatur of government approval on his exhibition, the president’s wife, Carmen (Carmelita) Romero Rubio de Díaz would open Diego’s exhibition on November 20th. 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. Emiliano Zapata brought his mounted army up from the south toward Morelos, only a few miles from Mexico City.
Still Life with Green House
1917
Oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
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 left Mexico City on January 3rd, 1910 for a small village two hours away by train named Amecameca. 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. In reality, while parked safely behind his easel in Amecameca peering at the volcano Popocatépetl, looking at the sweeping snow-capped volcanic mountain range spread before him, the sun-drenched colours of the fresh spring foliage at his feet, crowns of yellow flowers that capped the cacti of the high desert, he knew where he had to find this new direction for his art. He packed his paints and headed back to his hostel where he prepared to leave for Paris.
Midi Landscape
1918
Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 63.2 cm
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City