Let the Revolution Begin

“Diego Rivera: Art & Revolution.” Get it? Probably not. The title of the exhibition opening Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art may seem perfectly obvious, but it doesn’t mean what you might think.

Rivera, who was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1886 and died in Mexico City in 1957, rose to the pinnacle of the Mexican muralist movement in the 1920s and early ‘30s. Creating a new iconography based on socialist ideas and the indigenous heritage of Mexican culture, he overshadowed his extraordinarily talented but less politic and less flexible compatriots David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, so he is inevitably linked to images that espouse ideals of the Mexican Revolution.

But when the curators came up with a name for the Rivera show, they had another revolution in mind--the aesthetic upheaval that led to Modern art.

“We weren’t thinking about the Mexican Revolution,” said Luis-Martin Lozano, an independent curator based in Mexico City who organized the show with William H. Robinson, associate curator of paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Agustin Arteaga, director of the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

The curatorial team wanted to prove that Rivera was a revolutionary figure not only in terms of his leftist politics and murals but also in many other aspects of his long artistic career. Generally relegated to the ranks of social realists, Rivera is “in need of serious reassessment,” Lozano said. So he and his colleagues set out to explore the complex relationship between the revolutionary aesthetics and radical politics in Rivera’s art throughout the full run of his career.

The result is a survey of about 100 paintings, drawings and prints, ranging from youthful academic work to utopian visions of world peace, painted during his final years. The murals are represented by sketches, details of figures and cartoons. But the bulk of the work on display was done by “the other Rivera”--the relatively little-known artist who was deeply involved with the European avant-garde and established himself as a Cubist before he ever painted murals. That Rivera also immersed himself in Surrealism and portraiture after his career as a political muralist wound down.

The range of styles and subject matter on display will surely surprise visitors who know Rivera only as a muralist who spread the gospel of socialism on public walls in Mexico and the United States--as well as those who mainly know him as the husband of artist Frida Kahlo, who posthumously rode the wave of feminism all the way to stardom in the 1970s and still has a devoted following.

But just as the show isn’t about the Mexican Revolution or Rivera’s murals, neither is it about Kahlo, who was only one of four women he married or called his wife, amid a parade of liaisons. “He has never been, nor will he ever be, anybody’s husband,” Kahlo wrote in a statement about Rivera shortly before her death in 1954. Indeed, Rivera’s life as a freewheeling ladies’ man has been so compellingly chronicled that it can be difficult to separate his persona from his art.

Rivera occasionally included images of Kahlo in his murals, but he is said to have made only one easel painting of her--a small portrait acquired by LACMA with the Bernard and Edith Lewin collection of Mexican modern art. Though the portrait is not in the traveling show, it will be added during the Los Angeles engagement. Other works from the Lewin collection will be displayed on the third floor of the Anderson building, as a complement to the Rivera exhibition in the Hammer wing.

Unlikely as it might seem, the exhibition sprouted from an alliance between the Mexican government and the state of Ohio, initially concerned with trade but later extended to include the arts. In 1996, when the Ohio Arts Council sent a show of American art, “Visions of America,” to the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico City proposed a Rivera show in exchange.

As the idea took shape, the Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts joined forces with the Cleveland Museum of Art, in partnership with the Ohio Arts Council. From the beginning, Cleveland curator Robinson said, the organizers hoped to send the show to California and Texas, which have large Latino populations. The exhibition opened in Cleveland in February; after closing in Los Angeles on Aug. 16, it will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (Sept. 19-Nov. 28) and the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City (Dec. 17-March 19).

A retrospective with a point of view, the show unfolds in roughly chronological order, divided into four thematic sections. The first part, “Rivera’s Formative Years,” begins with an astonishingly accomplished drawing of a classical draped sculpture, done in 1899, when the artist was a 12-year-old student at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City. Within a few years he had tried various approaches to landscape, still life and the human figure with such success that he obtained a grant to study in Europe.

“I arrived in Spain on the 6th of January, 1907. I was twenty years old, over six feet tall, and weighed 300 pounds. But I was a dynamo of energy,” Rivera wrote in his autobiography. He spent most of the next 14 years in Europe, living mainly in Spain and France, where he became well acquainted with prominent artists. He also traveled to Italy, where he studied Italian frescoes.

The influence of his foreign surroundings is easy to see, as his work evolved from a moody, Impressionistic painting of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris and a Symbolist view of Bruges, both executed in 1909, to early experiments with the faceted space of Cubism. Examples include a 1912 painting of the hilltop town of Toledo and a dramatic 7 1/2-foot-tall portrayal of Mexican artist Adolfo Best Maugard as a dandy, standing on a balcony overlooking modern Paris. The latter was exhibited at the Salon des Independants in Paris in 1913, but it was virtually ignored, while Robert Delaunay’s work captured critical acclaim, Robinson said.

In the second section, “Radical Political and Artistic Transformations,” featuring works made from 1914 to ‘21, Rivera appears as a serious Cubist, interacting with Picasso and other artists--and undoubtedly picking up on their leads but also infusing his own stylistic and technical twists and incorporating bits of his Mexican heritage. Trying various approaches to landscape and portraiture, he frequently portrayed his first wife, Angelina Beloff, a Russian artist he met in Brussels.

The centerpiece of this group of works is “Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla),” which the curators regard as Rivera’s Cubist masterpiece. A “landscape” that is actually a symbol-laden portrait, the painting depicts Emiliano Zapata, the peasant revolutionary hero, with a serape, rifle, gourd canteen and ammunition box.

“Rivera was above all a great synthesizer,” Robinson said, noting that the portrait combines Modernist formal structure and inventive iconography and a bit of trompe l’oeil realism, in the image of a small piece of paper “nailed” to a corner of the painting. Executed in 1915, six years before Rivera returned to Mexico, this work shows that he was not a mere follower of Picasso but an innovator who merged his national identity and political sympathy with Cubism, the curator said.

Children and Families Also Subjects for Rivera

The third thematic section, “Art for the Masses,” explores Rivera’s activities as a muralist in a group of small studies of heads and hands, prints of details and cartoons of major projects, such as “Allegory of California” at the Pacific Stock Exchange Luncheon Club in San Francisco.

Finally, “Visions of Mexico and World Harmony,” the fourth segment, features works dating from 1923 to ’56 that portray Rivera as an artist with wide-ranging--and often contradictory--interests. The earliest pieces, completed while he was doing mural projects, depict monumental indigenous people of Mexico engaged in everyday tasks, thus reflecting his ambitious desire to paint a vast portrait of his country and its people.

A few years later his work takes a distinctly sweet turn in pictures of children and loving family groups, which critics often dismiss as romantic drivel or tourist art. But Rivera also painted arresting, expressionistic images, including a 1941 self-portrait and a 1938 full-length portrait of his anguished second wife, Lupe Marin, wearing a long white dress and seated on a wicker chair with her oversized hands tensely clasped around her legs.

Rivera also dipped into Surrealism, as several paintings from the 1940s reveal. Letting his imagination roam, he painted “The Temptations of Saint Anthony,” with the people portrayed as writhing red radishes. In a couple of landscapes, denuded trees resemble human bodies, twisted and torn by war.

The breadth of Rivera’s work will probably surprise many visitors at LACMA. If so, that’s because Mexico’s modern art has been largely ignored in America since 1945, Lozano said. But now it’s time--however belatedly--to reconsider Mexican artists’ role in the international scheme of Modern art, and Rivera is a good place to start, he said. *