government in order to put food on the table at their home in St Petersburg. Her devoted mother, Catherine, was a Finnish Swede who wanted Angelina to become a doctor, but when Angelina wanted to switch to art school, Catherine gave her support. Angelina’s art studies were rigorously academic, and when her parents died suddenly she received a small pension from the Russian government. Using that money, she moved to Paris and took up studies with the more experimental and demanding Henri Matisse. His bold ideas seemed too outré and she fled to the more conservative Academia Vitti and the classes of a Spanish academician named Anglada Camarasa. He carved out his work with palette knife and hog bristle brush until the impasto resembled a bas relief. Angelina mused “…he must have sold his paintings by the pound…”[11] to his wealthy clientele.
It was at Camarasa’s class that she had met María Blanchard. They became friends and journeyed together to Bruges. Arriving on a cold wet day, they found the café with “Rooms for Travellers.”
The four young artists hooked up and stayed together, painting and sampling what pleasures their meagre budgets could afford in the Belgian countryside. The foursome was truly international. Diego spoke Spanish, some French and no Russian, María spoke better French and Spanish, Angelina spoke Russian and French but no Spanish, and Friedmann spoke German, Spanish and French. They all spoke a smattering of English.
A Polish art student from Paris joined their group and the five painters busied themselves, with Diego not stopping even when the sun went down. Angelina declined to join Diego and María working in the dusk on a house that would become Diego’s Beguine Convent in Bruges or Twilight in Bruges. When María returned to their rooms above the café she was obviously upset; Diego had asked her to be a go-between and convey his love to Angelina who spoke no Spanish. Though Diego and María were “just friends” at this point and not “lovers”, the request put a chill into the friendship between the two girls that he could not understand.
On an apparent whim, the group took a “small freighter” to London and visited the Hogarths and Turners in that city’s museums. The cosmopolitan group enjoyed an unproductive, carefree existence as Diego gradually fell even more in love with Angelina. He also encountered a city larger than he had ever experienced. Along with the labyrinth of streets and buildings came the attendant urban poverty that had driven Karl Marx to pen the Communist Manifesto in 1848 with Friedrich Engels. This crushing poverty of the London slums – much worse than the poverty of the poor in Mexico City – deeply affected the young painter, but he did not translate any of it, save for a few sketches of a workers’ strike, to his art.
33. Diego Rivera, Arum Vendor, 1924.
Pencil on paper (study for lacquer project), diameter: 50 cm.
Juan Coronel Rivera Collection, Mexico City.
34. Diego Rivera, Child with a “Taco”, 1932.
Lithograph, 42 × 30.3 cm.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
35. Diego Rivera, The Rural Teacher, 1932.
Lithograph, 31.8 × 41.7 cm.
Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.
Beloff travelled with him to London’s museums, docks, and tourist spots and gradually became attracted to the lumbering young man with the big eyes and awkward charm. Unfortunately she had no allusions as to his art. Rivera’s technique was brilliant, but he chose the subject matter of a forgettable academician. He studied the work of one allegorical realist after another while around him swirled the modern art of Matisse and Cézanne, the flurry of manifestos coming from the Futurists’ overheated presses in Italy, the beginnings of work by two painters named Braque and Picasso cobbling together something called “Cubism”. All Diego wanted was wall-space in the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, a grossly conservative group show of slick academicians, tripping over each other to please rich patrons.
When they returned to Paris, Angelina kept her reflections to herself, because both María Blanchard and Diego owed paintings to their sponsors to keep their stipends coming. They set to work with María keeping to her Fauve style while Diego did his best alternating his painting with study of Puvis de Chavannes’ murals. The Seine chose that time to spill over its banks with a historic flood. No one could cross the bridges to the Right Bank, telephones and electricity were down and many streets were flooded. The Hôtel de Ville, whose interior walls had been decorated by Puvis, was unreachable because of high water, leaving Diego only the Pantheon and Sorbonne for study.
Being trapped by the flood gave him time to produce an etching, Mitin de Obreros en los Docks de Londres; he finished the House on the Bridge begun in Bruges and started a new painting, Le Pont de la Tournelle, in which he transposed the remembered London mist with its unique pinks and greys to the banks of the Seine. This painting shows workers unloading wine barrels from a barge onto the quay. To Rivera it represented a first look at what was emerging as his own style and it signalled the arrival of his empathy for the toil of the worker. He credited this new class sensitivity to his relationship with Angelina Beloff and the writings of Karl Marx.
The Salon des Indépendants accepted six of his paintings: four Bruges landscapes, La Maison sur le Pont and Le Pont de la Tournelle. By 1910, this Salon had frittered away some of its avant-garde reputation, but acceptance would look good in the Mexico City local newspaper.
Diego Rivera was a nobody in the high-pressure Parisian world of fine art, patronage and financial success – and he knew it. He needed credentials and recognition from more than the provincial governor of Veracruz. He also needed constant pats on the back to buy up his confidence. His image of himself as a Mexican bumpkin lost in the halls of culture européenne continued to haunt him.
He had reached a point in his technique where he could paint in any manner he chose, paint like any artist he chose; any artist but himself. He had been abroad for four years and while he had grown considerably into his twenty-four years, he was still homesick.
The centenary of the 1810 Mexican Revolution demanded a celebration, and Porfirio Díaz intended to impress his foreign investors and the wealthy criolos who kept him in office. Besides the inevitable speeches, bullfights, fireworks and marching bands, the arts were to be celebrated with orchestras, operas and displays of original Mexican art. Diego had received enthusiastic permission from Governor Dehesa to return home with his latest work. With his paintings accepted by the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, he might even expect a warm welcome from his President. And there was the foreign press to consider.
While he had earlier planned this return to Mexico without a thought, now he had Angelina and their developing relationship on the boil. They were deeply involved, but both understood the pressures and realities of their situation. They needed to keep their stipends alive without additional obligations, both financial and emotional. Neither knew if their autocratic governments might be toppled by internal or external strife at any time and their bursaries discontinued. Being the emotionally stronger of the two and the more pragmatic, Angelina suggested that they spend a year away from each other in their respective home cities. Diego could re-establish himself as the hometown artist who “made good” in Europe, while she explained him to her Russian brothers.
After endearing pledges of love and loyalty she boarded a train heading north, while Diego’s railway carriage rolled down the tracks towards Brittany and the sea. He needed some painting and solitude before
Angelina Beloff,
