Life of Rivera: A Panoramic View

For 20th century art, Diego Rivera is Mexico, and Mexico is Diego Rivera. The artist and the nation’s modern identity are so inextricably intertwined as to be virtually inseparable from one another.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the 64 paintings and 37 works on paper in “Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution” provide a relatively compact survey of the artist’s prolific career (born in the university town of Guanajuato in 1886, he painted for more than 50 years before his death from cancer in 1957). It’s probably too much for American audiences to expect substantial revelations from this show, following as it does the highly focused, eye-opening 1984 Phoenix Art Museum exhibition of Rivera’s early Cubist work and the great, career-long retrospective at the Detroit Institute of Arts organized two years later. Still, its organizers at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts have assembled a straightforward introduction to Rivera’s always fascinating art, and it includes a variety of exceptional works.

Rivera’s career can be loosely divided into three parts. Each is critical to an understanding of his remarkable achievement.

First came the education. Learning to be an artist was a complex process that ranged from acquiring manual skills and technical proficiencies to developing more general philosophical and attitudinal positions, which Rivera mostly acquired among the contentious artists of the Parisian avant-garde early in the century.

Next came the elaborate socio-cultural mythology--the aspect of his career on which his artistic reputation most fully rests. Rivera, largely through the often astonishing murals he painted in San Francisco, Detroit, New York and, especially, Mexico City, merged his own struggle to establish an individual, modern identity with the birth pangs of an entire nation.

Finally there’s the studio production. This includes numerous society portraits, as well as a steady supply of genre paintings and lithographs, either specifically derived from or thematically connected to the murals. His studio production became the source of great personal wealth.

Murals don’t travel, of course, so the second of these three categories of work is necessarily the least represented in the show. One room at LACMA does include 15 drawings and lithographs related to prominent mural projects, while another features three transfer drawings, complete with the chalky pounce marks with which the stencil-composition was transferred from paper to wall. A reading room, featuring exhibition catalogs and black-and-white posters of Rivera at work and at play, establishes a pause in the artist’s chronology when, in 1921, the 34-year-old artist returned to Mexico City from his 14-year sojourn in Spain, Italy and France and began to paint murals.

Much has been written about Rivera’s murals and their critical place in revolutionary Mexico’s post-colonial development. What the murals didn’t do, however, was represent a mere fusion of 20th century socialist ideals with imagery associated with a pre-Columbian past. Rivera’s art was never as simplistic as that--and if it had been it never would have captured the popular imagination in as deep and resonant a way as it did.

Rather, Rivera understood that Mexico’s pre-Columbian history was built around a fabulous and elaborate tangle of heroic mythologies. And so, in his art (and his life), he progressively wove his own elaborate tapestry of fantastic myth, one that featured not only a committed socialist iconography of the people--la raza--but also, preeminently, of himself.

The irony is that this approach was akin to the route taken by the European conquerors of Mexico 400 years before. Colonial art is an often remarkable record of the merger between pre-Columbian cosmology and Spanish Catholic iconography, wherein an Aztec mother-goddess could be transformed into a cult of the Virgin Mary, or a religious tradition of blood sacrifice melded with the miracle of the sacred heart. The brilliance of Rivera’s achievement was that, as a Mexican, he accomplished a similar transformation from within.

It’s doubtful whether he could have accomplished the extraordinary feat without first having made himself a nominal outsider, spending those many years in Europe looking at Italian Renaissance frescoes and working in the heady milieu in Paris populated by Picasso, Mondrian and the rest. The strongest, most absorbing and also the largest portion of the exhibition chronicles Rivera’s early years.

Works Date to Artist’s Child-Prodigy Phase

The section is divided into two parts. The first focuses on his youthful training, much of it prior to Paris. Rivera, like Picasso, was a child prodigy. The earliest piece is an academic pencil drawing of a fragment of classical sculpture, which makes up in careful visual fidelity to form what it lacks in imaginative verve. Rivera drew it when he was 12.

Boy, could that guy draw. Throughout the exhibition, whether in the exquisitely Ingres-like pencil portrait of his Russian lover Angeline Beloff or the more abstracted charcoal and pastel nude of his Italian lover photographer Tina Modotti or the complex iconographic program of the mural studies for “Man at the Crossroads,” Rivera’s graphic facility is abundantly in evidence.

The second part of the show’s introductory section chronicles the Cubist years, beginning in 1913, and the eventual return to realist painting following the chaos and brutality of World War I. Rivera came to Cubism near the tail end of Picasso and Braque’s intense, seven-year period of inventing the style, and after it had become fairly well established as the leading avant-garde movement in Paris. But it was the chosen idiom in which he painted his first flat-out masterpiece--the stunning “Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla)” of 1915.

Almost 5 feet square, the painting packs a graphic wallop. Although painted shortly after the death in Paris of exiled Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, it’s doubtful Rivera had a specific revolutionary theme in mind (the title came much later). Instead the picture is a tour de force of painterly effects--pigments brushed, combed, feathered, stippled, made illusionistic and more. Fragments of Mexican imagery are cobbled into a kind of emblem of Cubist technique, creating the most personal of Rivera’s forays into avant-garde art.

At the other end of the show, Rivera’s studio work is rather less represented. For this kind of easel painting the danger of perfunctory production is obvious, and a considerable amount of rather pedestrian work is on view.

This is not to say that, for a muralist with socialist commitments like Rivera, studio production is inevitably weak. LACMA’s own magnificent “Flower Day” (1925), painted during the first flush of his success as a revolutionary muralist, carries much the same emblematic power of “Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla),” albeit in a wholly different style. Here the iconic image shows a peasant whose soulful burden is a huge basket of calla lilies, sensual symbol of ritual death and rebirth; the figure is attended by anonymous supplicants, who assume the position of saints or donors in traditional Renaissance altarpieces. It’s as fine an easel painting as Rivera made.

The show is, however, short on convincing studio portraits. The notable exception is a 1941 “Self-Portrait,” in which Rivera portrays himself as a veritable Old Master (in bearing it recalls the audacious confidence of Chardin’s similarly bespectacled self-portrait). That the strongest example should be a rather grand depiction of the artist himself says a good deal about Rivera’s aspirations--and the nature of his achievement.

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* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through Aug. 16. Closed Wednesdays.