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DIEGO RIVERA -- MY ART, MY LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (WITH GLADYS MARCH) |
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YOUR PAINTING IS LIKE THE OTHERS! ANGELINE REMAINED IN MADRID while I reconnoitered the situation in Paris. My new paintings caused a sensation in the art colony. Opinion was sharply divided, however. Some critics hailed my latest work. Others, notably the orthodox cubists, proposed excommunicating me because of the exoticism they found in it. And the latter were not entirely wrong. When I study the paintings of this period now, I realize that they distinctly show the influence of the pre-Conquest tradition of Mexican art.
Zapatista Landscape, (The Guerrilla), 1915, Oil on Canvas, 57 3/32x 49 1/4 inches, Marte R. Gómez- INBA Collection, Museo Nacional de Arte Even the landscapes I did from life in Europe were essentially Mexican in feeling. I recall that, at this time, I did a self-portrait in order to bring into focus the inmost truth about myself. The clearest revelation, however, came from a cubist canvas, "The Zapatistas," which I painted in 1916. It showed a Mexican peasant hat hanging over a wooden box behind a rifle. Executed without any preliminary sketch in my Paris workshop, it is probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood that I have ever achieved. Picasso visited my studio to see my new paintings; he had, of course, heard of the controversy concerning them. He looked and was pleased, and Picasso's approval turned practically the whole of opinion in my favor. Dealers now took me up. Yet, though I had "arrived," I was still searching for a medium which would better express what I had seen and wished to communicate, a medium which used cubist freedom and invention, but without the tangle of conventions which cubism had now accumulated. What was behind this discontent with the work I was doing, which was souring my success? In part, it was the conviction that life was changing, that after the war nothing would be the same. I foresaw a new society in which the bourgeoisie would vanish and their taste, served by the subtleties of cubism, futurism, dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, and the like, would no longer monopolize the functions of art. The society of the future would be a mass society. And this fact presented wholly new problems. The proletariat had no taste; or, rather, its taste had been nurtured on the worst esthetic food, the very scraps and crumbs which had fallen from the tables of the bourgeoisie. A new kind of art would therefore be needed, one which appealed not to the viewers' sense of form and color directly, but through exciting subject matter. The new art, also, would not be a museum or gallery art but an art the people would have access to in places they frequented in their daily life -- post offices, schools, theaters, railroad stations, public buildings. And so, logically, albeit theoretically, I arrived at mural painting. My ideas found little favor with most of the painters with whom I discussed them. The few who thought there might be something in them said, "Theoretically, Diego, your stand may be correct, but where is the example? Your painting is exactly like that of the others." How right they were! I had to demonstrate my ideas in the only one convincing way -- in my work.
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