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, which 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.
Notre-Dame, Paris
1909
Oil on canvas, 144 × 113 cm
Private collection, Mexico City
By the age of ten Diego had experienced the results of Mexico’s autocracy. Making the most of his gift of drawing and endlessly sketching concerned his parents now. Diego liked to draw soldiers, so his father considered a military career, but the boy also spent much of his spare time at the railway station to draw the trains – so what about a job as a train driver? Subject matter aside, Diego’s mother defied her husband’s wishes that the boy enter the Colegio Militar and sent him instead to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts for evening school classes.
Portrait of Angelina Beloff
1909
Oil on canvas, 59 × 45 cm
Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz
Veracruz
Diego struggled with this day and night school education for a year until at the age of eleven in 1898 he received a scholarship to move his studies full time to the San Carlos Academy. While the school was considered the best in Mexico, its curriculum was bound by dusty European artistic dogma compounded by the societal engineering of the government científicos that mandated strength over weakness in all life experiences.
By 1906, Rivera had completed eight years of study at San Carlos and graduated with honours, appearing in his final student show with twenty-six works. His efforts had paid off with an excellent reputation among the government people he had to impress to keep grant money coming in. This was accomplished, but the money for study in Europe did not arrive for six months, allowing young Diego to live the life of a bohemian artist among his school chums.
The Old Ones
1912
Oil on canvas, 210 × 184 cm
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
This gang of “intellectuals, artists and architects” – El Grupo Bohemio – who had struggled to finish college, worked hard at exploring a dissolute lifestyle.
During this time he also came into contact with the curious character Gerardo Murillo, a faculty member and anarchist political agitator against Díaz. Murillo chose the name “Dr Atl” while living in Mexico. In Indian dialect, Atl is the name of the fourth sun – Nahui Atl – and means Water Sun, but Murillo was actually a rabble-rousing criollo, the same as the rest of the governing class.
Portrait of a Spaniard (Hermán Alsina)
1912
Oil on canvas, 200 × 166 cm
Private collection
Discovering Europe
Diego Rivera was twenty years old when he arrived aboard the steamship King Alphonse XIII in Santander, Spain on January 6th, 1907.
When Rivera arrived in Madrid, he was the sum of everything he would be for the rest of his days. His life, as the gypsies say, was written in the lines of his palm. His work ethic was brutal; his politics were as yet unformed but inclined toward the lowest level in the trickle-down economy in which his father had been broken by the bosses. His art had no direction, but he was also an empty vessel anxiously waiting to be filled.
Study for “The Jug”
1912
Gouache on paper, 28.5 × 23 cm
María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection, New York
Diego was ready to learn about women, but he already possessed sensitivity, a gentle nature and an ability to lie with great sincerity as he created stories that would become the myths of his life. He would always have women.
The next day, he presented himself at the studio of one of Madrid’s premier portrait painters, Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera. Diego proffered his letter of introduction from Dr Atl and was led to a corner of the studio he could call his own. The other students scrutinised the fat Mexican farm boy and were unimpressed. A heady perfume of paint and turpentine, open tins of linseed oil, raw canvas and pine wood for stretchers filled the room, and he set to work at once. He painted for days, arriving early and leaving late. Gradually, with his sheer brute concentration and resolve, the value of his stock rose among his fellow classmates and he became part of their social circle. And, here in Madrid, an interesting quirk of content appeared amidst his self-generated themes. No religious paintings by young Diego have ever been recovered or noted. Holy scenes from the Bible were big sellers and the more slickly rendered the better. Diego, however, who had bad memories of the Church, and of his father’s anti-clerical teaching and writing, eschewed the gaudy morality plays of Madrid’s commercial painters. He continued as he was, a young Mexican man living off a free ride and working hard to find his own vision and style.
Adoration of the Virgin
1912–1913
Oil and encaustic on canvas, 150 × 120 cm
María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection, New York
Portrait of the Painter Zinoviev
1913
Oil on canvas, 97.5 × 79 cm
Private collection
Diego’s brush with the Madrid avant-garde found him embroiled in an anti-modern art movement (el Museísmo) which demanded the abandonment of modern art for the 300-year-old El Greco paintings. This move was hardly a plunge into the future, and Rivera’s painting from his isolated two years in Spain was conventional, slick and bland.
While Picasso was creating the revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Rivera ground out The Forge, The Old Stone and New Flowers and The Fishing Boat. The paintings were handsome if only because of their superb technique, but they would also have looked at home in any mercado tourist shop.
Woman at Well
1913
Oil on canvas
Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City
The bohemian lifestyle eventually laid Diego low, so he stopped drinking and went on a vegetarian diet. He took hikes and began reading very serious books: Aldous Huxley, Emile Zola, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Voltaire and Karl