Blazing with revolutionary fire and energy
Dreaming with his Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera
By Patrick Marnham
Bloomsbury, 1998
370 pp., $59.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Drama and controversy followed Diego Rivera everywhere. The Mexican artist, world famous for his brilliant murals, painted Lenin in one of them in the Rockefeller Centre in Manhattan in 1933. J.D. Rockefeller Jr, not amused by this "red propaganda to further the doctrines of communism", set his men to pulverise the mural with axes.
Rivera was also sent home in a hurry from Moscow in 1927 after he publicly supported the Trotskyist opposition. He also traded pistol shots with his former comrade and fellow muralist David Siqueiros (who was later to make an assassination attempt on Trotsky), in a Mexican showdown of "Bolshevismo Leninista versus Stalinismo".
Rejected by US capitalism and Stalinist Russia, Rivera was also rebuffed by the Mexican "revolutionary" government, which objected to his murals portraying the government's exploitation of the people. He lost his state patronage and public walls to paint on for six years from 1935.
Throw in his ceaseless hunger for sexual affairs and their attendant explosions of jealousy, and the life of Diego Rivera is anything but that of the reclusive artist, detached from the world and all its passions.
Patrick Marnham's biography of Rivera charts his tempestuous life, which began serenely enough as an art student in Mexico and France in the early decades of the 20th century.
At that time, Rivera's attachment to cubism was the only sign of a revolutionary political or artistic spirit in his paintings. Under the influence of some Russian socialist friends, however, Rivera gradually found political commitment and began to observe and portray the lives of workers and the poor.
By 1922 he was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and its central committee, and his murals depicted, in Trotsky's words, "the epic of work, oppression and insurrection". Right-wing opponents physically assaulted his wall paintings, while he and his team carried out their work with pistols handy. Rivera formed a union of painters and sculptors, and negotiated payment for murals at the award rate for plastering work!
Rivera always faced the difficult challenge of balancing his political commitment with the realities of official patronage.
The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa had degenerated by the early 1920s into a military oligarchy, thinly disguised by revolutionary rhetoric. Rivera was used by the regime as radical cover, his Marxist portrayals of Mexican history considered a reasonable price to pay for maintaining the generals' socialist credibility while they lined their pockets with the fruits of the revolution.
Stalinism proved a no easier patron. The Communist International, increasingly under Stalin's control, regarded the Mexican party as insufficiently obedient to Russia's national interests and sacked Rivera from the Mexican party in 1925, then again (after he had rejoined) in 1929. When Rivera accepted commissions for murals in the USA in the '30s, the Mexican CP waged a propaganda battle against this supposed "henchman of the Yankee millionaires".
Rivera's new capitalist patrons began liberally enough, regarding him as a prestigious modern art "scalp". Buildings in San Francisco (the Stock Exchange, no less) and Detroit (financed by the son of Henry Ford) received a Rivera mural.
Rivera found relatively safe common ground with his paymasters (a fascination with machinery and science), but it was Lenin in the Man at the Crossroads mural for the Rockefellers which tested the friendship, and then buried it under axe and whitewash.
Rivera returned to Mexico under the reforming President Cárdenas, where his artistic stocks sank but his political ones rose. Joining the Trotskyist International Communist League, Rivera successfully intervened with Cárdenas in 1937 to grant asylum to Trotsky, who was then being hounded across the globe by Stalin and denied a visa by every other country in the world.
Trotsky's last retreat in Coyoacán, a suburb of Mexico City, was the scene of political collaboration, artistic argument and shared drama between Trotsky, Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo, who had a brief affair with Trotsky, and André Breton, the surrealist poet. A "Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art", drafted by Trotsky and signed by Breton and Rivera, attempted to unite artists against capitalist market and Stalinist police-state controls over art.
Rivera, however, broke with Trotsky after two years in Mexico. Marnham, whose affinity is more with the sudsy plots of soap opera than the passions of political ideology, claims that the break was purely personal, initiated by Rivera following his delayed discovery of Trotsky's affair with Kahlo.
Most Marxist commentators, however, have attributed the break to a dispute between Trotsky and Rivera following Rivera's denunciation of President Cárdenas as "an accomplice of Stalinists" and backing of a right-wing general in the 1938 elections who promised to get tough on the left and the unions. This was an example of what Trotsky called "Stalinophobia", where hatred of Stalinism drove some of its critics to the capitalist right.
Although Cárdenas was dependent on the support of the Stalinist CP-led unions, his agrarian reforms and nationalisation of the foreign-owned oil and rail industries were radical (within a bourgeois nationalist framework) and certainly to the left of his opponent. Cárdenas was also the only political leader in the world with the courage and humanity to shelter Trotsky from the Stalinist whirlwind. Trotsky had little option but to break with Rivera.
The full explanation of the split probably lies somewhere between the sexual and the political, but the political basis certainly doesn't deserve to be relegated to a mere parenthesis, as Marnham does.
Following Trotsky's removal from Rivera's house, the Stalinist assassins moved in for the kill. Rivera's rival muralist, Siqueiros, led an attack by 20 Mexican CP veterans of the Spanish Civil War, spraying 173 bullets but miraculously missing Trotsky.
This attack prompted Rivera to flee to San Francisco in 1940, where he heard the news of Trotsky's murder later that year. The murder did not, however, stop Rivera from applying to rejoin the Mexican Communist Party in 1941 and on four other occasions before being readmitted in 1954. This regression to Stalinism accompanied a decline in Rivera's artistic creativity, and he died in 1957.
Rivera's life was turbulent and his politics were erratic and unpredictable, but at heart he was a genuine revolutionary.
As Marx was indulgent of the political shortcomings of artistic genius, so Trotsky treated the political vagaries of the artist with tender understanding. Trotsky was long an admirer of Rivera's art, which combined Renaissance styles with Goya, El Greco, cubism and Indian and Mexican folk art. Despite Rivera's leaps from Trotskyism to right-wing anti-Stalinism to unreconstructed Stalinism, Trotsky defended Rivera the artist as "a genius whose political blundering could cast no shadow either on his art or on his personal integrity".
Unlike Trotsky, Marnham is fundamentally out of sympathy with Rivera's revolutionary politics — "political dreamland" is his condescending description of the political hopes and ideals of Rivera.
Similarly, Trotsky's embattled band of brave revolutionary socialists, attempting against great and dangerous odds to organise against Stalinism, is patronisingly dismissed as a "ramshackle circus of advisers, bodyguards and starry-eyed research assistants".
So the great political issues are often reduced to a side dish spiced by exotic Mexico, and Rivera's paintings are admired for technique rather than as a unique achievement of political art. Though unreliable in matters of revolutionary theory and strategy, Diego Rivera was an artist whose murals blazed with the fire and energy of socialist revolution.