style="font-size:15px;"> 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
Portrait of Angelina Beloff
1918
Oil on canvas, 116 × 146 cm
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City
His New Exile to Europe
During the time that Diego Rivera remained in Paris and travelled in Italy, his homeland once again went up in flames and was riddled with violence. The combined armies of Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza opposed Huerta’s government. Villa fought to avenge Madero and to become the next president, Zapata led an agrarian revolt of the campesinos, and Carranza claimed he fought to create a democratic Mexico.
Suburbs of Paris
1918
Oil on canvas, 65 × 80 cm
Private collection
During the ten years that followed the assassination of President Madero – the Decada de Dolores (the Decade of Sorrow) – all three of Mexico’s legendary champions were assassinated. The last was the retired Pancho Villa, machine-gunned in an ambush in 1923.
Villa’s death was still years in the future as Diego rendered pencil sketches using Cubist fractured planes. He created Toledo landscapes with sliced hillsides Cézannesque trees and jumbled houses. At last, he painted Man with a Cigarette, a Cubist portrait, and surrendered his talent to the Cubists’ faceted world.
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