and Diego thoroughly absorbed his enthralling gift of prevarication, adding touches to expand his own myth-making machine. María Blanchard’s real name was María Gutiérrez Cueto, and she was one of Chicharro’s painting students. She was bright, five years older than Diego and four feet tall with a subtle hunchback caused by an accident to her spine in her youth. She dressed in the English tourist style and made a striking contrast to her towering mountain of a friend (and lover, according to Rivera in later years). In 1908 she headed for Paris, leaving Diego to finish up his second year in Spain. He prowled the Basque countryside looking for material, and entered some of his paintings in another exhibition where his friend Ramón Gómez de la Serna gave him a booster review.
The bohemian lifestyle of this merry band eventually laid Diego low, so he stopped drinking and went on a vegetarian diet – a purge he resorted to again later in his life. He took hikes and began reading very serious books: Aldous Huxley, Emile Zola, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Voltaire and Karl Marx. He devoured books on mathematics, biology and history, drowning his over-indulged body with intellectual stimulation.
26. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 59 × 45 cm.
Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz, Veracruz.
27. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Woman at her Toilet, 1883.
Oil on canvas, 75 × 63 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
28. Paul Gauguin, Vaïraumati Tei Oa (Her name is Vaïraumati), 1892.
Oil on canvas, 91 × 68 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
29. Diego Rivera, Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1923.
Oil on canvas, 63 × 52 cm.
Museo Casa Diego Rivera, Guanajuato.
30. Diego Rivera, Flower Vendor, 1926.
Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 109.9 cm.
Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu.
31. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Concha, c. 1927.
Oil on canvas, 62.3 × 48.3 cm.
Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu.
32. Paul Gauguin, Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), 1891.
Oil on canvas, 70 × 46 cm.
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.
After sticking it out for two years, Chicharro, Ramón Valle-Inclan and Rivera, apparently flush with winnings gathered from a Spanish casino, took a train to Paris, chipped in for a horse cab to the Place Saint-Michel and found rooms at number 31, the Hotel de Suez on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. This hotel near the Latin Quarter was crammed with penniless American and Spanish art students living off meagre stipends from various sources. No sooner had Diego put down his bags than he was out the door, down the hill and across the Seine heading for the Louvre.
The Paris art scene must have overwhelmed him. In the two months he spent in the city, very little time was wasted as he got out his paints and brushes, joining other Paris-struck painters on the banks of the Seine. He wandered through the galleries peering at the works of Pissarro, Monet, Daumier and Courbet. Gallery and museum walls glowed with colour and ways of seeing and techniques so foreign to his well-ordered provincial realism. He must have been desperate to try and locate a path to a style he could call his own. One painter stood out who had decorated the walls of the amphitheatre or “hemicycle” in the Sorbonne across rue St Jacques from a number of panels in the rotunda of the imposing Pantheon – formerly the church of St Genevieve – residing behind its portico of Corinthian columns. Both buildings were a five-minute walk from the Hotel de Suez.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French artist who was born in Lyon in 1824 and died in Paris in 1898. He studied with Eugène Delacroix and rose to prominence in the world of the Paris Salon. He embraced the allegorical tradition of representing abstract ideas of honour, triumph of the spirit, despair and sacrifice with classical figures arrayed on dreamscapes that symbolised the subtext of their actions. He accomplished his painting on large canvas surfaces that were fixed to the walls. His work appealed to both the post-Impressionists and the Symbolists as he simplified forms and used non-naturalistic colours to evoke moods.
This first taste of public mural painting by a contemporary artist also drew Diego into the influence of the Symbolists – whose work at a later time might be called “psychedelic realism” and eventually metamorphosed into Surrealism. Puvis de Chavannes, though the radical post-Impressionists praised him, was elected by acclamation to the presidency of the National Society of French Artists and was made a Commander of the Légion d’honneur.
Rivera claimed that the work – and respect – of Puvis so inspired him, that he drew another expatriate Mexican artist, Ángel Zárraga, and the artist who had beaten him to the Mexican government bursary, Roberto Montenegro, into a scheme to create murals for the Palacio de Bellas Artes under construction in Mexico City.
However, his feverish absorption of French art had to be shelved for much of June as he ended up on his back, sick with chronic hepatitis, a malady that would return again throughout his life. The illness did give him time to plan a trip to Brussels. Enrique Friedmann, a Mexican-German painter, accompanied him.
As summer settled over Europe, Rivera and Friedmann travelled from the Brussels museums of Flemish masters to the small city of Bruges, thought by many to be the home of Symbolism. While there, he began the painting House on the Bridge, one of many paintings he completed in Bruges, rising at dawn and painting until the light was gone. His cumulative impression of the city appeared to be that of stillness and death – a complete absence of people, landscapes of still waters and uninhabited structures. A steam barge floats without its crew. La Maison sur le Pont carries no traffic. A Night Scene sketch is silent.
This introspection mirrors his early Mexican landscapes and picks up his feelings of being the observer, the outsider looking in, seeing through his gift of artistic translation. He confided later how he felt as a Mexican among Europeans, experiencing “…my Mexican-American inferiority complex, my awe before historic Europe and its culture.”[9]
While living on the cheap, Rivera and Friedmann wandered into a Bruges café to grab a bite before catching some sleep in the railway station waiting room as though they were waiting for the next train. A sign outside the café offered “Rooms for Travellers”. Hoping for a good deal they entered and took a table, a brioche and two coffees. Rivera was eating when he looked up and discovered María Blanchard, his girlfriend from Spain, grinning at him from the café’s doorway. He stood and held his arms wide. Next to her stood a “…slender blonde young Russian painter…”[10] named Angelina Beloff.
Angelina was seven years older than Diego and her life paralleled his on
Diego Rivera,
Diego Rivera,
