The Painter Who Cared
RODMAN, SELDEN
The Painter Who Cared THE FABULOUS LIFE OF DIEGO RIVERA By Bertram D. Wolfe Stein & Day. 457pp. $10 Reviewed by SELDEN RODMAN Author, "Mexican Journal" and forthcoming monographs on...
...10 Reviewed by SELDEN RODMAN Author, "Mexican Journal" and forthcoming monographs on Rivera and Orozco When I revisited Diego Rivera's Chapingo chapel outside Mexico City last winter, I was in no mood to be pleased...
...A review of the major frescoes in and around the capital had been disheartening...
...Only the nostalgic Alameda parade in the Del Prado Hotel, painted in the late '40s, continued to give me esthetic pleasure...
...He presents the work itself, with so clear an eye to its evolution and iconography, that it is possible to see for the first time exactly out of what Chapingo grew and into what (and why) it degenerated...
...But one last and vitally important message is to be derived from this splendid and generously illustrated book...
...Rivera as a generous friend and great lover (the story of Frida Kahlo, told with tact, reverence and psychological insight, is in itself worth the price of admission...
...Chapingo, "pure" and lyrical as it appears on the surface, could not possibly have been conceived or painted in the moral vacuum which most contemporary artists choose to inhabit...
...Rivera as a child prodigy...
...Above all, he presents the life—the life of a Renaissance Man who mastered his time and was then mastered by it—in all of its superb color, movement, humor and pathos, with a gusto and epic sweep matching its subject...
...This has been true—this emotional involvement in something beyond the painter's ego, beyond the little world of "painting," in every great artist since time began, from Bruegel and Gruenewald and Greco and Van Gogh to Orozco and Lebrun...
...Rivera fighting his way ruthlessly and unscrupulously up the ladders to the beckoning walls...
...Why it was true, and what happened before and after, is part of the stunning burden of Bert Wolfe's book...
...What keeps Chapingo from being "academic" is precisely the fact that the artist cared deeply, at the time, about his country, his loves, and his politics...
...Wolfe does not make these distinctions...
...It was true of Rivera at Chapingo...
...The problem now is not to determine—as Professor John McAndrew was doing in the Times— how and to what extent the Mexicans, bemused by Diego's nationalism, personality and quantitative productivity, have given an essentially "academic" artist major rank, but rather to disentangle the genius of Diego Rivera from the mess his opportunistic Leftism and publicityseeking ultimately made of it...
...And as I approached Chapingo, I began to wonder whether the artist's commanding and exuberant presence— I had first visited Chapingo with Diego himself in 1940—might have mesmerized me into the state of excitement I still recalled...
...Form, color, composition, design, are but means to an end: a meaningful and communicable statement about the world the artist inhabits...
...The telling is as "fabulous" as the tale...
...Rivera trying to be an art-for-art's-sake artist in the Paris of Apollinaire and Picasso...
...In the still later panels upstairs, these "sins" against taste and credibility are compounded by a sickeningly sweet color-key that makes even the worst of the Pre-Raphaelites look restrained...
...I have no hesitation in saying, after revisiting Chapingo, that this is a masterpiece of painting unsurpassed in our Hemisphere except by the greatest of Orozco's works and perhaps by the Genesis of Rico Lebrun in Pomona, California...
...Rivera accommodating himself (belatedly) to the Mexican Revolution...
...As a biographer, political scientist of extraordinary enlightenment, and intimate friend of the artist, there is no reason why he should...
...The huge staircase mural in the National Palace, dating from the following decade, forecasts all the degeneration of the works of the '40s and '50s: overcrowding, tiresome propaganda formulae, childish oversimplification and outright distortion of history...
...Rivera as a political mountebank and fabricator of banal cartoons with still enough love for the essential Mexico in his dissipated heart to create one last masterpiece: all these Riveras are here...
...Having already read Bert Wolfe's new book, and a review of it in the New York Times which disparaged his judgment as an art critic, I was even prepared to believe that he had been mesmerized by Diego...
...The quantitatively awesome series of panels in the Ministry of Education, executed in the '20s, were in disreputable shape, faded and cracking...
...One look at that marvelous little chamber, so intricately complex and yet serenely lyrical, glowing in color, and perfectly harmonious in every detail, convinced me that I was wrong...
...And what a life it was...
...Outside the supreme achievements of Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, and Goya, Chapingo bears comparison with any painted chamber in Europe...
Vol. 47 • June 1964 • No. 12
