Homage to the Earthbound Vision of Diego Rivera : Public Buildings in and Near Mexico City Display a Wealth of Revolutionary Art

Last July, while visiting the Mexican state of Michoacan on business, I decided to treat myself to a few days in Mexico City, to do what I wanted to do. I have been to Mexico’s capital about 10 times in 13 years and have seen enough ruins, Spanish Colonial buildings and folk art to hold me nicely into the next century. But I never get enough of Mexico’s artists. I decided to spend my free time in and around the capital visiting Diego Rivera’s murals. I’ve long been drawn to Rivera--to his immense talent and to stories of the gregarious personality and strong leftist political beliefs that put him center stage in Mexico’s artistic and intellectual worlds of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s. Although as a young man Rivera took art training in Europe, he and his friends and fellow painters Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros were inspired by the social ferment that followed the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He returned to Mexico to experiment with the creation of a new art on revolutionary themes, frescoes that would not be in museums and galleries but in great public buildings where common people could see them.

Planning my Rivera odyssey, I was surprised to find only sketchy information in travel guidebooks. To compile a decent itinerary, I had to turn to books on Mexican art that I had brought home from previous trips. Still, I had little more than a title and an address for several of Rivera’s works.

I also had no way of knowing that Rivera’s murals in the chapel of the National Agricultural School in the town of Chapingo, an hour’s drive east of downtown Mexico City, would be so breathtaking that they remain, in my mind, the highlight of my entire trip.

In retrospect, going to Chapingo seems almost like a pilgrimage--although I suspect pilgrimages cannot be taken in retrospect. The Chapingo experience was definitely spiritual (even to a rarely spiritual type like me). The rural surroundings of the school combine with the Renaissance-influenced frescoes, commissioned by the school’s director in 1923, to heighten the experience from mere Mexico City side trip to . . . well, pilgrimage. Entirely covering the walls and ceiling, the murals (in mint condition and as vibrant as the year they were painted) are unexpectedly splendid and haunting, an opinion shared by many art critics--even though they aren’t mentioned in most travel guides.

Rivera’s assignment, in the same year that the government began turning land over to the peasants, was to celebrate the fecundity of Mexican earth on the chapel walls. The site was perfect: the chapel of an old hacienda that was being turned into the country’s top school for agriculture (it reminded me of Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley).

Since Chapingo is off the tourist track and would have required intricate bus logistics, and much better Spanish than I can manage, I decided to hire a taxi for a few hours from the Zona Rosa section of Mexico City. Instead of flagging down one of the VW drivers (perfectly fine for around town, but I wasn’t sure about a longer trip), I went to a sitio (cabstand) in front of a big hotel where the drivers have large sedans and are more likely to speak English. I wanted to make sure my driver knew where Chapingo was before we took off. When he nodded and said, “near Texcoco,” I knew I was in good hands. Driving to Chapingo is a crucial part of the experience. Along the highway, the cornfields, mountains and high clouds serve as a decompression chamber. The campus location helps, too: acres of shady trees, well-tended gardens and robust students along the walkways.

Once there, the driver parked at the guard gate on the east side of campus. In answer to my simple-but-effective “murales de Diego Rivera?” the campus guard pointed me down the quarter-mile walkway to the chapel.

The chapel ceiling--all naves and apses and architectural devices to challenge the artist-- Rivera filled with larger-than-life, grander-than-life nudes and near nudes of both sexes, some floating against a dark blue sky, others standing, feet down, still others wedged in triangular niches. Rivera’s deeply felt socialist politics are woven into the murals: In one scene the revolutionary Trinity of worker, soldier and peasant share their food with a rural family. But it is the grandeur of the human body--these gods and goddesses of the earth--that radiate from the chapel walls. It is dizzying. Dazzling. And best of all, the chapel was mostly deserted that Wednesday morning. Rarely these days is one able to enjoy such superb art in solitude.

Another day, in downtown Mexico City, I saw a number of Rivera’s murals that are within walking distance of each other. Just as Chapingo’s tranquil setting complemented the spiritual quality of the chapel’s mural, I found the hustle-bustle of downtown streets in tune with his people-crowded scenes on urban walls.

At the National Palace, on the east side of the Zocalo , the city’s main plaza, Rivera’s encyclopedic exploration of Mexican history fills the walls of the grand stairway and the second floor. Rivera is a visual raconteur. Here is Mexican history for people who don’t want to read a book about it: the Classic Comics approach raised to its highest possible artistic level (and I write that with no put-down intended). He tells of Aztec gods, Spanish conquistadors and peasant revolts.

Although I’ve made my way to the National Palace half a dozen times in the past 10 years, I am always a little disappointed by the highly touted mural on the stairway--not the content, but the location. It’s dark. People are pushing by. And, most of all, I never feel like I’m standing in the right place--and that the optimum viewing place is really in midair. Where’s the trapeze?

It may be artistic heresy, but I’ve come to the point where I pretty much walk past the stairway and put my wonderment into the upstairs murals. Rivera, the eternal storyteller, tells some of his best here: In rich detail, he brings Tenochtitlan, the Aztec city-of-the-lake that is now Mexico City, to life. This pictorial epic poem begins with a prologue along the bottom of the wall: In grisaille (an art technique using only gray tints to give the effect of bas-relief), Rivera recounts the contributions Mexico has made to the world, from the cultivation of corn, the cacao bean and tomatoes to the sciences of astronomy and botany. Rivera’s depiction of the marketplace of Tlatelolco is so intense, so real, I could almost walk into it. One vendor offers tender frogs’ legs, while another seller, just behind her, tries to interest a shopper in buying a human arm! Rivera is never an impartial historian. Even a casual glance tells you who the heroes and villains are; here he depicts the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes as imbecilic and syphilitic--one of his most uncompromising portraits.

Later, I walked a few blocks north of the National Palace to the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), a massive stone building that fills an entire block just north of the Metropolitan Cathedral. Here, Rivera painted 210 panels (almost 1,800 square yards’ worth) exalting Mexico’s workers and peasants. The frescoes cover three floors and several patios. “How could one man do so much?” I kept thinking. The murals were painted in three years, 1923-26, and he painted much of the Chapingo murals during this same period.

For the past three years, the SEP building has been undergoing major renovation to repair damage done in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, work that is expected to take another two years to complete. In the meantime, the murals are prisoners of the renovation. They seem under siege. I saw panels covered with paper or cloth, others taped in strategic places or covered with mesh. I had to step over concrete slabs, jump missing floor tiles and tolerate paint fumes and dust-laden air. But it was still worth going. Rivera’s task at SEP was more than just to document the Mexican worker. He meant the murals as a work of empowerment--to infuse those who viewed them with the courage to continue struggling for a society where no one had to endure poverty or injustice. The SEP murals are often highly Byzantine. Sombreros seem like golden halos. Here, as in all of Rivera’s murals, there are recognizable faces such as that of his wife, Frida Kahlo, dressed in a red shirt (gang colors in their world). My favorite is a Zen-like Emiliano Zapata, wrapped in a red shroud.

That afternoon, I walked to the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, about 10 blocks southwest of SEP. It contains just one 13-by-50-foot mural painting: “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda.” Rivera painted it for the Hotel del Prado, which stood, until the 1985 earthquake, across the south side of Alameda park. Saving the mural was a high priority in the city, so a special museum, one big room, was erected at the west end of the park to house it. Here, the mural seems so much grander and accessible than it did when I saw it in the mixed-use lobby of the hotel.

Inside the museum, three walls are lined with photos of Rivera creating the mural; it was easy to get the gist of the photo captions, even with my limited command of Spanish. Although there’s a cartoon-style drawing in the middle of the floor with each figure in the mural keyed and identified, I found it worked better to buy the English-language brochure in the lobby and bring it to the mural.

The mural is rich in both history and anecdotes (typical Rivera). Around the central figures (Diego as a boy, Frida, a feather boa-bedecked skeleton and artist/engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada) the story of the park unfolds: the torture of the Inquisition in the 16th Century; bombastic, speechifying politicians of many eras; the peasants who were only allowed to look at the park from the sidewalk.

At the Palace of Fine Arts is Rivera’s mural “Man at the Crossroads.” It is his repainting of a mural he was hired to do for the lobby of Rockefeller Center in New York City, but which was obliterated by its sponsors in 1934--before the proverbial paint was dry. After commissioning a work that was to deal with “the new relationships of man with matter and man with man,” the Rockefeller family objected to the mural when they discovered that Rivera had painted an image of Lenin in the work to promote the brotherhood of workers in all countries. They asked that an unknown worker be substituted for Lenin. Rivera refused to paint over Lenin and the mural was destroyed.

Returning to Mexico, Rivera immediately began to re-create the work on the third floor of the Palace of Fine Arts. In it, a blond man (some say he looks like Charles Lindbergh) dominates a panorama of misery and hope. Two giant, winglike ellipses make an X across the panel: one half of the work depicts the wonders that can be seen through the microscope, the other half the world through the telescope. The wings divide the mural into vignette scenes: battle-ready soldiers in gas mask, eager athletes at a meet. The portrait of Lenin that drove Nelson Rockefeller wild is center right.

Also at the Palace of Fine Arts are several small murals that Rivera painted in 1936 for the Hotel Reforma, a few blocks away. The carnival themes were meant to be appropriate to their designated settings in the hotel’s party and banquet balls. But Rivera manages to make his pointed comments: a buffoonish dictator (an intriguing mix of Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt), a pig-snouted general (who some critics thought was general-then-president Lazaro Cardenas).

The Museo Estudio Diego Rivera, several miles south of downtown, is where Rivera did most of his easel paintings as well as preparation sketches for his murals. It is across the street from the San Angel Inn (an old hacienda-turned-restaurant where Rivera often ate). The Museo Estudio complex, designed by Juan O’Gorman in the functionalist style, has much of the feeling and color of Frida Kahlo’s house--the family home where she was born and where she and Diego lived for many years--a few miles away. The first two floors serve as a gallery with temporary exhibits related to Rivera in some way. Unfortunately, the exhibits I saw there were lackluster, filled with photographs of art rather than originals.

But the third floor is pay dirt. Thirty-five years after Rivera’s death in 1957, it feels like his larger-than-life presence has just left the room. His palettes are still on a table. His tubes of paint, the very ones he squeezed, are nearby. Green wooden chairs, heavy Mission-type chairs, line the area where the maestro stood at his easel. It’s so easy to imagine him here, holding court as he worked. The walls of the studio are hung with huge papier-mache skeletons that exaggerate the ribs and pelvic bones. Several paintings, portraits of women, are set around the room. Off the landing is a small bedroom; Rivera’s shoes and cane are there along with well-worn luggage, piled on the armoire--his name handwritten across the edges (such a sweet, unpretentious touch’s in a world where lesser artists require matched Louis Vuitton). Diego’s reputation as a major womanizer could hardly be the result of conquests in this tiny room, this tiny bed--too tiny for him alone (well, the thought did cross my mind).

Kahlo’s home is now a museum, too, and contains many of Rivera’s drawings, paintings and personal effects (his hat and huge overalls hang on a bedside peg). The Museo Frida Kahlo, at the corner of Londres and Allende streets in the district of Coyoacan, has been officially closed for renovation for over a year and is not expected to reopen for at least another year. I decided to go and try to get in, armed with a sad face and a long story. When I knocked on a Saturday afternoon, the door was opened two inches, and before I could open my mouth, I was told to come back in an hour. I was then let in (along with about 10 other people), and for a little more than $3 each, we were allowed to walk through, carefully watched by the guards. All very unofficial. Later, I talked to several other people who had tried to get in within a few weeks of my trip, but were turned away.

Two Mexico City murals are not open to the public: “The Creation,” in the Amphitheater of the National Preparatory Schools, near SEP, and the nude panels in the Secretariat of Health, near the Reforma entrance to Chapultepec Park. Near the end of his life, Rivera designed a museum to house his vast pre-Columbian art collection. Anahuacalli is a stone, Aztec-esque fortress on a hill in a working class suburb, San Pablo Tepetlapa, southeast of the city. It contains a replica of his San Angel studio, sketches for murals and a few paintings. The main draw here are the pre-Columbian artifacts--Rivera had accumulated more than 60,000 in his private collection. Assuming Rivera was an active collector for 40 years, he averaged buying 30 objects a day during that time, weekends included.

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Wall-to-Wall Art in Mexico

Where to find the Diego Rivera murals:

The National Agricultural School chapel, in the town of Chapingo, off Highway 136. It’s near the city of Texcoco, about 25 miles east of downtown Mexico City. Open Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Free.

The National Palace, on the east side of the Zocalo, downtown. Open Monday-Saturday, 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Free.

The Secretariat of Public Education, corner of Avenida Republica de Argentina and Calle Gonzalez Obregon, downtown. Open Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-2 p.m. (sometimes to 3 p.m.). Free.

Museo Mural Diego Rivera, corner of Avenida Balderas and Calle Colon, on the west side of the Alameda, downtown. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission: about $3.40. (At the rate of 3,000 pesos to one U.S. dollar, the 10,000-peso admission to many museums works out to about around $3.40.)

The Palace of Fine Arts, Avenida Cinco de Mayo and Avenida Lazaro Cardenas, east of the Alameda, downtown. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission: about $3.40 (free on Sundays).

Museo Estudio Diego Rivera, Calle Diego Rivera and Calle Altavista, in the district of San Angel. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission: $3.40. From downtown, take the Metro Line 3 south (marked Universidad) to M. de Quevedo station. It’s $2 by taxi from there.

Museo Frida Kahlo, Calle Londres and Calle Allende, in the district of Coyoacan. It is officially and indefinitely closed for renovations.

Anahuacalli, Calle del Museo, in the suburb of San Pablo Tepetlapa. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Free.