A Muralist’s Talent Scaled Down

One of the drawbacks of being a famous artist is that viewers get used to thinking of your work in larger-than-life-size dimensions. Diego Rivera is a case in point. His monumental murals in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Mexico, New York, Detroit and San Francisco are the stuff of legends.

Throughout the 1930s and ‘40s and into the ‘50s, Rivera’s gigantic masterpieces were lightning rods for political controversy. They still stir deep passions, galvanizing peoples’ ideas about social justice, economic inequity and art’s place in the struggle.

These public paintings matched a personal life that was neither private nor ordinary. Married five times to four women (who accounted for three of his four children), Rivera, who lived from 1886 to 1957, hobnobbed with Picasso; traveled throughout North America, Europe and Russia; formed a union with fellow revolutionary artists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rivera de la Cueva and Jose Clemente Orozco; and shared his home in Mexico City with Leon Trotsky, not to mention wife number 3, Frida Kahlo. A prodigious worker and generous teacher who was repeatedly embraced by and expelled from his hometown’s Communist Party and art academy, Rivera was no stranger to the glamorous fanfare of celebrity.

At the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, “Diego Rivera: The Brilliance Before the Brush” strips away the myths that have grown up around the life and work of Mexico’s premier modern artist. Organized for Denver’s Museo de las Americas by curator Tariana Navas-Nieves, this straightforward show reveals the humble heart of Rivera’s art: his talent for translating direct observations into simple emblems that resonate with complex emotions and pulse with the dignity and drudgery of everyday life.

The modest, refreshingly intimate exhibition consists of 42 pencil sketches the artist made when he was a restless thirtysomething in search of himself, before his artistic identity was established and his place in history secured. Each charming drawing occupies a single, 6-by-8-inch page plucked from a pocket-size sketchbook Rivera took on a trip to rural Tehuantepec, a town and region in eastern Oaxaca, where Mexico’s isthmus reaches its narrowest point.

As works of art, Rivera’s drawings impress because of their tautness, power and efficiency. With great economy of means, the confident draftsman uses only a handful of decisively drawn lines and a few quick scribbles of shading to create scenes as engaging as they are stylized, at once spare and vivid.

All but three of his images depict people, mostly men, women and children carrying baskets, jugs, and mats to and from the market, or crouching alongside stacks of produce, bread and clothing as they sell the products of their family’s labor to other farmers and craftsmen. Rivera is at his best in composing variously sized groups whose members all do different things.

For example, “Sketch for Tehuanas in the Market #20” locks seven silhouetted figures in a rectangular composition that has the solidity of a brick wall. In contrast, “Sketch for Buying Huaraces #17” abandons architectural stability for sweeping curves and fluid lines, giving form to the give-and-take of face-to-face negotiation.

“Sketch for Tehuanas Conversing #27” fuses three women in a sturdy pyramid of vertical and horizontal lines, their thickly woven skirts and protective headdresses echoing one another like the refrain from an unforgettable melody. In another picture, a ring of people turn their backs to the world, forming such a tightly knit cluster that it’s hard to tell how many there are. And in one of the most schematic, least detailed images, three people are positioned in a spiral around which your eye spins as it takes in the scene’s casual dynamism.

Rivera captures the hustle and bustle of a day at the market, which provides both respite from solitary toil and money to buy provisions that can’t be produced at home. Like any good dramatist, he knows that punctuating action-packed vignettes with a few quiet moments intensifies the effects of both. He provides such points in depictions of people sitting as still as statues.

The lone woman in “Sketch for Pinole Vendor #41” crouches on the ground against a blank wall. Resting her chin on her hand and her elbow on her knee, she looks as if she’s used to carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, without complaining for a minute. In another work, a woman seated at a table could be lost in her own thoughts if she didn’t appear to be too exhausted to entertain any.

End-of-the-day fatigue and disappointment are palpable in an image of a couple seated on the ground behind an empty bowl and beside their standing child. In “Two Figures, Sketch #40,” the strain of a relationship reverberates between a younger couple. They play a waiting game in which his stubbornness collides with her patience.

Nearly a quarter of Rivera’s images are portraits of women. None is beautiful by conventional standards, but all embody a sense of fresh-faced vitality. Rivera accentuates their un-idealized individuality by emphasizing idiosyncratic details, oddly proportioned features or character-defining expressions.

His two portraits of men fall short of such loving observation. Little more than caricatures, they exaggerate oddities so extremely that they become theatrical cliches. Likewise, the infants in three drawings lack any spark of life, revealing that Rivera’s forte is the tumult of the marketplace and the beauty of women it draws out of the home and into the street.

All of his drawings are animated by a sense of in-the-street immediacy. Like handmade snapshots, they not only capture slices of life, but also render it via the simplest of media, pencil on cheap paper.

Hardly archival, the pages of Rivera’s sketchbook have yellowed with age, a golden border warming their stark white centers. With an eye to posterity, and a nod to his own marketing savvy, Rivera has signed every drawing, filling his sketchbook with images significant both for what they depict and because he made them.

“The Brilliance Before the Brush” presents works from a pivotal time in Rivera’s development. After spending 14 years in Europe, studying Realism in Spain, Modernism in France and Renaissance frescoes in Italy, he returned to Mexico in 1921.

His first commission, completed in 1922, was criticized for being too indebted to Byzantine art to speak the language of the people. Mexico’s secretary of public education, Jose Vasconcelos, sent Rivera to Tehuantepec to “de-Europeanize” his style. Excited by the daily dramas he witnessed, he forged, in his little sketchbooks, an accessible style that would become the foundation and trademark of his murals.

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“DIEGO RIVERA: THE BRILLIANCE BEFORE THE BRUSH,” Museum of Latin American Art, 628 Alamitos Ave., Long Beach. Dates: Through April 14. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11:30 a.m.-7 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission: $5. Phone: (562) 437-1689.

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David Pagel is an art critic and a visiting scholar at Claremont Graduate University.