Diego Rivera. Gerry Souter

travelled with him to London’s museums, docks, and tourist spots and gradually became attracted to the lumbering young man with the big eyes and awkward charm. Unfortunately she had no allusions as to his art. Rivera’s technique was brilliant, but he chose the subject matter of a forgettable academician. He studied the work of one allegorical realist after another while around him swirled the modern art of Matisse and Cézanne, the flurry of manifestos coming from the Futurists’ overheated presses in Italy, the beginnings of work by two painters named Braque and Picasso cobbling together something called “Cubism”. All Diego wanted was wall-space in the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, a grossly conservative group show of slick academicians, tripping over each other to please rich patrons.

      When they returned to Paris, Angelina kept her reflections to herself, because both María Blanchard and Diego owed paintings to their sponsors to keep their stipends coming. They set to work with María keeping to her Fauve style while Diego did his best alternating his painting with study of Puvis de Chavannes’ murals. The Seine chose that time to spill over its banks with a historic flood. No one could cross the bridges to the Right Bank, telephones and electricity were down and many streets were flooded. The Hôtel de Ville, whose interior walls had been decorated by Puvis, was unreachable because of high water, leaving Diego only the Pantheon and Sorbonne for study.

      Being trapped by the flood gave him time to produce an etching, Mitin de Obreros en los Docks de Londres; he finished the House on the Bridge begun in Bruges and started a new painting, Le Pont de la Tournelle, in which he transposed the remembered London mist with its unique pinks and greys to the banks of the Seine. This painting shows workers unloading wine barrels from a barge onto the quay. To Rivera it represented a first look at what was emerging as his own style and it signalled the arrival of his empathy for the toil of the worker. He credited this new class sensitivity to his relationship with Angelina Beloff and the writings of Karl Marx.

      The Salon des Indépendants accepted six of his paintings: four Bruges landscapes, La Maison sur le Pont and Le Pont de la Tournelle. By 1910, this Salon had frittered away some of its avant-garde reputation, but acceptance would look good in the Mexico City local newspaper.

      Diego Rivera was a nobody in the high-pressure Parisian world of fine art, patronage and financial success – and he knew it. He needed credentials and recognition from more than the provincial governor of Veracruz. He also needed constant pats on the back to buy up his confidence. His image of himself as a Mexican bumpkin lost in the halls of culture européenne continued to haunt him.

      He had reached a point in his technique where he could paint in any manner he chose, paint like any artist he chose; any artist but himself. He had been abroad for four years and while he had grown considerably into his twenty-four years, he was still homesick.

      The centenary of the 1810 Mexican Revolution demanded a celebration, and Porfirio Díaz intended to impress his foreign investors and the wealthy criolos who kept him in office. Besides the inevitable speeches, bullfights, fireworks and marching bands, the arts were to be celebrated with orchestras, operas and displays of original Mexican art. Diego had received enthusiastic permission from Governor Dehesa to return home with his latest work. With his paintings accepted by the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français, he might even expect a warm welcome from his President. And there was the foreign press to consider.

      While he had earlier planned this return to Mexico without a thought, now he had Angelina and their developing relationship on the boil. They were deeply involved, but both understood the pressures and realities of their situation. They needed to keep their stipends alive without additional obligations, both financial and emotional. Neither knew if their autocratic governments might be toppled by internal or external strife at any time and their bursaries discontinued. Being the emotionally stronger of the two and the more pragmatic, Angelina suggested that they spend a year away from each other in their respective home cities. Diego could re-establish himself as the hometown artist who “made good” in Europe, while she explained him to her Russian brothers.

      After endearing pledges of love and loyalty she boarded a train heading north, while Diego’s railway carriage rolled down the tracks towards Brittany and the sea. He needed some painting and solitude before the ocean voyage bore the conquering hero home, thankfully carrying his shield and not on it.

      36. Diego Rivera, Bathers at Tehuantepec, 1925.

      Red chalk and pastel, 64.5 × 50 cm.

      Vicky and Marcos Micha Collection, Mexico City.

      ¡ Vuelva a México! Homecoming

      In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Erasmus (1466–1536)

      37. Diego Rivera, Head of “Hope” (study for the mural of the Anfiteatro Bolívar), 1923.

      Red chalk and pastel on blue-grey paper, highlighted in white, 63 × 48.5 cm.

      Vicky and Marcos Micha Collection, Mexico City.

      Diego Rivera’s return to Mexico in 1910 began a year during which his cast-iron layers of denial began to rust. He spent the rest of his life living as the person created by his own damage control.

      On October 2nd, 1910, he came down the steamship gangplank at the port of Veracruz wearing a broad grin for his waiting father and his sister María. Under his arms were rolls of canvases, the fruits of his grand tour of Paris, Spain and Belgium. Alongside his family stood representatives of the Society of Mexican Painters and Sculptors and, with shutters clicking and notepads poised, members of the press edged forward. He represented not only his own success in the European salons, but also a triumph of the Porfiriota regime. Diego Rivera, the newspapers would proclaim, was the new poster child for the efforts of President Porfirio Díaz to bring European culture and values to Mexico.

      To further stamp the imprimatur of government approval on his exhibition, the president’s wife, Carmen (Carmelita) Romero Rubio de Díaz, handsome and regal at a youthful forty-five to her husband’s eighty plus years, would open Diego’s exhibition on November 20th. This was an unbelievable honour. The venue was to be his old school, the Academy at San Carlos. The prodigal had returned. Exhibition walls were cleared – for his immediate convenience – of paintings by a ragged coterie of young Mexican artists belonging to the Savia Moderna art movement which opposed shipping Mexico’s art talent to Europe. Gerardo Murillo, the shady “Dr Atl”, had created the exhibition to further his own nihilist agenda and as a further prod to the Díaz regime. The press and anyone with political ambitions had avoided the show.

      Diego managed to glimpse some of the work before it was removed, then was introduced to a student exhibitor who seemed to simmer with an indefinable zeal. José Clemente Orozco shook Rivera’s hand and then a younger student stepped forward. Diego told Angelina in a letter that the paintings of David Alfaro Siqueiros showed obvious talent. At the academy, Diego had unloaded two etchings, eight drawings and thirty-five oil paintings, plus the paintings he had retrieved on loan from his patron, Don Dehesa, at Jalapa, the capital of Veracruz. There was much work to do re-stretching and re-framing all the work from Europe, which bore titles such as The Valley of Ambles, The Quiet Hour, Reflections and The Breton Girl, painted in the style of the Flemish Masters in Brittany before his departure for Mexico. His show created a virtual history of nineteenth-century art from El Greco to Puvis de Chavanne. Not represented were works done in the manner of Cézanne, Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Pisarro, Seurat, or the experiments of Braque and Picasso. The Flemish Masters were there as were the gauzy ephemera and allegorical subtexts of the salon academicians that had gained him recognition in the dusty exhibition halls of Paris. To the Mexican élite, whispering in French and sipping from demitasses, the exhibit’s result was an affirmation that their backward nation was closing in on everything that was excellent on the European continent.

      Jean Charlot (1897–1979) wrote of this period later. He had