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. M. W. Turner, Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, 1796.
Watercolour on white paper, 31.8 × 41.9 cm.
Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Services, Wolverhampton.
Into this conspiracy of the Mexican government, aided by the indifference of the Catholic Church to marginalise the peones and Campesinos (farmer land-owners) in favour of international investment that lined the pockets of the rich for trade franchises and slave labour, stepped young Diego Rivera – after scraping his shoes clean, of course. His father made use of his deep educational background at the expense of his personal politics and improved his government position to become a health inspector. The city’s population growth had allowed María del Pilar to grow her midwifery practice to the point of opening a gynaecological clinic. For the first time since the silver mine investment debacle in Guanajuato, the Riveras had actual options.
By the age of ten he had experienced the results of Mexico’s autocracy, but would confront the causes later. Making the most of his gift of drawing and endlessly sketching concerned his parents now. They sought practical applications of his frivolous hobbies. 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.
12. Diego Rivera, Notre-Dame, Paris, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 144 × 113 cm.
Private collection, Mexico City.
13. Diego Rivera, Midi Landscape, 1918.
Oil on canvas, 79.5 × 63.2 cm.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
14. Paul Cézanne, Aqueduct, 1885–1887.
Oil on canvas, 91 × 72 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
Only a block away from the Zócalo, Mexico City’s large central square, Diego often crossed its beaten dirt surface, stepped over criss-crossing mule trolley tracks, dodged rumbling horse-drawn wagons full of freight and market goods on his way to class. One other distraction had to be the clank of a printing press on a street just off the square. The print shop at No. 5 Santa Inéz belonged to José Guadalupe Posada, a lithographer and engraver whose story-telling prints were the editorial cartoons and “photographs” of their time.
Using black and white line drawings and ambitious colour, Posada told the stories of daily events, extraordinary happenings, the bizarre, the satirical and the tragic, which appeared in the broadsheets – called hojas volantes (flying leaves) by their readers – of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, whose shop was next door to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. Every day and often into the night, the press clanked and rumbled again and again as pages were inked and the folklore and daily life of Mexico City was committed in such a vivid style to which Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and the other Mexican muralists all acknowledged their debt.
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. The art school also required classes in physics, mathematics, natural history and chemistry as well as perspective and figure drawing.
The professors were Spanish, practising the skills of the French academicians far from the avant-garde of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements. Of these professors, Diego, the youngest student in the class, remembered best Don Félix Parra, who had a rare appreciation of pre-Spanish Conquest Indian art, but whose own art was very conventional, and José M. Velasco, the renowned landscape painter who taught lessons in perspective. Santiago Rebull was the school’s principal and Diego’s instructor in the balance of proportion and composition. In his student days Rebull had studied in Paris with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, considered one of the greatest figure artists of all time. Ingres’ drawings were held up to Rebull’s students as models of perfection. The curriculum built around this perfection was a grind, consisting of two years spent copying reproductions of Ingres studies followed by two years of drawing from plaster casts before graduating to a live model.
15. Diego Rivera, View of Arcueil.
Oil on canvas, 64 × 80 cm.
Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz, Veracruz.
16. Diego Rivera, Suburbs of Paris, 1918.
Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 79.5 cm.
Private collection.
Diego was singled out by Rebull as promising, and given instruction in the so-called “Golden Section”, a mathematical system of composition developed by the ancient Greeks, that establishes a harmonic ratio between two unequal parts. Its principles were widely distributed in Luca Pacioli’s three-volume work Divina Proportione published in 1509. In the Elements, Euclid of Alexandria (c. 300 B. C.) defined a proportion derived from a division of a line into what he calls its “extreme and mean ratio”. Euclid’s definition reads:
A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.
In other words, in the diagram below, point C divides the line in such a way that the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the ratio of AB to AC. Some elementary algebra shows that in this case the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the irrational number 1.618 (precisely half the sum of 1 and the square root of 5).[6]
This mathematical formula applied
Mario Livio,
