FANFARE OF UNCOMMON MURALIST

The shade of Diego Rivera must have spun like a tornado. A large retrospective of his art opened June 10 at the Philadelphia Art Museum to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the once-legendary Mexican muralist’s birth. On view just a couple of weeks, the whole caboodle was shut down by a city workers’ strike that bottled up local services from trash collection to municipal swimming pools.

Rivera would have liked seeing the workers sticking up for themselves. He was a dedicated Communist when he wasn’t squabbling with the party. His ghost must have folded its pudgy fingers in gratified repose.

Until it realized that this blow struck on behalf of the common man was keeping people from seeing his art.

Ack!

In 1907, when Rivera went to study in Paris, he was over six feet tall and weighed in at 300 pounds. The only thing about him that was bigger was his ego, which had the proportions of the Graf Zeppelin. He was so volatile that he got into a fistfight with a hostile critic and was ostracized by Braque, Leger, Gris and other fellow artists. Decidedly, his ghost had a volcanic tantrum when the blue collars of Brotherly Love shut down his show.

Luckily, the strike has now abated and the museum has reopened. Rivera’s 200-work survey continues until Aug. 10, then moves on to Mexico City, Madrid and Berlin. In any event, it will not come to Los Angeles.

If that’s too bad, it is not because the exercise altogether redeems a reputation grown grimy in the decades since 1957, when Rivera died at 70. The ensemble yields enough aftershocks to topple all comfortable sets of assumptions about his art. Those who kept him on the hallowed shelf he once inhabited with Picasso, Matisse, Lipschitz and other modern immortals are in for a jolt. People who dismissed him as a bombastic sentimentalist, crowding overdesigned murals with hordes of button-eyed waifs, will have to rearrange their minds.

The obvious trouble with this exhibition is that it cannot deal directly with the works that are Rivera’s legitimate claim as an architect of modern art history: the giant fresco murals, brandishing revolutionary workers and dark, zaftig nudes symbolizing the great forces of the earth. These are literally plastered to walls from Michigan to California and Mexico when they aren’t blotted out by censorship, as in the notorious instance of his work at Rockefeller Center in 1933 that was eventually covered over because of politically unpopular imagery.

Rivera invented the politically charged populist wall mural for modern times, along with Orozco and Siqueiros. Their influence did not end with American Regionalist painting and WPA murals. It went underground in the large scale of Abstract Expressionist art and re-emerged in the mural revival of the last two decades. It’s all been especially vigorous in L.A., where the work of Terry Schoonhoven, Kent Twitchell and the collective mural movement around the barrio show an energy that has yet to be concentrated. (I still think L.A. should mural every blank wall on old downtown buildings.)

Rivera & Co. left a heroic aesthetic legacy that has been snubbed by the artistic mainstream, who said it was nothing but revivalist propaganda. In our Post-Modern era, the politics of the murals are certainly as acceptable as those promoting church and prince on Renaissance walls, and their revivalism is presently re-revived by Neo-Expressionism. (It is amazing how much Rivera one finds in Italians like Clemente and Chia. However, it’s an insight that blows no one good.)

Keeping Rivera’s unshakable contributions in sight, one moves through the Philadelphia exhibition with mounting admiration and dismay.

From childhood the artist was fascinated by mechanical objects, building wheeled toys by age 8. He loved engineering, and when he came to paint industrial murals at the Detroit Institute of the Arts in 1932 his tangled depictions of machinery were an orgy of convoluted vigor.

This mechanical bent resided in a fist piloted by extraordinary intelligence. Early academic work is utterly undistinguished, except that it’s structured with locomotive solidity. Studying in Paris on a scholarship, Rivera grasped Cubism with the analytic accuracy of a computer, cranking out a “Sailor” as witty as a Picasso or a “Zapatista Landscape” as cool and elegant as a Juan Gris. He drew portraits with the surgical probity of Ingres and painted them with the attenuated spirituality of El Greco.

Back in Mexico he wove tall tales of fighting alongside the revolutionaries, but what he really did was develop a style that blended Uccello and Piero with the pre-Columbian art of Mexico, using Picasso as the binding medium. It’s the manner we all know from the murals--reflected here in numerous works like “Flower Day,” with its rigorous symmetry, reverent peasants and decorative surface.

But his reach had yet to find its limit. He’d paint a nude portrait of a black dancer with the sexual charge of German New Realism, then give us the “Liberation of the Peon” or a portrait of Edsel Ford as wry as a Hockney.

Decidedly, Rivera is a much broader artist than we knew, but the only thing that holds it all together is his boggling technical virtuosity. Temperamentally, the work is a chaotic stew that doesn’t hesitate to bumble into corny schlock Surrealism in which a “Temptation of St. Anthony” is acted out by dancing roots, like a Disney cartoon. Rivera’s earthiness waxed lumpish.

He was not only gigantically overweight, he had a thick-lipped baby face with eyes popped to the point of rolling out of his head. Charles Laughton might have played him in a screen biography. None of this prevented him from lining up an endless string of adoring wives, mistresses and admirers with whom he had rocky relationships.

Reading his biography, one comes to expect that his great relationship with Frida Kahlo or Trotsky or whomever is going to come to a moment of fuming dissolution. Clearly, a guy who was magnetically unattractive. Emotionally, his art bangs around from cooing over urchins to extolling peasant heroes and flattering industrialists and actresses. The range is so contradictory that the great ideologist seems now as cynical as a night clerk in a hookers’ motel, now as cloyingly pious as a TV evangelist.

There is a little cartoon painting of a cantina, called “Las Illusiones.” Rivera, playing a peon, stands behind two gross pigskins full of pulque, the cactus liquor. The bloated skins are also women’s breasts. There is a jeering bitterness about the picture that holds the world in contempt as a tawdry fiction where only gross satisfactions count.

Finally, it is not Rivera’s politics nor his gifts that bring his art into question; it is the fact that it is not fulfilling to look at for very long. Its vaguely tainted, bloated form suddenly goes fizzled and dispirited like an unpressed trouser leg. Glutted, gabby compositions exhort sensation and then lock into airless decorative prissiness. There is a Falstaff-like tragedy here about a monstrous talent touched with genius gorging itself into insensitive self-caricature, manipulative and scornful.