The Strange Case of Diego Rivera

...Within the year, almost the entire union moved into the Communist party...

...Nor do Lenin and Stalin...

...Perhaps Freud does...

...Its sessions were fantastic...

...Friends turned to the platonic Trotskyite, Rivera, to see if asylum could not be secured for him in Mexico...

...But his glorification of Leon Trotsky and his red-eyed Stalin are still on the walls...

...He has never been an intense and powerful painter, but I imagine he remains, as he always was, an enormously talented and fecund one...

...He was as swift to compose imaginary political pictures of the realities around him, and to invent a wealth of supporting detail to fill in the pictures, as he was to cover walls with his frescoes...

...But one thing is sure: In the Soviet Union, a painter with his esthetic sophistication, his mastery of modern impressionist, cubist and post-cubist techniques, and his incorporation of these techniques into his murals and easel paintings, would not be permitted to paint...

...They were degrading to Diego's sense of his own importance, so that he, too, was concerned to invent reasons of a larger and more dignified scope...

...The writer was at that time a Communist and a member of the Mexican party...

...In the center of this mural there was a worker whose eyes were blinded by a red banner that wrapped itself around his head as he fought against his brothers...

...The specific causes given in Rivera's case were hastily trumped up and so palpably inadequate that the party later busied itself inventing better ones...

...It was vast, bright and gory, an oversized bedsheet of a newspaper, its masthead a huge woodcut of a machete, 16 1/2 inches long by 5 deep, printed in black and overprinted in blood red...

...The time when I produced this work of degeneration corresponds to the weakest period in the plastic quality of my painting...

...In December, Diego Rivera will be 68...

...Agents brought orders, money, gifts, weapons, killers...

...Even if he is too complaisant with his own work, he turns out more really good works a year with amazing ease than many another who discreetly limits himself to a handful of paintings in a lifetime...

...In the autumn of 1936, Leon Trotsky, who had vainly been seeking refuge in Europe since he was deported by the government he had helped raise to power, was ordered out of Norway...

...At its 1923 convention, the three editors of El Machete were elected to the Executive Committee...

...The painter went to interview President Cardenas, and, to his astonishment, permission was granted...

...He knows that many of the fellow painters of his Paris days returned to Russia only to be denied the right to paint and to end in a concentration camp or with a bullet in the neck...

...But when he attended, his vivid imagination, his creative fantasy simply overwhelmed the others...

...The police guarding it were suborned by beautiful woman spies...

...It is a shame to waste a day or an hour of such an exceptional talent on meetings, manifestoes and resolutions...

...How long a man with his temperament and his love of headlines and public controversy will remain in the party is hard to say...

...Rivera's old comrade-in-arms, Siqueiros, began what passed for an esthetic analysis: Rivera's murals glorified the "bourgeois Mexican Revolution...

...Orozco had no use for factional quarrels or for the Communist incitement of splits and class hatred...

...he called it "the death wish...

...We walked for a long time without either of us saying a word while Diego revolved the thing in his mind and the plaster dried on the wall...

...Could it have been to prove that his biographer was right...

...To this higher nonsense was added the charge of Paris sophistication and a systematic campaign to build up the reputation of other Mexican painters, notably Siqueiros and Orozco...

...Socialists and capitalists...

...Under the pressure of the Soviet colossus, country after country refused him a visa...

...they lacked one of making a majority of the body...

...He painted in patios of public buildings, whereas he should be painting on street corners where the masses could not escape his work...

...On July 13 of this year, Frida, a lovely and lovable person and a great painter in her own right, died at the age of 44...

...Trotsky, so to speak, expelled Rivera from Trotskyism, and Rivera expelled Trotsky from the home in which he had offered the wanderer hospitality...

...He went on to call himself "a coward, traitor, counter-revolutionary and abject degenerate"??which, by some delirious logic, seemed to fit him to become once more a member of the Communist party...

...He has never taken himself seriously as a politician, or in personal human relations, but he will always remain one of the great painters of his time...

...I do not know whether this is so...

...He was forever in danger of being expelled for non-attendance at the regulation "three successive meetings...

...Each issue carried a number of wonderful propaganda cartoons, cut directly on wood or linoleum or etched on metal by the artists themselves...

...With this announcement, Rivera's relations with the Communist party completed a full circle...

...He is one of those monsters of fecundity that occur at rare intervals in the history of mankind...

...And, besides, you are always missing meetings, being threatened with expulsion...

...No one on the Committee seemed to know anything about the economic and political realities of the land, nor??with the exception of the one non-Mexican member??did anyone seem to care...

...So they built up Orozco (who was, to be sure, a very great painter in his own right) in order to diminish Rivera...

...After a year of opposing, with my halting Spanish and my incomplete and imperfect vision of Mexican reality, Rivera's perfect, complete and coherent fantasies, I strained our friendship nearly to the breaking point by urging him to resign from the party...

...Neither he nor the party leaders were able to give a coherent account of the causes of the expulsion, for Diego had merely been caught in a worldwide "purge" emanating from the factional politics of the Soviet Union...

...He pledged himself to continue making such "self-criticism" and applying to the party "until my readmission becomes acceptable...

...What then induces a Picasso or a Rivera??or, for that matter, a Siqueiros??to serve the party which, if it were to win, would destroy the one freedom that really matters to them...

...People had to stop to look at his paintings, but he should really paint in such a way that, as people moved past his paintings without stopping, the images would take on ever new forms with each change of position and angle...

...There seemed no place on the face of the earth for him to go...

...Rivera's almost biological urge to paint, as a tree begets ever fresh leaves, is matched by an insatiable hunger for publicity at whatever cost...

...When I first met Diego Rivera in 1922, he was just joining the party...

...Two more years, and the world Communist movement will be "celebrating" his 70th birthday (if he lasts that long as a member in good standing...

...Trotsky's home became a beleaguered fortress...

...But so blind are party commissars in the arts that they do not feel the impact of plastic statement, only of political formulas expressed in familiar parrot language...

...Each had something in him of the caudillo...

...In his heart, Diego knows this...

...The time came when Rivera entered joint exhibitions with the gunman-painter...

...I had another battle to persuade the members of the Committee to accept it...

...Look, Diego," I pleaded in summary, "you are today the greatest revolutionary painter in Mexico, probably in the world...

...Another mural, on the walls of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, glorifies Trotsky...

...He asked Frida Kahlo to lend him the fountain pen Trotsky had given her with his name inscribed on it??so that he might use that very pen to make a humble application for readmission to the Communist party...

...But he was made the scapegoat...

...As soon as I left Mexico??in the summer of 1925??both Diego and the Central Committee, by mutual agreement, hastened to undo my efforts...

...Their organ, El Machete, became the official organ of the party...

...At midnight, men in stolen police uniforms surrounded and attacked his home, machine-gunned his bedroom, wounded his grandson Seva in the leg...

...While the plaster was wet and the fantasy flowing from his brain to his hand to the wall, time would stand still...

...Don't you see that as a sympathizer you are the most valued, as a member one of the worst...

...Then, as they dropped out, the painters of the budding Mexican artistic renaissance suddenly moved in...

...He lived in the home she owned and in which she had been born...

...Both the painter and the party were glad to let it appear later that the real cause had been "Trotskyism...

...Having quarreled with Trotsky before the latter's final assassination, Diego Rivera did not shrink from once more exalting Trotsky's murderer, Joseph Stalin, and grasping the hand of his would-be assassin, Siqueiros...

...When a friend went to Picasso after one of his pro-Communist statements and reminded him that his works were banned in the Soviet Union and that any Russian who painted like him was hounded into sterility and prison, he answered: "If they threw me into jail, I would sever the artery of my left arm and with my last drop of blood, on the floor of my cell, I would paint one more Picasso...

...I explained to him as tactfully as I could the dangers to an inexperienced committee of his overpowering mind and imagination...

...In point of fact, this was not thought of or mentioned in his heresy trial, nor did Diego develop any interest in Trotsky until after his expulsion...

...Leon Trotsky became a guest of Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo...

...The two worker members and the representative of the Communist Youth were totally unable to stand up against the fantastic imagination and torrential invention of Diego Rivera...

...In 1926 he was readmitted, only to be expelled in 1929 when a holocaust of heresy trials was ordered by the Stalinized Communist International in every country in the world...

...He is not a Communist, and could hardly have been expected to fight with the Communist guards at the funeral...

...But both were men of intense self-confidence and great personal pride...

...To this question Marx has no answer...

...If he should lose her now, the solitude which besets him would be much heavier than it is...

...Moreover, he was a poor Executive Committee member, for he was constantly forgetting what hour of the day and what day of the week it was...

...While their quarrels were growing toward open break, the long arm of the GPU reached out for Leon Trotsky in his Mexican refuge...

...Mexico had not yet quieted down from the vague revolutionism inspired by its own indigenous revolution of 1910-1920...

...The convention also elected me to the Executive...

...Thus, while "Trotskyism" brought others their expulsion, expulsion brought Rivera his "Trotskyism...

...Andres Iduarte, poet, scholar and Director of the Institute of Fine Arts, was fired...

...When I was completing his biography in 1939, I wrote of his marriage with Frida Kahlo: "This is the tenth year of their marriage, and Diego grows more and more dependent on his wife's judgment and comradeship...

...we destroy the writers whom We consider harmful...

...At her funeral in the Palace of Fine Arts, the mourners, personal or political, included ex-President Lazaro Cardenas, who gave Trotsky asylum in Mexico, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, the painter-with-a-pistol who violated the right of asylum and tried to murder Trotsky...

...Even in 1927, when Lunachar-sky invited him to Moscow to do a mural, the growing reaction in the arts prevented him from executing his mission...

...Today, the copies of El Machete are an art collector's item...

...But, as the reader may well understand, I shied away as speedily as possible from that delicate topic to emphasize another order of reasons no less cogent...

...Many native political leaders, like Governor Carrillo Puerto of Yucatan and Governor Mujica of Michoacan, had briefly passed through the party...

...Two months later, the Communist party announced that it had accepted the self-styled "coward, traitor, counter-revolutionary and abject degenerate" back into its ranks...

...No matter how well you do other things for the movement, they are not as useful to it as your paintings...

...For a headline he will do the most bizarre things, invent the most preposterous stories or theories, paint the silliest caricature, even betray those who love him most dearly...

...Tito-ists...

...Siqueiros never concealed his part in the attempted murder, yet he walks freely around Mexico today...

...This fresco of mine," wrote Rivera in a statement which he himself printed and distributed in November 1952, "is the best example of the degeneration into which a Marxist artist can fall when, after having failed to remain in the ranks of his party, he also fails to discipline himself to its line from outside...

...The Strange Case of Diego Rivera By Bertram D. Wolfe After 25 years, the Mexican painter has rejoined the Communists After rejecting him three times, the Communist party of Mexico announced on September 26 that it had readmitted to its ranks the Mexican painter Diego Rivera...

...On the walls of the Prepara-toria, he had depicted workers quarreling with each other while the rich and well-fed laughed at them...

...I have not seen his paintings since 1946 and cannot say...

...Three times he condemned his past "sins," denounced Trotskyists...

...Yet another year and he remarried her...

...Friends told me that Rivera had persuaded his wife to leave all her property to the Communist party...

...A few months later, he arranged a big party, where he loudly proclaimed to a friend: "Tell Bert that I am divorcing Frida to prove that my biographer is wrong...

...And now, in the fourth public attempt, he has been readmitted...

...Only after Diego had been solemnly excommunicated did it occur to his erstwhile comrades that the best way to attack an artist is through his art...

...The principle was applied which has been so succinctly proclaimed by the Communist poet-critic, Johannes Becher: "We build up the reputations of writers whom we think useful...

...The next day, Dr...

...At any rate, the Communist party created a political scandal by covering her bier with the Russian flag...

...Just as one man specializes in teaching, another in speaking, a third in writing, a fourth in organizing among unions or peasantry, so you should do...

...Moreover, Trotsky was soon quarreling with Rivera's fantastic political word-pictures of Mexico and of the world...

...Its editors were Xavier Guerrero, Alfaro Siqueiros and Diego Rivera...

...One of his murals, painted in the New Workers School and now hanging in the Recreation Center of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (it was painted on movable walls), pictures Stalin baleful, red-eyed, the Cain who murdered all his brothers in the blood purges...

...Trotsky's American guard, Sheldon Harte, was kidnaped and murdered...

...Early in 1922, the painters formed a "union," the Sindicato Revolu-cionario de Obreros Tecnicos y Plas-ticos...

...People who have seen his more recent works say that he is repeating himself increasingly, that there is more and more of hollow poster propaganda and less and less intensity of conviction in his work...

...esthetic considerations are petit-bourgeois prejudices...

...He used medieval and retrogressive fresco techniques in an age of duco and spray-gun painting...

...At least two of the gunmen were Communist artists??Arenal and Diego's old lieutenant, David Alfaro Siqueiros...

...At last, he pressed my hand warmly and we went to his home together to draft his letter of resignation...

...From a party of vaguely revolutionary politicians, the Mexican Communist party was now converted into a party of vaguely revolutionary painters...

...He is for painting what a Lope de Vega is for drama...