6 minute read

Diego Rivera*

from From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture

from From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett. Exchanges of Political Print Culture, page 420

Otto Neurath and Isotype*

Anna Seghers

“If a fascist government in Mexico wanted to eradicate all aspiration to a better, happier future on the part of the people and to obliterate any recollection of a desire for progress, they would not organize a burning of books as Hitler did in Germany. They would have to scrape all the frescoes from the walls of public buildings. For the Mexican painters have incorporated in these frescoes everything that has played a part in the revolutionary history, the feelings and the thoughts of their people.”

About a year ago I began an article about Mexican frescoes in the magazine Athena. At the same time, an event was reported in the Latin American newspapers that concerned the frescoes Diego Rivera had completed in Mexico a short while ago. In the previous year, on one of the main streets in Mexico City, a luxury hotel had been built to meet the needs of pampered American tourists. To further enhance their well-being, the great painter had been commissioned to embellish the hotel dining room with frescoes. The room was fifteen meters long and four-and-a-half meters high. The guests would be able to taste the light and the air of the “Alameda” with their first-rate breakfast. The “Alameda,” today a large park, had always been at the center of Mexican life. It was here that the Inquisition took place during the Spanish conquest. Here there were demonstrations and public trials. Elegant passers-by, the famous and the infamous, occasionally molested by pickpockets and vagabonds, were entertained by the vision of delightful women and by the burning of candles and of Jews.

The theme Diego Rivera chose for his mural was: Mexico, past and present. He entitled it: Sunday Reverie in the Mexican “Alameda.” The life in the shade of the trees in the real “Alameda” would harmonize with the painted life of the frescoes. And so the hotel guests would become even more inquisitive, even jollier and even thirstier. Time, flowing as freely as the pure and fluid light, would effortlessly reveal all that Diego himself had seen there during his childhood, as well as everything that his forebears had seen there before him and described to him. Idle strollers and confidence tricksters, Indian peasant farmers, their wives and children beaten by the police, soldiers, women frozen in their own elegance, their elegance under their feathered hats crystallizing them into refined skeletons. The idiosyncratic and outlandish pimps and flunkies. The perpetually familiar, unknown faces of yesterday and today, lawyers, civil servants . . . and in and over the mass of the people hovered the faces, unique and deeply familiar to each and every one of these people, of the beloved men who had established their nation and guided its revolutions. The crowned head of Maximilian looks sadly and dully out from the throng while, larger and more solemn, Juarez towers over the multitude; Juarez, the Indian who achieved social and national emancipation simultaneously. He had Emperor Maximilian, who had been imposed upon his people by Napoleon III with the help of foreign powers, executed by firing squad in Queretaro. He did away with the greed for land and the corruption of domestic and foreign agents and landowners, and the Indians finally obtained some land.

Amid the gun barrels and the crowned, the hatted, the bare, the black and the gray heads surrounding Juarez’s torso appears the goatee beard of the philosopher Ramirez. In his flexible, meticulously painted fingers he holds a piece of paper on which his doctrine is printed. At the very top, clearly legible to the beholder, the sentence: Dios no existe [God does not exist].

Probably, nobody had taken the trouble to study the text within the compact, colorful mass of the picture. Once Diego had completed his mission and the hotel was prepared to receive guests, the director, in keeping with the custom of the country, asked the archbishop of Mexico to consecrate the dining room. The archbishop agreed. He commenced his speech, surrounded by hotel guests and employees: then his eyes fell upon the inscription. He immediately interrupted his speech and refused to bless a room in which such words were written on the wall. The celebration was cut short. The archbishop went home. The hotel management had not achieved the success on which they had been reckoning.

They beseeched Rivera to paint over the offending writing. Surely he would not quibble about a few square centimeters when he had decorated a surface that was fifteen meters long and four meters high? When Rivera refused, the dining room that had promised to be such a great success and had cost so much money was closed. A group of clerical students broke in during the night and scraped the inscription off. Then Rivera’s students broke in and repainted the inscription. The squabble seemed to be endless. The “Alameda” was again the focal point of turbulence, and the police had to cordon off the big, modern hotel.

I remembered this story, which I had already learned about months back from newspaper reports and letters, when, after a long absence, I emerged from the overcrowded and dingy Friedrichstraße train station and saw Horst Strempel’s wall paintings. Standing before the brown and gray and russet colors of the expanse of ruins, where a small trace of energy and hope had been summoned up on a surviving section of wall, I was foolish enough to think with fresh nostalgia of the colors of that country, the colors in its air and the colors on its walls. I think life is easier for painters in Mexico precisely because life is more difficult. Certainly their disputes are constant, as they are everywhere. They argue in the streets and on the high scaffolds in the courtyards of the ministries they are supposed to be painting. But does the question of what the painter has to paint or not paint play any role in these disputes? Since the year 1810, when the village priest Hidalgo gave the signal for the uprising against the Spanish by the tolling of the bells of his village, Dolores (and ever since they have been tolled annually to commemorate the national holiday from the president of the republic’s roof in Mexico), one uprising has followed another. Barely a generation has been spared martyrdom in the struggle against external and internal oppressors, and certainly no generation has been spared the harrowing and indelible recollections of this struggle. No parcel of land and no face does not bear its traces.—And even if they do not carry the marks of struggle, then they bear such excruciating imprints of the centuries of oppression that any person who is not completely indifferent must wonder: when will these faces, too, this young woman, too, or this field, breathe the air that is theirs? How could a Mexican painter find any subject matter that is not impacted by the history of his people? Even if he is painting a courting couple or a tree, even then, whether he is gifted or not, whether or not this is his intention he becomes an “activist,” because he calls his country and his people to the mind of the beholder and thus implicates the aloof and uninformed beholder in their history.

The letters in which my friends related the halfserious, half-funny story of the Rivera frescoes contained a further anecdote. Another mutual Mexican friend, Gamboa, was sent to Colombia in his capacity as museum director and exhibition organizer to accompany a collection of works by contemporary Mexican painters. He had just begun to exhibit them in Bogotá when an uprising broke out. Gamboa’s consulate advised him to interrupt his work and to repair immediately to a place of safety. He refused to abandon the paintings that his painter friends had entrusted to his care. Laden with his precious material, he made his way through the streets under shell fire. The workers recognized him and called out, in their understanding of his feelings and those of the artists who had sent him: “Hurrah for the brave Mexican painters!”

Upon Gamboa’s return, a party was held for him a short distance from the very “Alameda” to which we were referring. Poetry was read and a song was sung in his honor in keeping with the custom of the country, a cross between a commemorative speech and a drinking song. The performer was the beautiful woman whom the Russian film director Eisenstein had chosen to play the female lead in his film about Mexico, and who was not unknown in Europe. The festivities were so turbulent that the participants later wrote that they had not noticed the police cordon that had materialized around the hotel decorated with Rivera’s frescoes a few minutes’ walk away from there.

These two small incidents show how rapidly good art, when it is truly “pure,” becomes a “trend” that is then “applied.”

José Luis Franco and Robert Mallary

El nazismo: Juventud perdida [Nazism: Lost youth]