Diego Rivera the Dilemmas of a Communist Artist

Universidad Nacional Autnoma de MxicoUniversity of California Institute for Mexico and the United States

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The Dilemmas of a Communist Artist: Diego Rivera in Moscow, 1927-1928"

William Richardson Wichita State University

Diego Rivera fue activo en los debates sovieticos artisticos y culturales durante su estadia en la Uni6n Sovietica en 1927-28 pero se desilusion6 con el creciente autoritarismo en asuntos culturales del Estado y los grupos artisticos conservadores. Rompi6 con aquellos marxistas mexicanos afiliados con el comunismo sovietico.

During the 1920s, the Soviet Union was a mecca for foreign leftists who hoped to see the foundations for a new world being laid. When confronted with Soviet reality, most found their expec- tations to be much too optimistic, and more than a few left the country dejected and disappointed. Some were shocked at the re- vived bourgeois way of life allowed, even encouraged, by the New Economic Policy, others by the growth of bureaucracy and the continuing willingness of the government to do more than merely over- see the intellectual and esthetic life of the nation.' Internal communist party politics, which became more bitter and caustic, and indeed more public during the second half of the decade, caused many other foreigners to question their enthusiasm for the new Soviet state. Foreign artists especially seemed to vacillate from one * For financial support during the research and preparation of this article, the author would like to thank the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Fulbright- Hays Program, and Wichita State University.

1. On the changes taking place in the 1920s, see John Bowlt, editor and trans- lator, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde (New York: Viking, 1976), Section VI: Toward Socialist Realism; in literature, see Edward J. Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Rus- sian Literature 1928-1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953); for the subsequent period of the First Five Year Plan, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 3 (1), Winter 1987. @ 1987 Regents of the University of California.

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50 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos extreme to the other in their evaluations of Soviet life, and the Soviet bureaucracy's attitudes toward them was mixed at best. One artist in particular, the widely respected communist muralist Diego Rivera, arrived in Moscow in 1927 wearing the rosiest of rose- colored glasses, but by the time he left the following year, he found it difficult to remember the hopes for the USSR he had had in Mexico City. On the contrary, he was greatly disillusioned with the growing authoritarianism of a Soviet government that felt it permissible to establish a formal esthetic policy which Rivera believed was coun- terrevolutionary in its denial of pluralism. In addition, he was dis- heartened by the xenophobic, jealous, and highly conservative Soviet artistic community. By 1928 he was faced with a choice that would have an impact on his position in the USSR and with his Mex- ican comrades: he could bend to the demands of the neotradition- alists increasingly supported by the government, or he could throw in his lot with the innovators who appeared to be fighting a losing battle. It is this dilemma and how it was resolved that is the focus of this article.

Rivera was born in Guanajuato in 1886, and at age ten was accepted into Mexico City's prestigious Academia San Carlos as an art student. He spent several years there studying the derivative art for which the school was famous, but he soon came into conflict with the established curriculum and the dominance of European models which the students were forced to emulate. In the end, his artistic career was influenced more by pre-Columbian art and the work of the engraver Jos Guadalupe Posada than by the classical examples of late romanticism promoted by his official instructors. By 1907 his generally undistinctive, if talented work had earned him the atten- tion of the governor of the state of Veracruz, and Rivera was awarded a scholarship to travel to Spain and France to study and further develop his artistic abilities. Except for a brief return to Mexico in 1910, he remained in Europe until 1921, making his home for most of that time in Paris.

Rivera's work in Montparnasse during much of the decade he spent abroad was influenced esthetically above all by Cubism, but his personal life was to a great extent determined by the large number of Russian expatriates and exiles who lived in Paris. Rivera's common-law wife, Angelina Belova, brought him into contact with many Russian emigres, and his affair with Marevna Vorobieva in- creased those contacts. Congregating at the Caf6 Rotonde, the avant- garde artists who were his friends fervently discussed art and politics, both of which they felt were in process of radical transformation. The Russians, in particular, expected the birth of a new


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 51 world at any moment. Many of them, Rivera wrote later, " . . had suffered exile . . . their life was one of black misery, sustained only by reports of riots in Russia and their own utopian dreams."2 Rivera was fascinated by them, and admired them enormously. Ilya Ehren- burg was one of this group, and was so impressed by Rivera's per- sonality that he wrote a comic novel whose protagonist was based on his Mexican friend.4 Once the Romanov dynasty collapsed early in 1917, and with the Bolshevik coup in November, Rivera felt the infectious anxiousness of his Russian friends about their country's future, and their hopes for a fundamental reorganization of society and culture in Russia were ones he shared. His own country's revolution had already been continuing for several years, of course, but by 1917 the period of armed struggle appeared to him to have ended, and prospects for lasting change in Mexico, too, were en- couraging. By 1918, Rivera was faced with the choice of where he should direct his revolutionary energies. Would he stay in Europe, possibly travelling to a communist Russia which would welcome him with open arms, he felt, or should he return to his homeland, and participate in the constructive phase of the revolution there? He soon came to the realization that he had never felt entirely a part of Europe, and he suspected that even in Russia he would continue to sense this alienation. In 1920, with many of his Russian friends gone from Paris, he chose to return to the land of his birth.

Rivera was encouraged by his friend David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was visiting Europe in 1920, and by messages from the new Secretary of Public Education, Jose Vasconcelos. On behalf of the government, Vasconcelos had sent money to Rivera that allowed him to travel to Italy to study the Renaissance frescoes there, and had invited him to come home with the assurance of future commissions. He promised that Rivera would be given the opportunity to pursue his painting with the moral and even financial support of the new government of Alvaro Obreg6n. The offer came at the proper psychological moment for Rivera, and he sailed home with great plans for the work he hoped to do for the people of Mexico.

A concise characterization of Rivera's political philosophy at this point in his life is difficult because it was so amorphous. He considered himself a radical in art and life, even a revolutionary, but he had had no real experience with revolution. As Rivera's friend and

2. Diego Rivera, with Gladis March, My Art, My Life (New York: Citadel Press, 1960), 60.

3. Ilya Ehrenburg, Julio Jurenito, tr. Anna Bostock in collaboration with Yvonne Kapp (Philadelphia: Dufour, 1963).


52 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos biographer Bertram Wolfe pointed out, his political philosophy at the time of his departure from Paris was "an undigested mixture of Spanish anarchism, Russian terrorism, Soviet Marxism-Leninism, Mexican agrarianism-the redemption of the poor peasant and the Indian."4 What little he had seen of a real revolution in progress was during his short stay in Mexico in 1910, when he happened upon a battle between Zapatistas and Porfiristas. However brief, it made a lasting impression, and Rivera came to think more highly of Zapata than of any of the other leaders of the Mexican Revolution, and as Wolfe added, "the admiration for Zapata was to become the core of his revolutionary philosophy for the rest of his life."5 It was never the doctrines of revolution that I-ppealed to him. Instead he responded emotionally to human misery and the exploitation of one man by another. He wanted revolution as part of his utopian hope for change and the improvement of the lot of the poor. His enthusiasm for Russian Marxism-Leninism was a result of its promise, not its "method" or its practice. In the end, and throughout his career, he was an artist, and politics, with a few exceptions, he allowed to impinge on his artistic life only in so far as it did not limit his creative impulses. Yet even this emotional revolutionism, because of its extraordinary independence of spirit and its refusal to bend to political direction, earned Rivera the hostility of people as disparate as Joseph Stalin, John D. Rockefeller and after an initial period of approval, even Leon Trotsky.

Rivera's return to Mexico led to the first products of what came to be known as the Mexican mural renaissance, and as his works of the 1920s and 1930s proved, Rivera was the most talented and original representative of that movement. By 1922 he was engaged in painting the walls of the National Preparatory School, and in 1923 he began his extraordinary series of frescoes for the newly- constructed Secretariat of Public Education. Three years later he was covering the walls of the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo. All these works were commissioned by the federal government, initially by Vasconcelos, but later by other government bureaucrats, who nevertheless found it increasingly difficult to countenance Rivera's radical point of view, particularly as the revolution and its leaders became increasingly conservative. One reason for their discomfort with Rivera was the uncompromising if incon- sistent political messages he insisted on inserting into his works, no

4. Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Stein and Day, 1963), 577.

5. Ibid., 62.


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 53 matter where they appeared. Rivera believed it was his duty as an artist and a citizen to keep the revolution alive on the walls of government buildings, even if it had died in the hearts of government officials.

Rivera's positions on political and social questions during the first half of the 1920s were determined significantly by his member- ship in two organizations. The first was the Syndicate of Revolution- ary Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, which he and a number of prominent leftist Mexican artists founded in 1922. The organizers' intent was to promote through their journal, El Machete, a radical (and to most of them, this meant communist) transformation of Mexican life through art, education, and rabble-rousing. Rivera's second commitment was to the Mexican Communist Party, the PCM, which he joined at the end of that same year. For some time, communism had been attractive to Mexican government and labor union officials, and its popularity reached widely into Mexican society as a whole. By the time Rivera joined the party, however, any broadly-based infatuation with the PCM had cooled, and the communist movement in Mexico became one less of politicians than of artists. It was not accidental that in 1923 Rivera, Siqueiros, and Xavier Guerrero, three artists, were elected to the party's executive committee. Like any Comintern-affiliated communist organization, the party required more than a little loyalty on the part of its members, but at this stage of its history in Mexico, it needed well-known members more than highly-disciplined ones. Adherence to ideology was less vital than public statements of support for communism, whether they were verbal, written, or painted on the surface of official buildings.

With the exception of these artists, a number of intellectuals, and a few agrarian groups in Veracruz and Yucatain, the PCM's mem- bership continued to be limited, at least until the establishment of diplomatic relations between Mexico and the USSR in 1924. There was genuine popular enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution in Mex- ico during the 1920s, a sense that Russia and Mexico were the only two countries in the world building new societies, even if they were following different paths to those new societies. The opening of the Soviet embassy in Mexico City meant that the PCM would enjoy much greater prestige than it had in the past in Mexico, and that above all, the subsidies provided through the embassy would allow it to take a more active role in Mexico's political life. The embassy was also important because of its promotion of cultural contacts between Mexico and the USSR, however, and through its assistance, an active exchange of literary and scientific visitors took place.


54 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Rivera and other members of the PCM, as well as representatives of the government, were frequent guests at the legation, and the Soviet staff succeeded, despite considerable scepticism in Mexico and abroad about their real mission, in promoting a positive picture of the new Soviet state to Mexicans. Rivera's long-standing interest in Russia grew as he talked to the ambassador and his assistants, and particularly to such visitors as Vladimir Mayakovsky, who came to Mexico in 1925, and who was "astonished" at Rivera's murals.6 As the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution neared, Rivera, like many other foreigners, was anxious to see what had transpired in Russia, to visit the land of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," particularly since there had been a great deal of both positive and negative publicity about the country.7 His work for the party and his friendly relations with the Soviet embassy helped him obtain an invitation to the celebrations to be held that fall in Moscow.

Rivera was among several Mexicans who had been asked by Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky to come to the celebrations as representatives of the PCM, the Mexican Peasant League (a branch of the peasant international, the Krestintern), the Anti-Imperialist League of Mexico, and finally, on behalf of the "revolutionary Mexican peasants and workers."'8 The Mexican delegates would have to pay their own travel expenses to the Soviet frontier, they were told, but once across the border, all their needs would be taken care of by the Soviet government. To Rivera, it was an opportunity not to be missed, although he perhaps did not ex- pect that he would remain in the USSR until late in the spring of the following year.9 He and his compatriots travelled to Moscow by way

6. Oddly enough, Rivera was not a member of the PCM at this time; he had resigned, for professional, and not for ideological reasons, in 1924 and had not re- joined until 1926; see Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 305.

7. The U.S. journalist Carleton Beals remembered that a labor delegation from Mexico representing the CROM had been to the USSR on a journey financed by the Soviet ambassador in Mexico City, for example, but had returned from the journey "peddling fantastic stories about being spied upon, robbed, attacked; they were shocked by nudism and the freedom of the marriage relations, and the sad fate of the 'enslaved' Russian workers. They sounded like Mr. Hearst on a spree." Carleton Beals, Glass House: Ten Years of Freelancing (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1938), 340.

8. See Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 215-216. Rivera's official invitation arrived in Mexico City rather circuitously: it came through Edo Frimmen, the President of the International Transport Workers' Federation in Amsterdam. Rivera was accompanied by Luis Monz6n, Jose Guadalupe Rodriguez, Cruz Contreras, and Samuel Ramos; they were joined soon thereafter by Siqueiros and Guerrero, delegates to the fourth Profin- tern congress in Moscow in February 1928.

9. One reason he was anxious to leave Mexico was personal: his first marriage, to Guadalupe Marin, was breaking up, and their fights were becoming more and more violent; they were divorced after his return to Mexico.


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 55 of Berlin,10 and were met in Moscow on a particularly icy day by the former Soviet ambassador to Mexico, Stanislav Pestkovsky, at that time the Comintern expert on Latin America.

What surprised Rivera most about Moscow was the fact that he was so well known there. Almost everyone within Moscow's intellectual and cultural community, it appeared, as well as many or- dinary citizens, had heard of him and his work because of Mayakovsky. Rivera had figured prominently in Mayakovsky's writ- ings about Mexico, and wherever he lectured on the country, the popular Soviet poet spoke of his enthusiasm for Rivera's murals, which he called "the world's very first communist frescoes."1' Rus- sians even had some visual idea of the murals because of photo- graphs Mayakovsky had brought home with him and given to Soviet journals for reproduction.12 Everyone seemed anxious to meet him, and he was kept busy renewing his friendship with Mayakovsky, at- tending productions at Meyerhold's theater, and becoming ac- quainted with the film director Eisenstein.'3 He also, as he had hoped, had an opportunity to see both the old Russia and the new Soviet Union about which he had heard so much. He felt he already knew the snowy cold and the old wooden houses that Ehrenburg and his Russian friends had described to him in Paris, and the new workers' clubs, the children's kindergartens, and the innovative architecture he felt were representative of the many accomplishments carried out under the Bolshevik government.'4

The warmth of Rivera's reception, the openness of his new Soviet friends, and the achievements of the revolution did not dis- guise entirely the country's political turmoil, of which he soon became aware. He certainly did not realize the extent to which the arguments between Stalin, Trotsky, and their adherents about the

10. Apparently Rivera stayed a few floors down in the same hotel as Hitler while he was in Berlin.

11. Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1958), 276; this quotation had appeared in several places, and in 1926, Mayakovsky had published an article devoted to his meeting with Rivera in Mexico City; see Mayakovsky, "Moia vstrecha s Diego de Riveira," Krasnaia niva (7 February 1926).

12. See Ia. Tugendkhold, "Diego de Riveira: khudozhnik meksikanskogo proletariata," Krasnaia niva, #6 (1926).

13. On October seventeenth, he gave Eisenstein a book of reproductions of his works (it is now kept in the Lenin Library); Eisenstein's later film, Que Viva Mexico! would be influenced greatly by Rivera's paintings of Mexico.

14. See Vera Nikolaevna Kuteishchikova, "Diego Rivera y la revoluci6n de oc- tubre," Plural I (1978), 47-49; and her " . . . Ia nikogda ne smogu zabyt ... ," Latin- skaia Amerika, #2, (1977) 186-90; see also her "El tema ruso en la obra de Diego Rivera," Gallo ilustrado (19 December 1976), 5.


56 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos future of the Soviet state had grown during the previous two years. In the fall of 1926 the conflict between the two men had broken into the open, and by July 1927 Trotsky was attacking Stalin publicly. In October, Trotsky had organized and led a series of mass protests in Moscow and Leningrad against the direction being taken by the party, but each of the demonstrations had been dispersed by the police. Finally, shortly after the tenth anniversary celebration, Trotsky and his allies Zinoviev and Kamenev were expelled from the Communist Party, and Trotsky himself was soon exiled to Alma Ata.

Rivera had arrived in Moscow at the highpoint of Stalin's cam- paign against "Trotskyism." Eisenstein may have told Rivera that the night before the anniversary parade in Red Square, Stalin had come to the editing room where Eisenstein was working on October. Sta- lin explained to Eisenstein that he was there to help him modify major sections of the film dedicated to Trotsky's role in the revolution, and equally as interesting, to Lenin's "no longer relevant" liberalism in dealing with enemies of the revolution.15 Rivera would always be ambivalent toward Stalin, admiring him for his strength and forbearance during the Second World War, for example, and willing to glorify him if it meant his readmission to the PCM in the early 1950s, but his impressions of Stalin in 1927 and 1928 were not favorable. He met him for the first time on November 8, 1927, at the opening session of the International Congress of Friends of the USSR, and made a number of sketches of him during his speech to the Congress. In later years Rivera was not charitable in his descrip- tion of Stalin on this occasion: "Suddenly a peanut-shaped head, sur- mounted by a military haircut, decked off with a magnificent pair of long moustaches, rose . .. one hand slipped into his overcoat and the other folded behind him ' la Napoleon . . Comrade Stalin posed before the Stalinists and worshippers."'6 There is little doubt that Rivera was more impressed by Stalin at the time than he admitted later, after he had broken with the Stalinists in the Mexican communist movement. In any event, he was less concerned with the questions involved in the Soviet political scene during the winter of 1927-28 than he was with issues of art and literature, and with the form culture should take in a worker-peasant state.

Rivera was delighted to discover that not only had his reputation preceded him to Moscow, but that many in the Soviet capital

15. G. V. Aleksandrov, quoted in Yon Barna, Eisenstein, tr. by Lise Hunter, ed. by Oliver Stallybrass (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1973), 123.

16. Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 386; some of the sketches were reproduced in Emil Ludwig's article, "Joseph Stalin," Cosmopolitan Magazine (September 1932): 34- 37, 144-147.


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 57 wanted him to remain there for several months to lecture, teach, and even to execute several mural commissions. Two days after his first meeting with Stalin, Rivera was invited, as guest of honor, to attend a lecture on contemporary Mexican art, and as a result of his appearance was asked to speak elsewhere in the capital. Soon he was being petitioned by a number of aspiring young artists to take them on as students and apprentices, and he was made an instructor in the Academy of Fine Arts, and given materials and a place to teach and to work. Next, Komsomolskaia pravda (Komsomol Truth) requested that he write a series of articles for them on modern Mexi- can art, and he plunged into the project with enthusiasm. Rivera had not planned to remain in Moscow much longer than the few weeks required for the anniversary celebrations and the congress meetings, but these developments, coupled with an offer from Lunacharsky, changed his mind. Lunacharsky had been asked by representatives of Moscow's Red Army Club and Metallurgists' Club to approach Rivera about his doing a series of interior murals for their head- quarters. Lunacharsky thought the idea a promising one, and told Rivera that if the public liked the murals, Rivera would probably be asked to do some further work for the government, and he hinted at least that the next commissions would be for the new national library to be named for Lenin. Rivera signed a contract with Lu- nacharsky for the murals on November 24, and by all indications expected at that point to remain in the USSR for several months.17

Rivera's original plans for the Red Army Club commission were inspired by what he had seen at the November seventh parade in Red Square. Despite the three hours of bitter cold he was forced to endure, few of his experiences in Moscow had as immediate an impression on him as did this one, and as one scholar of Rivera's work has commented, the sketches were "among the most exciting things Rivera ha[d] done."'8 During the parade, he had drawn the soldiers, children, banners, and speakers, and it seems likely that even then he had begun to imagine how they might all be incorporated into future murals. Oddly enough, the drawings were never realized as frescoes on Soviet walls, but did reappear in his destroyed Rock- efeller Center mural of 1933, and later in his "Man at the Cross- roads," installed in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City in 1934. Other variants appeared in the U.S. magazines Cosmopolitan and Fortune, but in the end, the only piece of original art he did for any Soviet client was the cover for the March 1928 issue of Krasnaia

17. Rivera, My Art, 1654; and Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 217. 18. Bernard S. Myers, Mexican Painting in Our Time (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1956), 71.


58 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos niva (Red Cornfield) devoted to memorializing the Paris Com- mune.19

Since they admired his works so enormously, of considerable interest to Rivera's Russian patrons were his theoretical ideas on art, the esthetic basis for his work. Surprisingly, it was these ideas that brought him into conflict with the general direction in which Soviet art was evolving in the late 1920s, and Rivera found himself siding with those on the losing side of the debate. He first expressed his opinions in a series of interviews with Alfred Kurella, head of the Comintern's Department of Agitation and Propaganda. Kurella summarized Rivera's esthetic views in an article that appeared shortly after Rivera arrived in Moscow. In the discussions, Rivera stressed that he believed that old traditions of "painterly" activity were no longer valid. In the past, he said, the artist worked in isolation in his studio, his pictures were exhibited in a gallery or museum, then they were taken down or sold to an individual patron. It was not possible under such a system for art to reach the masses of workers and peasants, as it must in a socialist society. Instead of following out- moded custom, Rivera contended, artists should begin painting murals in clubs and other public buildings, thereby establishing a rapprochement between the artist and his new public. These masses would not be capable of truly understanding art initially, Rivera added, but over time their level of appreciation would rise through ex- posure and education. It was this improvement of their cultural level that was to be the aim of art in a postrevolutionary society, Rivera concluded, and it was disagreements over how this was to be done that resulted in his departure from Moscow in the spring of the following year.

It was probably Rivera's friendship with Eisenstein that led him to sign the manifesto of the "October" group, published in 1928 in Sovremennaia arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture). By then he felt quite at home within the Soviet artistic community, and the group's esthetic beliefs corresponded closely to his own. Unfor- tunately, his subscribing to the declaration brought him directly into conflict with what was becoming a dominant artistic establishment in the USSR. The "October" group's positions paralleled somewhat those of Prolekult and of constructivism, but the group itself con- centrated on industrial and applied arts, and emphasized contem- poraneity and service to the workers. The manifesto declared first that the "spatial arts" (which it identified as architecture, painting, sculpture, graphics, industrial arts, photography, and cinema) must serve the concrete needs of the working class, and that they

19. Krasnaia niva, 1928 #12 (17 March).


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 59 must carry on ideological propaganda and promote the collective way of life:

The main task of this artistic service to the proletarian needs of the Revolution is to raise the ideological, cultural, and domestic level of the backward strata of the working class and of those workers who are undergoing an alien class influence; their level would be raised to that of the avant- garde, revolutionary industrial proletariat, which is consciously building the Socialist economy and culture on the bases of organization, planning, and highly developed industrial technology.20 The new proletarian artist, the manifesto continued, must make an eclectic collection of old techniques of the past only to the extent that these techniques could be used in a new way, to create a new style based on technological innovation. Traditional, individualis- tic realism was rejected in favor of a "dynamic realism" associated with the future world being built by the proletariat. The manifesto concluded by rejecting "any claim by any one association of artists to ideological monopoly or exclusive representation of the artistic interests of the working and peasant masses.' '21 This final point was significant since such claims were being put forward by certain Soviet artists' organizations.

The "October" group's manifesto was signed by some of the new Soviet state's most original and talented artistic figures, includ- ing Lissitsky, Moor, Deineka, the Vesnin brothers, Rodchenko, and Kurella, but it appeared at a time when such statements were already under attack by the newly forming artistic establishment. Its subsequent history was short. As a group, "October" did not exhibit until 1930, and in 1932 it was accused of "abolishing art" and was dissolved with all other creative organizations in the country. Until then it was an independent voice in favor of innovation and change whose ideals were shared by few of the party bureaucrats who came to determine artistic policy for the Soviet Union. It was the group's independence and its disagreement over means that brought it into conflict with the increasingly authoritarian government and its allies.

To Rivera and his "October" associates, the greatest threat to a revolutionary art of high quality in the USSR was an imitative return to the discredited traditions of the past. The spokesman for that point of view, it seemed to them, was the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR), a group formed in 1922 to reas- sert more conventional artistic values in the face of the extremism

20. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 276. 21. Ibid., 278.


60 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos of Proletkult.22 AKhRR's organizational manifesto was outspoken in its opposition to LEF, Proletkult, and constructivism, and it stressed promotion of a realistic, "tendentious" depiction of the everyday life of the proletariat and peasants. Its emphasis on realism became less compromising as the decade progressed, and after 1925, non- realist exhibitions were being accused not just of stylistic alienation from the masses, but of ideological alienation as well.23 What made AKhRR's views particularly important was that by the middle of the decade it had become the most influential group of artists in the Soviet Union, with its own publishing house and direct encourage- ment by the government. It too would be dissolved in 1932 along with all other independent artistic and literary groups in the USSR, but its position on the proper style and substance of art would be the one adopted by the formulators of artistic Socialist Realism, and such former members of AKhRR as Isaak Brodsky, Aleksandr Gerasimov, and Boris loganson would produce the purest examples of what the association had long considered proper proletarian art.

As an individual, Rivera entered the esthetic arguments taking place in the USSR in 1928 through an open letter to the journal, Revoliutsiia i kultura (Revolution and Culture). The letter was written in response to a new manifesto issued by AKhRR, which had now taken the name, Association of Artists of the Revolution (AKhR).24 Certainly much of what the manifesto said, Rivera agreed with. AKhR announced that its aim was to assist the proletariat in the realization of its class objectives, that the artist's duty was to de- sign truly artistic implements of everyday life for mass consumption, and that subjects for works in the fine arts should be the class struggle of the past and the construction of socialism in the present. The manifesto organizing the Syndicate in Mexico in 1922 had similarly made it clear that its signers wanted an art that was revolutionary, and one that was united spiritually with the workers. It rejected entirely the social basis of prerevolutionary art, however, and what Rivera disapproved of in the AKhR manifesto was the method it pro- posed. The forms of art were to be realistic and comprehensible to the broad masses of the workers, and however different the content was from work done in the past, in AKhR's view, proletarian art must be created "on the basis of continuity and critical assimilation of world artistic culture .... 25 To Rivera, this was nothing more

22. See ibid., 265-267. 23. See ibid., xxxix-xl, 265-267. 24. See ibid., 271-272. 25. Ibid., 272.


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 61 than artistic Thermidorianism, and he felt he could not remain si- lent about the impact such a backward-looking decision might have on Russian art.

Rivera wrote to Revoliutsiia i kultura that he wished it known publicly that he disagreed fundamentally with the esthetics of the majority of the AKhR artists. He particularly wanted to distinguish between what AKhR envisioned in talking about a style correspond- ing to the proletarian revolution, and what he felt. According to what he believed, he wrote, This will be a style which will create from painting an excellent, precise, clear and synthetic language, a style which will give the works of art the character of plasticly-regular organisms, invested with a deeply human expression, a style which reconciles art with our contemporary industrial life and our socialist economy. Proletarian art must begin to speak a language comprehensible to all the proletarian masses of the world and powerful [enough] at the same time to penetrate by cultural means into the capitalist countries, becoming thereby a weapon of exceptional strength in the hands of the communists.26 Essentially, Rivera was repeating what he had said years before, that a revolutionary society could not maintain a style developed by the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. It must create new forms of art, and must educate the proletariat to appreciate these new forms of art. Art was not solely utilitarian, and he rejected the idea that "the unformed taste of the esthetically illiterate masses should determine what and how a painter should paint."27

This call for new styles of art might seem to contradict Rivera's own work in Mexico done during the 1920s, which was realistic in essence, and certainly easily understandable even to the most unsophisticated viewer. Yet Rivera knew that the political reality of Mexico was considerably different from that of the Soviet Union at this time. In Mexico, he believed, political agitation through art at an elementary level was still necessary, since genuine Marxist revolution had not as yet taken place, whereas in the USSR the political issue had been solved, and the social and intellectual level of the workers and peasants was now to be raised through the construction of a new way of life. If his own style was realistic, it reflected the nature of his society, and what he would do in the USSR would similarily respond to different political and social realities. What

26. Diego Rivera, "AKhRR i stil proletarskogo revoliutsionnogo iskusstva (ot- krytoe pismo v redaktsiiu)," Revoliutsiia i kultura, #6 (1928): 43.

27. Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 422.


62 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Rivera feared most in Moscow was that bureaucrats and philistines were taking over the direction of Soviet art, and that much of the enthusiasm and originality of the first years of the revolution were being denigrated and rejected. If this proved to be the case, he warned, at best Soviet art could look forward only to a slightly revamped version of nineteenth-century critical realism. Above all, what he wanted for Soviet culture was that it be allowed to develop freely, without state intervention.

Such sentiments, openly expressed, were increasingly less toler- ated in Moscow, and as the winter progressed, Rivera came to un- derstand that this was the case. It was soon obvious too that the project for the Red Army Club was not moving along as well as Rivera had hoped. The assistants he had been assigned were either incompetent or in some cases unwilling to follow his instructions. The building used by the club was a former palace with ornate decorations which Rivera wanted removed before he would begin painting. The club's officials liked the decorations and wanted to keep them. Rivera's health was a constant irritation. Sketching winter scenes complicated his chronic sinus problems, and he was forced to spend several weeks in a Kremlin hospital undergoing treatment. His lectures at the Academy of Arts, a stronghold of traditionalist sentiment, were received hostilely: while young artists approved his attacks on the inadequacies of pre-revolutionary Russian art, their more successful and influential older colleagues were disturbed by them. His words were taken out of context and used to disparage his positions. When he said that easel painting had no real role in an art directed to the masses, for example, he was accused of rejecting easel painting entirely. When he criticised Russian artists for failing to combine modern techniques with popular Russian artistic traditions, particularly those of icons, his critics said he was glorify- ing the Church, that he was underestimating the role of the machine, of industrialization, of the party's economic plan. He was disillusioned at the artistic conformism the CPSU approved and encouraged, and saddened to learn that many of his fervently revolutionary Russian friends from Paris had either gone into exile again, given up their artistic activities, or been effectively paralyzed by criticism. Finally, his requests for materials and new assistants were constantly ignored. He began to think that there was not much hope of accomplishing anything of value by remaining in the USSR. He, like many others, was out of step with the development of Soviet art.28

28. Ibid., 220-221.


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 63

Finally, in the middle of May 1928, he left Moscow in a rush, failing to take leave of his friends, and not appearing at several meetings at which he had promised to speak.29 He said later that Lu- nacharsky had requested, on behalf of the Latin American Secretariat of the Comintern, that he return to Mexico to supervise communist participation in upcoming national elections. He added, too, however, that "I suspect that resentment on the part of certain Soviet artists brought about this unhappy turn."30 He did not admit this at the time. He told Eugene Lyons, United Press's Moscow cor- respondent, that he planned to return to the Soviet Union after several months in Mexico, so that he could begin work on frescoes for the Commissariat of War. He did say that he had "been very much involved in polemics on art matters here. Among painters, as in the other arts, there are conflicts occasioned by the revolution: an effort to adjust both the content and form of art to the new social conditions and viewpoints. Russia is in the thick of this conflict."31 He explained as well that despite arguments, his projects were not being opposed by the government, and that his work would resume once the elections in Mexico were over. On June fourteenth, he was again in Mexico City.

There is no doubt that Rivera's experience in the Soviet Union was disillusioning. He had hoped for so much there, and while he was not totally disappointed at events in Moscow, psychologically he was beginning that distancing process that would lead to his long estrangement from the PCM and the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. He arrived in Mexico with plans for new frescoes in the Secretariat of Public Education, with unused designs for the covers of Soviet magazines, several oil paintings, and three or four note- books filled with drawings and watercolors from the May first celebration in Moscow. He had hoped originally to use these sketches as the basis for a fresco depicting the experiences of a Rus- sian worker and his family on the day of the celebration, first in their apartment, then in the streets on the way to the parade, during the parade itself, and their activities after the parade's conclusion. Whether he genuinely expected to be able to use these for further work in Moscow or not is questionable, but they were some of the best envisioned work he completed while there. Only one sketch was incorporated into the fresco recreated in the Palace of Fine Arts;

29. Ibid., 221-222. 30. Rivera, My Art, 156. 31. Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 223.


64 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos the rest found their way, through Amy Rockefeller, into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where they remain today. What is most impressive about all of them, perhaps, is that stylistically, they differ very little from Rivera's work elsewhere. The intellectual and artistic stimulation he had felt in the USSR was not reflected in a modification of his own unique vision. It is possible that artistically he had a greater impact on Soviet artists than they had on him, even those whom he admired most.

Rivera had left the USSR, but he was not forgotten in the Soviet press, and his reputation seemed to have survived his hasty departure. In the summer of 1928, his article "Narodnoe iskusstvo Mek- siki" ("Folk Art of Mexico") appeared in Vestnik inostrannoi literatury (The Herald of Foreign Literature). Besides his praise for Mexican artistic inventiveness, which he said in fact most workers and peasants possessed if only given the opportunity to express it, he reiterated the earlier assertion he had made in his letter to Kul- tura i revoliutsiia that modern socialist artists must join with the urban and rural proletariat to bring back the artistic activity and creativity they had expressed in the past. At the same time, he added, they must be taught a higher esthetic consciousness.32

Two articles very favorable to Rivera appeared in 1929, one in Iskusstvo (Art), and the other in Vestnik inostrannoi literatury. The Iskusstvo article included comments by Rivera himself and a series of evaluations of his work, and was intended to portray Rivera as an artist fully agreeing with the spirit of traditionalism growing among Soviet artistic bureaucrats. Rivera was quoted as saying that Cubism had been transformed into artistic fascism in France, and that similarly, Italian Futurism had become artistic fascism. He was described as a great opponent of individualism, as a man whose ideals derived from the collective art of the ancient world and of the Gothic middle ages, that he was interested most in the social struggle of the masses for betterment. Above all, the article emphasized, Rivera saw himself not as a teacher, but as a comrade, working with the masses: "I speak to them in their own language. My art is for all the people, for the workers and peasants."33 The Vestnik inostrannoi literatury article was almost eulogistic. It emphasized the political and social function of Rivera's Mexican frescoes. They were deeply revolutionary both in their content and form, the author

32. "Narodnoe iskusstvo Meksiki," Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, #8 (1928): 151-152.

33. B.Z., "Diego Rivera-zhizn i tvorchestvo," Iskusstvo, #1-#2 (March-April, 1929): 67.


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 65

wrote, and their inspiration had come directly from the social conditions of Mexican reality. His works instructed the workers on how to organize against their exploiters, and were thereby active factors in the struggle of Mexican labor for independence and unity.34 If these articles were not entirely accurate descriptions of Rivera's esthetic frame of mind in 1928-29, and gave no indication of the artistic furor in which he had been involved in Moscow, they nonetheless approximated much of what he believed about his art, and did stress some of the points of which he and his Soviet artistic colleagues agreed.

1929 also marked Rivera's break with the PCM, however, and the beginning of his intellectual flirtation with Trotskyism. His expulsion from the party signalled the end of an important period in his life. The PCM had long been uncomfortable with him because of his contacts with the government. While Rivera worked for the Calles regime, for example, the PCM was attacking Calles himself as the "left arm of U.S. imperialism," and urging united opposition to his policies. 35 The government's attitude toward the PCM hardened as well, and by the summer of 1929, in response to a Comintern- ordered rebellion, the party had been outlawed, and any communists who could be caught were arrested and sent into exile or put into prison. In September, the conflict between Rivera and the other party leaders reached a climax, and Rivera presided, rather comically and absurdly, over his own ejection from the PCM.36 He was condemned for accepting the position of Director of the Academy of Fine Arts, and for continuing to work for the government in other ways as well, although behind all this was Stalin's order for communist parties to rid themselves of the "right danger."37 Rivera was excoriated by the party press, and many of his former friends refused to acknowledge him. He still considered himself a communist, he wrote later, but he felt that as a result of the expulsion, "I did not have a home-the Party having always been my home."38

The finale of Rivera's conflict with the newly-formed Soviet artistic establishment took place in 1932. He and his works were denigrated in Moscow, while in an article appearing in the United

34. A. Mikhailov, "Diego Rivera," Vestnik inostrannoi literatury, #5 (1929): 198-211.

35. Karl M. Schmitt, Communism in Mexico: A Study in Political Frustration (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 11.

36. See Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 102 for details.

37. Rivera, MyArt, 163-166. 38. Herrera, Frida, 102.


66 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

States, Rivera expressed his evaluation of the state of art in the country he had admired for so long. Joseph Freeman's "Zhivopis i politika (tvorcheskii put renegata diego rivery)" ["Painting and Pol- itics (The Creative Path of the Renegade Diego Rivera)"], was published in Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii (The Literature of World Revolution) in March; it summarized the reasons why Rivera had been expelled from the PCM and explained how his art had "deteri- orated" since his turning away from communism.39 Artistically, Freeman wrote, the weaknesses in Rivera's work were now clear: in the "typical primitiveness of his canvases," the "monotony of [his] colors," and his "poverty of expression," he was not the great artist everyone had thought. He had left the party in 1929 out of op- portunism, Freeman charged; from being a communist he had become a nationalist, because in that way he could avoid the persecution launched by the government. Freeman admitted that much of Rivera's early work had been revolutionary both in form and content, but he said that now, because Rivera had become a reformist and opportunist, his talent had become bankrupt. The cause for this decline was clear: Rivera no longer had a proper political theory underlying his creative energy, and without a revolutionary ideology, his work necessarily had to decline. By breaking with the party, Rivera had rejected not just the ideals of Marxism- Leninism and of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Freeman felt, but he had condemned himself to a future of artistic deterioration. In refusing to submit to comradely discipline, Rivera had sabotaged not only his political, but also his artistic career.

Rivera's own closing comments on the controversy surround- ing his break with the party and his unpleasant experience in Moscow were published in the U.S. journal Arts Weekly at about the same time Freeman's article appeared.40 In "The Position of the Ar- tist in Russia Today," Rivera reiterated his views of what truly revolutionary art (and by this he had in mind Marxist, if not Stalinist art) must be. He repeated his contention that artists trained in bourgeois society had to overcome the individualism essential to their earlier success, and embrace collectivist, revolutionary art. Russian artists, he wrote, had a great opportunity, and great responsibilities.

39. Joseph Freeman, "Zhivopis i politika (tvorcheskii put renegata diego rivery)," tr. E. Romanova, Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii, #3 (1932), 89-94. Freeman had been head of the PCM committee investigating Rivera, and was the one who pro- posed his expulsion from the party in 1929.

40. Diego Rivera, "The Position of the Artist in Russia Today," Arts Weekly I #1 (March 11, 1932): 6-7; see also Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 223-224.


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 67 Their audience, the Russian masses, should be given art of the highest quality that was nonetheless simple and clear, "transparent as crystal, hard as steel, cohesive as concrete,"41 art inspired by functional, constructivist architecture. They must adapt themselves to the new social and political reality of their country, and yet must also educate the proletariat to appreciate art, and work with the proletariat to create something entirely new. Most importantly, true Soviet artists must struggle to prevent the academic painters of the past from usurping their position as the representatives of proletarian art. These academic painters had managed to win the support of the political functionaries of the NEP government, officials who were esthetically inept, and who exhibited the worst petit-bourgeois bad taste. They were officials, he might have added, who had their counterparts in Mexico, the type Rivera had had to work with throughout the 1920s. Most appalling, Rivera added, was that these artists, "the worst academic painters in the world," had shielded themselves behind slogans and mottoes that on the surface, to the unsophisticated, seemed convincingly Marxist. The genuine revolutionary artists, those of the avant-garde, must renew the attack on these false innovators and their bureaucratic philistine supporters. The bureaucratization of art must be struggled against, Rivera concluded, with "true revolutionary ideology and the true art of the revolution."42

To Rivera there was no conflict between the idea that an artist could be both collectivist and avant-garde. That had been the ideal of the artistic "builders of a new life" who had been given so much publicity during the early years of the 1920s both within the USSR and abroad. If his calls for "true revolutionary ideology" and a "true art of the revolution" were vague in definition, that was how he intended them to be. He wanted free experimentation in art and life in what was still the only nation in the world ruled by a Marxist government. However disappointed in Soviet communism he may have become, it was nonetheless still only in the USSR that the conditions necessary for a genuine revolutionary art existed.

Periodically, Rivera commented on developments in Soviet artistic life in decades to come, but substantively, he never said much that was different from what he had written as a result of his visit to the USSR in 1927 and 1928. Politically, he maintained a generally independent leftist position. He remained outside the PCM for

41. Ibid., 223. 42. Ibid., 224.


68 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos almost a quarter of a century, during which he supported, then quar- relled with Trotsky, and was even suspected of his assassination. He accepted commissions from the directors of the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the Ford Motor Company, and John D. Rockefeller, and although his relationships with his U.S. capitalist patrons had never been anything but rocky, Mexican communists continued to reject him as a "painter for millionaires."43

By the early 1950s Rivera was recognized as Mexico's preemi- nent twentieth-century artist, and the position of the PCM began to soften toward him, particularly after Stalin's death in 1953. He had kept his faith with communism, he said, if not with Stalinism. Af- ter applying for readmission to the party twice (on the second occasion he signed the application with a pen given to him by Trotsky), he was finally allowed to return to the PCM in 1954. In 1955-1956 he even spent several months in the USSR, where he had gone to undergo treatment for cancer, and where he was welcomed as a great communist artist, his former service to the "capitalist exploiters" no longer held against him, and his criticism of the management of Soviet art no longer remembered as Soviet artists struggled to cast off Stalinist constraints. His loyalty to his own version of communism had brought him back to his earlier allegiances, and his international prominence meant that for him, at least, esthetic conformity was not required.

Whatever his reasons for wanting to rejoin the PCM were, he never sincerely believed that the Stalinist Socialist Realism of the 1930s and 1940s was a true proletarian art worthy either of Soviet artists or of their audience. He was deeply saddened at the fate of those Russians he admired most, men like Mayakovsky, Eisenstein, and Meyerhold, and infuriated at the success of the hacks whose work he found beneath contempt. Rivera had insisted on artistic pluralism at a time when Stalinism was beginning to allow no kind of dissent from an increasingly monolithic interpretation of art. Rivera is now admired by communists in Moscow, and his works enjoy official favor, not because he changed his view of art, but because of the evolution of artistic thinking among Marxist-Leninists in the USSR. His political inconsistencies and deviations have now been conveniently forgotten, and while many of the dilemmas with which Rivera was faced still confront Soviet artists, he at least has joined those rehabilitated modernist victims of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Fortunately for Rivera, living in Mexico, his punish-

43. Wolfe, Diego Rivera, 341.


Richardson: Diego Rivera in Moscow 69 ment for opposing the regimentation of Soviet art after 1928 was not as severe as that which his closest Moscow friends suffered. In the 1930s and 1940s he could speak out against what he considered a retrograde Soviet Socialist Realism, and he did. He remembered what he had seen in Moscow in 1927 and 1928 as the end of a heroic period in revolutionary Russian art. He feared then that the future of such art was only in its past, and he never found anything in subsequent Soviet art to ameliorate that uneasiness.


Article Contentsp. 49p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60p. 61p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67p. 68p. 69

Issue Table of ContentsMexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter, 1987), pp. 1-231Front MatterOn Maya Silviculture [pp. 1-17]La poltica obrera del Estado Mexicano: De Daz a Madero El caso de los trabajadores textiles [pp. 19-47]The Dilemmas of a Communist Artist: Diego Rivera in Moscow, 1927-1928 [pp. 49-69]Peasant Politics and the Mexican State: Indigenous Compliance in Highland Chiapas [pp. 71-98]Ethnicity and Politics in Rural Mexico: Land Invasions in Huejutla [pp. 99-126]Manufacturing Firms in Mexico's Financial Crisis: Determinants of Severity and Response [pp. 127-150]Review EssaysReview: The Postwar Mexican Economy [pp. 151-162]Review: Anthropological Studies in Yucatan and the Historical Dimension [pp. 163-180]Review: Peripheral Capitalist Development, Social Class Relations and Political Development in Mexico [pp. 181-194]

CommentMxico: una ciudad sin gobierno democrtico [pp. 195-209]

ArteReflexiones sobre mi obra [pp. 211-221]

Other Books Received [pp. 223-224]Back Matter [pp. 225-231]

Diego Rivera the Dilemmas of a Communist Artist

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Transcript of Diego Rivera the Dilemmas of a Communist Artist