discovered that his imagination need not be restricted to the images he created with his brushes and paints. Since he had been a small boy finding refuge from his frail mother’s drive to lift the family from the ruins of his father’s financial failure and ideological naivety, and both his parents’ desire to steer their lumpish son into some useful trade, he had turned to his sketchbook and its linear fantasies. As his skills grew and were recognised as a true gift, the fantasies he had created in childhood pictures of soldiers and trains and heroic deeds became habitable. At each stage of his formative years Diego met new people, involved himself with new groups and with each new telling of his stories his own role in them became greater. His father showed the sketches he made of battles and the disposition of troops to amazed generals. He stood shoulder to shoulder with strikers to be struck down by a soldier’s sabre and thrown into prison. His clever copying of Goya and El Greco paintings in the Prado were passed off as real and now reside in collections. He spent fine evenings with his bohemian chums feasting on “young women’s breaded ribs”.
Diego Rivera became his own myth. Later, as his fame grew, he inserted himself in his murals together with his patrons, historical characters, Communist ideologues, friends, those who inspired him and the women he was currently courting. He was there at last with his creations, forever the observer, forever part of history. The extent of his fabulous life became clear when he dictated his memoirs to Gladys March who, from 1944 to 1957, took down each fabrication word for word, with a straight face.
21. Diego Rivera, Portrait of the Poet Lalane, 1936.
Oil on canvas.
Private collection.
22. Diego Rivera, Portrait of a Military Man.
Museo Regional de Guadalajara, Jalisco.
But standing outside the Madrid railway station at the age of twenty, his palette was hardly more than a tabula rasa. After days spent in discomfort on the train from Santander, still reeking of unwashed travel, wine and stale tobacco from the crowded coach, his waistcoat and trousers still speckled with drips and crumbs of food purchased on the journey, he hoisted his bags and located the Calle Sacramento and the Hotel de Rusta. An artist friend from the San Carlos Academy lived there and recommended the cheap pension. There he crashed and slept.
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.
In his Rivera biography, Dreaming With His Eyes Open, the author Patrick Marnham offers an insightful appraisal of Rivera’s time spent in Spain and the value of the young artist’s first attempt to assert himself and discover his own style.
“Throughout the nineteenth century,” Marnham writes, “with brief liberal interregnums and spasmodic revolts ruthlessly suppressed, Spain dozed under four Habsburgs – one Ferdinand and one Isabella – and two Alfonsos. Alfonso XIII was still on the throne at the time of Rivera’s arrival.”
Spain had been passed by in the cultural, economic and political structure of a very vital Europe at the dawn of the twentieth century. Only Barcelona maintained a tenuous touch with the rest of Europe, and Picasso had studied there at the School of Fine Arts before bolting in 1900. He had hurried through Madrid, spent a day at the Prado, and penned a letter to a friend stating, “In Spain we are not stupid. We are just very badly educated.” Diego, in his search for the headwaters of the mainstream in modern painting, “…had sailed up a backwater.”[8]
As he settled into the rhythms of Madrid and the surrounding countryside, he appreciated the comfort factor of speaking the language – or something at least approximating to Castilian Spanish – and having his hotel only a stone’s throw from the Prado, which housed one of Europe’s finest collections of paintings. When not working with maestro Chicharro in the studio, he set up his easel opposite the finest examples of El Greco with the elongated figures towering above him, or feeling the heat come off Goya’s passionately restrained portraits of the Spanish rich and roughly-brushed stalwart peones massed before ranks of soldiers with bayonets. The vivid colours and brushstroke impasto came to life on the original canvases as opposed to the pale chromolithographs decorating walls in Mexico City. He slaved over these masterpieces, unlocking the secrets of their line, colour and dynamic compositions.
23. Diego Rivera, Portrait of John Dunbar, 1931.
Oil on canvas, 199.5 × 158 cm.
Private collection.
24. Diego Rivera, Study for The Jug, 1912.
Gouache on paper, 28.5 × 23 cm.
María Rodríguez de Reyero Collection, New York.
25. El Greco, The Visitation, 1610.
Oil on canvas, 96 × 72.4 cm.
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D. C.
And, here in Madrid, an interesting quirk of content appeared amidst his self-generated themes. No religious paintings by young Diego have been recovered or noted. Among the wealthy and those aspiring to higher positions, the purchase of art had contributed to a boom for painters, decorating walls with bucolic rural scenes, family portraits and the scarred and bloody body of Jesus on the Cross. 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 its effect on his mother’s impassioned judgments, 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.
Chicharro’s reports to Don Dehesa, Governor of Veracruz and Diego’s sponsor, were glowing and the paintings regularly sent to Dehesa reflected the reports’ praise. Some of Chicharro’s student exhibitions drew critics who singled out Rivera as a “promising talent”. 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 Grecos. Hardly a plunge into the future, but Rivera’s painting during 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. To be charitable, Rivera did manage to keep his meal ticket coming from the Governor of Veracruz. And he met a girl.
At the Café de Pombo, a hang-out for the Spanish avant-garde, Diego spent time with the two Ramóns and María Blanchard. Ramón number one was Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a critic and soon-to-be Dada poet. Ramón number two was Ramón del Valle-Inclán, a Spanish novelist who had lost
Patrick Marnham,
