Diego Rivera. Gerry Souter

Gauguin, Vahine no te tiare (Woman with a Flower), 1891.

      Oil on canvas, 70 × 46 cm.

      Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

      After sticking it out for two years, Chicharro, Ramón Valle-Inclan and Rivera, apparently flush with winnings gathered from a Spanish casino, took a train to Paris, chipped in for a horse cab to the Place Saint-Michel and found rooms at number 31, the Hotel de Suez on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. This hotel near the Latin Quarter was crammed with penniless American and Spanish art students living off meagre stipends from various sources. No sooner had Diego put down his bags than he was out the door, down the hill and across the Seine heading for the Louvre.

      The Paris art scene must have overwhelmed him. In the two months he spent in the city, very little time was wasted as he got out his paints and brushes, joining other Paris-struck painters on the banks of the Seine. He wandered through the galleries peering at the works of Pissarro, Monet, Daumier and Courbet. Gallery and museum walls glowed with colour and ways of seeing and techniques so foreign to his well-ordered provincial realism. He must have been desperate to try and locate a path to a style he could call his own. One painter stood out who had decorated the walls of the amphitheatre or “hemicycle” in the Sorbonne across rue St Jacques from a number of panels in the rotunda of the imposing Pantheon – formerly the church of St Genevieve – residing behind its portico of Corinthian columns. Both buildings were a five-minute walk from the Hotel de Suez.

      Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French artist who was born in Lyon in 1824 and died in Paris in 1898. He studied with Eugène Delacroix and rose to prominence in the world of the Paris Salon. He embraced the allegorical tradition of representing abstract ideas of honour, triumph of the spirit, despair and sacrifice with classical figures arrayed on dreamscapes that symbolised the subtext of their actions. He accomplished his painting on large canvas surfaces that were fixed to the walls. His work appealed to both the post-Impressionists and the Symbolists as he simplified forms and used non-naturalistic colours to evoke moods.

      This first taste of public mural painting by a contemporary artist also drew Diego into the influence of the Symbolists – whose work at a later time might be called “psychedelic realism” and eventually metamorphosed into Surrealism. Puvis de Chavannes, though the radical post-Impressionists praised him, was elected by acclamation to the presidency of the National Society of French Artists and was made a Commander of the Légion d’honneur.

      Rivera claimed that the work – and respect – of Puvis so inspired him, that he drew another expatriate Mexican artist, Ángel Zárraga, and the artist who had beaten him to the Mexican government bursary, Roberto Montenegro, into a scheme to create murals for the Palacio de Bellas Artes under construction in Mexico City.

      However, his feverish absorption of French art had to be shelved for much of June as he ended up on his back, sick with chronic hepatitis, a malady that would return again throughout his life. The illness did give him time to plan a trip to Brussels. Enrique Friedmann, a Mexican-German painter, accompanied him.

      As summer settled over Europe, Rivera and Friedmann travelled from the Brussels museums of Flemish masters to the small city of Bruges, thought by many to be the home of Symbolism. While there, he began the painting House on the Bridge, one of many paintings he completed in Bruges, rising at dawn and painting until the light was gone. His cumulative impression of the city appeared to be that of stillness and death – a complete absence of people, landscapes of still waters and uninhabited structures. A steam barge floats without its crew. La Maison sur le Pont carries no traffic. A Night Scene sketch is silent.

      This introspection mirrors his early Mexican landscapes and picks up his feelings of being the observer, the outsider looking in, seeing through his gift of artistic translation. He confided later how he felt as a Mexican among Europeans, experiencing “…my Mexican-American inferiority complex, my awe before historic Europe and its culture.”[9]

      While living on the cheap, Rivera and Friedmann wandered into a Bruges café to grab a bite before catching some sleep in the railway station waiting room as though they were waiting for the next train. A sign outside the café offered “Rooms for Travellers”. Hoping for a good deal they entered and took a table, a brioche and two coffees. Rivera was eating when he looked up and discovered María Blanchard, his girlfriend from Spain, grinning at him from the café’s doorway. He stood and held his arms wide. Next to her stood a “…slender blonde young Russian painter…”[10] named Angelina Beloff.

      Angelina was seven years older than Diego and her life paralleled his on many levels. Her father, Michael, had given up his occupation as a lawyer to work for the government in order to put food on the table at their home in St Petersburg. Her devoted mother, Catherine, was a Finnish Swede who wanted Angelina to become a doctor, but when Angelina wanted to switch to art school, Catherine gave her support. Angelina’s art studies were rigorously academic, and when her parents died suddenly she received a small pension from the Russian government. Using that money, she moved to Paris and took up studies with the more experimental and demanding Henri Matisse. His bold ideas seemed too outré and she fled to the more conservative Academia Vitti and the classes of a Spanish academician named Anglada Camarasa. He carved out his work with palette knife and hog bristle brush until the impasto resembled a bas relief. Angelina mused “…he must have sold his paintings by the pound…”[11] to his wealthy clientele.

      It was at Camarasa’s class that she had met María Blanchard. They became friends and journeyed together to Bruges. Arriving on a cold wet day, they found the café with “Rooms for Travellers.”

      The four young artists hooked up and stayed together, painting and sampling what pleasures their meagre budgets could afford in the Belgian countryside. The foursome was truly international. Diego spoke Spanish, some French and no Russian, María spoke better French and Spanish, Angelina spoke Russian and French but no Spanish, and Friedmann spoke German, Spanish and French. They all spoke a smattering of English.

      A Polish art student from Paris joined their group and the five painters busied themselves, with Diego not stopping even when the sun went down. Angelina declined to join Diego and María working in the dusk on a house that would become Diego’s Beguine Convent in Bruges or Twilight in Bruges. When María returned to their rooms above the café she was obviously upset; Diego had asked her to be a go-between and convey his love to Angelina who spoke no Spanish. Though Diego and María were “just friends” at this point and not “lovers”, the request put a chill into the friendship between the two girls that he could not understand.

      On an apparent whim, the group took a “small freighter” to London and visited the Hogarths and Turners in that city’s museums. The cosmopolitan group enjoyed an unproductive, carefree existence as Diego gradually fell even more in love with Angelina. He also encountered a city larger than he had ever experienced. Along with the labyrinth of streets and buildings came the attendant urban poverty that had driven Karl Marx to pen the Communist Manifesto in 1848 with Friedrich Engels. This crushing poverty of the London slums – much worse than the poverty of the poor in Mexico City – deeply affected the young painter, but he did not translate any of it, save for a few sketches of a workers’ strike, to his art.

      33. Diego Rivera, Arum Vendor, 1924.

      Pencil on paper (study for lacquer project), diameter: 50 cm.

      Juan Coronel Rivera Collection, Mexico City.

      34. Diego Rivera, Child with a “Taco”, 1932.

      Lithograph, 42 × 30.3 cm.

      Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City.

      35. Diego Rivera, The Rural Teacher, 1932.

      Lithograph, 31.8 × 41.7 cm.

      Museo

9

Diego Rivera, op. cit., quoted by Patrick Marnham, Dreaming With His Eyes Open – A Life of Diego Rivera, p.61

10

Diego Rivera, op. cit., p.34

11

Angelina Beloff, Memorias