Diego Rivera. Gerry Souter

      Diego Rivera’s return to Mexico in 1910 began a year during which his cast-iron layers of denial began to rust. He spent the rest of his life living as the person created by his own damage control.

      On October 2nd, 1910, he came down the steamship gangplank at the port of Veracruz wearing a broad grin for his waiting father and his sister María. Under his arms were rolls of canvases, the fruits of his grand tour of Paris, Spain and Belgium. Alongside his family stood representatives of the Society of Mexican Painters and Sculptors and, with shutters clicking and notepads poised, members of the press edged forward. He represented not only his own success in the European salons, but also a triumph of the Porfiriota regime. Diego Rivera, the newspapers would proclaim, was the new poster child for the efforts of President Porfirio Díaz to bring European culture and values to Mexico.

      To further stamp the imprimatur of government approval on his exhibition, the president’s wife, Carmen (Carmelita) Romero Rubio de Díaz, handsome and regal at a youthful forty-five to her husband’s eighty plus years, would open Diego’s exhibition on November 20th. This was an unbelievable honour. The venue was to be his old school, the Academy at San Carlos. The prodigal had returned. Exhibition walls were cleared – for his immediate convenience – of paintings by a ragged coterie of young Mexican artists belonging to the Savia Moderna art movement which opposed shipping Mexico’s art talent to Europe. Gerardo Murillo, the shady “Dr Atl”, had created the exhibition to further his own nihilist agenda and as a further prod to the Díaz regime. The press and anyone with political ambitions had avoided the show.

      Diego managed to glimpse some of the work before it was removed, then was introduced to a student exhibitor who seemed to simmer with an indefinable zeal. José Clemente Orozco shook Rivera’s hand and then a younger student stepped forward. Diego told Angelina in a letter that the paintings of David Alfaro Siqueiros showed obvious talent. At the academy, Diego had unloaded two etchings, eight drawings and thirty-five oil paintings, plus the paintings he had retrieved on loan from his patron, Don Dehesa, at Jalapa, the capital of Veracruz. There was much work to do re-stretching and re-framing all the work from Europe, which bore titles such as The Valley of Ambles, The Quiet Hour, Reflections and The Breton Girl, painted in the style of the Flemish Masters in Brittany before his departure for Mexico. His show created a virtual history of nineteenth-century art from El Greco to Puvis de Chavanne. Not represented were works done in the manner of Cézanne, Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Pisarro, Seurat, or the experiments of Braque and Picasso. The Flemish Masters were there as were the gauzy ephemera and allegorical subtexts of the salon academicians that had gained him recognition in the dusty exhibition halls of Paris. To the Mexican élite, whispering in French and sipping from demitasses, the exhibit’s result was an affirmation that their backward nation was closing in on everything that was excellent on the European continent.

      Jean Charlot (1897–1979) wrote of this period later. He had been a former Ecole des beaux-arts student in Paris and was of French, Mexican and Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side. He embraced his Mexican heritage and worked in Mexico during the 1920s, sketching for architects digging in the Mayan ruins. He later became a fresco muralist. Of Diego Rivera, Charlot wrote:

      “In 1910, the painter was a fledgling academic master, a docile retriever, bringing back from Europe the artistic booty that his aging protector, Don Teodoro Dehesa, rightist governor of Veracruz had paid him to fetch.”[12]

      Even as Diego greeted begowned and bejewelled guests at the grand opening of his show, Mexican art critics and a few international colleagues with Mexican investments choked back adjectives such as “bland,” “derivative” and the career killer, “lacking in originality”, to bring out “superb technique” and “a promising talent”. Grinning and glad-handing, Rivera watched Doña Carmelita Díaz write a cheque for six of his paintings to be sent to her house and seven more for the president’s palace. The sycophants of the social set elbowed their way into line to follow the example set by Doña Díaz. With his stipend from Don Dehesa secured plus this windfall, Diego had finally realised some significant income from his paintings – even if they did look like other artists’ work.

      Two days earlier, on November 18th, 1910, only sixty miles from Mexico City, for an entire day the thunder of gunfire had rolled over the dusty hillsides surrounding the equally dusty town of Puebla. When the siege lifted, a band of Maderistas surrendered to a company of Díaz soldiers. Three of the Revolutionary band lay dead. On November 19th, Francisco Madero, the son of a rich family and bitter foe of President Díaz, rode south across the United States border in the company of well-armed men. Silently they crossed the stretch of desert ground that separated the two countries; spurs jingled, brass cartridges were ready in cross-belts and blue steel gun barrels flashed in the sun. They rode for a day then camped in a friendly village, waiting to be met by friends. The next morning, November 20th, Madero proclaimed that the Mexican Revolution had begun.

      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. Pancho Villa, a one-time bandit, rode with Pascual Orozco, a Díaz army officer from the northern state of Chihuahua. Emiliano Zapata brought his mounted army up from the south toward Morelos, only a few miles from Mexico City.

      In the city, Diego Rivera counted his money and his good fortune. As long as Porfirio Díaz remained president of Mexico, Rivera’s financial future was assured. The show had been a success and he had any number of commissions waiting for him. He could buy a ranch in the country and a studio in the city where he and Angelina could paint and live quietly, or party and travel around the world with their friends. Mexico City had become a party town and Diego threw himself into the celebrations. He had shaved his straggly moustache, but kept the beard to maintain his masculine gravitas. He became the guest of honour everywhere he walked through the door.

      In the countryside, the Mexican army had been mobilised to combat the small posses of revolutionaries before they could grow into larger bands. Díaz’ tough shock troops, the Rurales, burned towns where sympathisers were found. More and more peons, armed with nothing more than sticks and machetes, flocked to Pancho Villa’s and Zapata’s growing guerrilla forces.

      38. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Ruth Rivera, 1949.

      Oil on canvas, 199 × 100 cm.

      Juan Coronel Rivera Collection, Mexico City.

      39. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Angelina Beloff, 1918.

      Oil on canvas, 116 × 146 cm.

      Museo

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