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DIEGO RIVERA -- MY ART, MY LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (WITH GLADYS MARCH) |
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MURILLO ATL IN THE SAME YEAR that the scholarship went into effect, the great Mexican painter Murillo Atl returned to Mexico from Spain. An eye disease had halted his painting career, and he had brought back no canvases. What he had brought instead was a fanatical enthusiasm for neo-impressionist art. He was mostly under the influence of the Italian-Swiss neo-impressionist Giovanni Segantini, but he was hardly less excited by the neo-impressionists of Paris. Atl had a great feeling for color and a passionate love for landscape, which he communicated with a missionary zeal. Like me, Atl was politically an anarchist, a product of the discontented middle class. Our common political and artistic interests brought us very close. Through hard life experience, I later came to reject anarchism for the more realistic politics of social-democratic action and still later, of communism. Atl's violent individualism took him to the extreme right and ultimately into the role of fascist agent. But in 1904, Murillo Atl was the dominant influence among aspiring young artists discontented with academicism. Unable to paint, he devoted his tremendous energy and his prestige to turning his disciples upon the path of neo- impressionism. Both Joaquin Clausell, the great landscape painter, and myself owe a great deal to Atl in this respect. Atl fired me with the desire to go to Europe. My greatest enthusiasm in contemporary European art was then Cezanne, with whose work I had become familiar through reproductions. However, before I went on to France, I decided to stop in Spain, believing that it would provide a necessary plastic transition between Mexico and modern Europe. In 1905, I expressed this desire to Governor Dehesa. He told me that, if I had a one-man exhibition and succeeded in selling my paintings in Mexico, he would provide traveling and living expenses for four years' study abroad. I would receive three hundred francs a month, a sum that proved barely enough to exist on but then seemed like a tremendous fortune to me. I worked for a year preparing for my show, doing landscapes mainly. One of the best of these, "Citlaltepetl," which I painted in Jalapa, is now part of the Antebi collection in Mexico. I favored pastels, because with them I could most easily achieve divisions of color. But I also painted with solid oil colors which 1 mixed myself with the help of Francisco de la Torre and Alberto Garduno, using Mexican copal gum as the base. Atl also gave his assistance. When I had enough paintings, Atl organized my exhibit, I not being then, or ever since, capable of handling such practical affairs. Atl invited critics, writers, and newspapermen and, of course, potential buyers, sometimes using devious means to induce them to attend. The show went so well that everything, to the last sketch, was sold. I joyously reported this to Governor Dehesa, and he granted me the promised subsidy. The needy Atl organized shows for many young painters as a means of supporting himself. He told the artists after the exhibition was over, "Boys, for you the honor and the glory, for me the base material profit." But in my case Atl not only gave me every cent we collected but contributed money of his own. He also presented me with a letter of introduction to the Spanish painter Eduardo Chicharro, with whom he had made friends while living in Madrid. Chicharro, then a medal winner with an international reputation, enjoyed the patronage of the richest families in Madrid. This kindness of Atl I very much appreciated. Cezanne had just died, and with that idol gone, I decided to study longer in Spain than I had first planned. Chicharro had an open workshop, and he was interested in color. To me, this compensated for his academic manner, with which I was already acquainted.
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