Television Reviews : ‘Rivera in America’: A Mix of Politics and Paint

Weighing 300 pounds and advocating a monumental public art that speaks to the masses, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera may be too big for any mere movie.

“Rivera in America” (airing on PBS’ “American Masters” series tonight at 9 on Channels 50, 15 and 24, and Friday at 9 p.m. on Channel 28) states the facts of his life (1886-1957) and ambitious efforts to apply Renaissance fresco techniques to social causes. But this documentary of Rivera’s tumultuous dealings in the 1930s with American capitalists rarely catches the pulse of a lovable and fearsome painter who created didactic murals while embroiling himself in political controversy.

The energy of Rivera’s socialist convictions and artistic prowess only throbs to the surface in sequences combining footage of American industry with Rivera’s paintings of workers. Here you begin to feel his excitement in visiting Detroit factories and the thrill of his first encounter with a tractor.

Why wouldn’t such a man portray the operators of exotic machinery as the new nobility? If his American critics didn’t think the workers were sufficiently cheerful and didn’t appreciate graphic suggestions that laborers might be better off in a socialist country, that was their problem.

To Rivera, criticism was only proof that he was delivering a trenchant message. If he paid for his beliefs in lost commissions and destroyed artworks, he at least had the satisfaction of making art that was taken seriously.

Rivera believed that all art is propaganda, but he was also a humanitarian whose example inspired the employment of American artists through the Works Project Administration.

The film’s passages on Rivera’s marital relationship with painter Frida Kahlo, interviews with former assistants and accounts of his generosity to Mexicans caught in the American Depression provide sporadic insights into the vulnerability of a man who called himself a frog-faced fatty.