|
DIEGO RIVERA -- MY ART, MY LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (WITH GLADYS MARCH) |
|
AN INSPIRATION From Moscow I went to Hamburg, where I embarked for Mexico. On the second morning out of that port, I was surprised and delighted to meet my friend David Alfaro Siqueiros, with his first wife, Gracielo Amador. They had boarded the ship the night before from France. The three of us enjoyed a warm reunion. Throughout this return crossing, the weather was ideal, and I took advantage of it to complete some canvases and water colors I had started in the Soviet Union. Enroute, there occurred an incident of perhaps only a minute's duration which had a profound effect upon me. Gracielo, Siqueiros, and I were on deck watching a brilliant sunset. A glaring red ball suddenly bounded over the horizon of the sea and came to rest in a greenish-white bank of clouds. A few seconds afterwards another sphere shot into our view, then still another. Siqueiros cried, "Look, Gracita! Look, Diego! Those things are really small balls. If we could get them in our hands, we could play with them. Real balls, I tell you!" At that moment the conception of the National Palace stairway mural, which I had begun to plan in 1922, flashed to completion in my mind so clearly that immediately upon my arrival in Mexico, I sketched it as easily as if I were copying paintings I had already done. The National Palace stairway rises broadly and majestically from a wide inner court, then forks at the first flight to right and left. For the wall of the right staircase, I envisioned Mexico before the conquest: its popular arts, crafts, and legends; its temples, palaces, sacrifices, and gods. On the great six-arched central wall, I would paint the entire history of Mexico from the Conquest through the Mexican Revolution. At the triangular base, I would represent the cruelties of Spanish rule, and above that, the many struggles of my people for independence, culminating in the outer arches, in the lost war with the northern invaders, and the final victory over the French. The four central arches would show aspects of the Revolution against Diaz and its reverberations in the strife-torn years of Madero, Huerta, Carranza, Obregon, down to the ugly present of Plutarco Calles. On the wall of the right staircase, I would paint the present and the future. Naturally, I was less certain of the course to which the present tended than of the past. I would consume much time circling backward to find the right point from which the future could be projected until, after six years, my preliminary perspectives would be sharpened by the destruction of my mural in Rockefeller Center. During this third sea voyage to my homeland, I became sure of my future artistic medium. I also spent time clarifying my impressions of my sojourn in Russia. I began to understand the opposition of the Soviet painters toward me as a working painter in their country. And that helped me to understand better my place as a Mexican painter in mine.
|