Diego Rivera. Gerry Souter
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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 trouble-maker to the political party in office. He was also a crillolo, a Mexican citizen of privileged “pure” European descent. His military service with the Mexican Army that had disposed of French rule under Maximilian also accorded him a somewhat bullet-proof position among Díaz’ “loyal” opposition.
The revered President Benito Juárez had freed Mexico from French rule with Díaz fighting at his side. When Juárez died, Díaz seized rule from the ineffective chosen leader Sebastián Lerdo in 1876. The peasant land reforms of Juárez were shelved over time, and Díaz shifted loyalties to rich foreign investors and conservative wealthy Mexican families. He modernised Mexico with electric light, railways and trade agreements, and balanced the Mexican budget to great international acclaim. At the top tier of Mexican social life, the wealthy embraced French customs, food, entertainment and language. The Mexican peons, the farmers on the lowest tier, were left to starve and scrape a living.
To improve his lot financially, young Diego’s father invested in recovering ore from the played-out silver mines that surrounded Guanajuato. Once a booming industry, the silver veins had vanished and no amount of resuscitation could bring them back. The Rivera family went into debt. Diego’s mother, María, sold the family furniture so they could move to a squalid apartment in Mexico City and start again. María was a mestiza, small and frail, but shared her European blood with Indian forebears. She also had a home-taught education, which allowed her to pursue her medical studies and became a professional midwife.
Through all this strife, young Diego was the pampered son. He could read by the age of four and had begun drawing on the walls. Moving to Mexico City opened up a world of wonders to him. The city rose on a high plateau atop an ancient lake-bed at the foot of twin snow-capped volcanoes, Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl. After the dusty rural roads and flat-roofed houses of Guanauato, the paved thoroughfares of the capital with its elegant French architecture and the Paseo de Reforma rivalling the best of Europe’s boulevards, Diego was overwhelmed.
6. Diego Rivera, Beguine Convent in Bruges or Twilight in Bruges, 1909.
Charcoal on paper, 27.8 × 46 cm.
INBA Collection, Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato.
7. Camille Pissarro, Landscape with Pastures, Pontoise, 1868.
Oil on canvas, 81 × 100 cm.
Private collection, New York.
8. Diego Rivera, Landscape with a Lake, c. 1900.
Oil on canvas, 53 × 73 cm.
Daniel Yankelewitz B. Collection, San Jose.
9. Gustave-Courbet, The Weir at the Mill, 1866.
Oil on canvas, 54 × 64.5 cm.
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Berlin.
By now he had a younger sister, María del Pilar, but a brother, Alfonso, born in Mexico City, died within a week. Life was hard in the poorer sections of the city and half of the infants died within a week of their birth. Typhus, smallpox and diphtheria resulted from poor sanitation, lack of running water and overcrowding. Diego suffered bouts of typhoid, scarlet fever and diphtheria, but his sturdy constitution and María’s medical training kept him going.
Diego’s father bit back his moral outrage at government corruption and mismanagement in order to provide for his family. He found work as a clerk in the Department of Public Health. He had discovered an undeniable truth in any revolutionary movement aimed at the lower classes of society: publishing articles aimed at helping the poor was foiled by rampant illiteracy – they couldn’t read. María began to find work as a midwife and they moved from their poor neighbourhood into better housing. Eventually they ended up in an apartment that occupied the third floor of a building on the Calle de la Merced (Market Street). This neighbourhood was created around two huge markets and their attendant scavengers, both human and rodent. But their colours, the variety of goods for sale, the bustle and mix of Indians, peons and customers from every class produced a rich texture that remained with Diego until his old age. For the young boy this upward change of status meant full time schooling. At eight he was enrolled in the Colegio del Padre Antonio. “This clerical school was the choice of my mother, who had fallen under the influence of her pious sister and aunt.”[4] He remained for three months, tried the Colegio Católico Carpentier – where he was downgraded for not bathing frequently enough, an unfortunate lifetime hygiene problem – and departed to the Liceo Católico Hispano-Mexicano. “Here I was given good food as well as free instruction, books, various working tools and other things. I was put in the third grade, but having been well-prepared by my father, I was skipped to the sixth grade.”[5]
10. Diego Rivera, Landscape with a Mill, Damme Landscape, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 50 × 60.5 cm.
Ing. Juan Pablo Gómez Rivera Collection, Mexico City.
The Lyceum system of schooling had come directly from French models as required by President Díaz. Having driven the French out of Mexico in 1867, Díaz spent the next years of his administration wiping out the democracy of Benito Juárez and re-establishing French and international cultures as examples of progress and civilisation for the Mexican people. The downside of this cultural importation was the denigration of native society, arts, language and political representation. The poor were left to die, while the rich and the middle class were courted because they had money and appreciated being able to keep it. The will of the ruling class was imposed on the poor using self-serving “scientific” principles developed by a panel of pseudo social scientists called los Científicos. This was government by Darwinian fiat.
In the same year that Díaz and Juárez were chasing the French out of Mexico, a book was published, Capital – A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 that represented a lifetime study of the political economy of the working class in a scientific manner. This work avoided the usual rabble-rousing demands of repressed workers substituting well thought out deductions that established the basic socialist premises of its author, Karl Marx. If there was ever an autocratic government ripe for a strong undercurrent of revolution supported by intellectual pillars of socialist ideology, it was Mexico. The Díaz government’s cultural and economic philosophy devolved strictly around the concept of creating wealth before addressing the issues of the poor, who were, unfortunately for the Mexican Científicos who set the policy, not dying off fast enough to offset their birth rate.
11. J.
Patrick Marnham,
Henry T. Stein, PhD,
Diego Rivera, p.11