Trotsky (10 page)

Rivera’s artistic breakthrough—the moment he discovered his own style—came in 1923, when he began to paint frescoes at the Ministry of Education building, a recently constructed stone and cement edifice two city blocks long and one block wide done in the style of Spanish convent architecture. In its great inner courtyard, lined with arches on all of its three floors, Rivera painted scenes of Mexico’s land and people, labor and festivals. The result was 235 individual fresco panels covering an area of 15,000 square feet. The project would take five years to complete, but already in 1923 the frescoes were a sensation and brought Rivera and the Mexican art movement international renown.

Diego Rivera, Mexico, 1920s.

Bertram D. Wolfe Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Planted on the scaffold from dawn to dark, Rivera drew crowds of onlookers. One who had the opportunity to join him up there was Bertram Wolfe, the Brooklyn-born American Communist who became Rivera’s comrade, friend, and biographer. Wolfe observed “a bulky, genial, slow-moving, frog-faced man, in weather-worn overalls, huge Stetson hat, cartridge belt, large pistol, vast paint-and-plaster-stained shoes.” The frog image recurs. “Frog-toad” was one of Frida’s affectionate nicknames for her husband. Wolfe says Diego’s eyes “bulged like those of a frog or a housefly, as if made to see a whole crowd, a vast panorama, or a wide mural.” In fact, though, they probably bulged as a result of a thyroid condition, which ailed him in later years.

Mexico’s painters took the lead among the radical intellectuals who wanted to continue the revolutionary struggle for economic justice, freedom, and democracy, including the liberation of art. In 1922 they formed a union: the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, as it came to be called. This short-lived and ineffectual body issued a combative founding manifesto, written by Siqueiros, declaring the sympathy of the unionized artists for the oppressed masses and repudiating “so-called easel art and all such art which springs from ultra-intellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic. We hail the monumental expression of art because such art is public property.” Rivera, Siqueiros, and Xavier Guerrero were elected to the syndicate’s executive committee and were coeditors of its newspaper,
El Machete,
whose name reflects the essentially agrarian outlook of Mexico’s revolutionaries.

It was at this same time that Rivera joined the Mexican Communist Party, which had been formed by aspiring politicians in 1917 under the influence of events in Russia, but which had since evolved into a party of radical painters with only a few dozen members. Inevitably, Rivera was one of its leading figures. Wolfe, whose radicalism had caused him to flee the United States for Mexico in order to avoid arrest, also joined the party at this time. It did not take him long to figure out that while Rivera was a great painter, in politics he would never be more than “an amateur and a passionate dilettante,” and an impulsive one at that. Diego’s ideology, Wolfe discovered, was “an undigested mixture of Spanish anarchism, Russian terrorism, Soviet Marxism-Leninism, Mexican agrarianism—the redemption of the poor peasant and the Indian.” Nor was the painter sufficiently read in the Marxist classics to pass muster as a credible communist: “All that Diego ever knew of Marx’s writings or of Lenin’s, as I had ample occasion to verify, was a little handful of commonplace slogans which had attained wide currency.”

Rivera made one extended visit to Soviet Russia, beginning in November 1927. He accepted an invitation to attend the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution. In Red Square on November 7, Rivera sat on the reviewing stand alongside Lenin’s mausoleum beneath the Kremlin wall, observing the daylong passing parade of Red Army soldiers, factory workers, Communist youth, and countless others through the square. Never a mere onlooker, Rivera had by day’s
end produced forty-five watercolor sketches and filled dozens of small notebook pages with penciled notes and sketches—raw materials for the Russian murals he hoped to paint.

Away from Red Square and undetected by Rivera’s panoramic vision, Trotsky and the Left Opposition attempted to stage their own anniversary demonstrations, which were broken up by the GPU. Stalin’s thugs stoned Trotsky’s automobile as it traveled along a Moscow street, shattering its windows as he ducked down in the backseat. That morning, Stalin had sat down in the Kremlin with Sergei Eisenstein to supervise the editing of his new feature film,
October,
with the result that Lenin’s role was considerably reduced, while Trotsky was cut out altogether.

Rivera remained in Moscow for five months. Invited to address public audiences about his art, he used these occasions to encourage Soviet artists to draw inspiration from Russian folk art. “Look at your icon painters,” he exhorted them. In his own country such advice would have seemed superfluous; in the birthplace of socialism it had the ring of heresy. Voices from the audience objected that he was glorifying icons and churches and endorsing backward peasant handicraft while minimizing the importance of industry and of economic planning.

Nor was Rivera’s artistic vision warmly endorsed by the Soviet establishment. The People’s Commissar of Enlightenment had commissioned him to paint a fresco in Moscow’s Red Army Club, but the enterprise was undermined by shortages of materials and assistants and by constant delays. He was continually told that something had to be put off until tomorrow—“Zavtra budet”—a Russian variation of the Mexican
mañana,
but in Moscow the sabotage felt deliberate. Perhaps his mood was darkened by his one meeting with Stalin, who sat for the painter. “Judging from the sketch he did,” says Wolfe, “he does not seem to have been impressed by his subject.” Disillusioned, he stayed long enough to sketch the May Day parade through Red Square, then quietly left the country.

Upon his return to Mexico, Rivera found himself increasingly under fire from fellow Communists and artists, who accused him of political fraud. These attacks intensified as he began to paint what would become one of his most celebrated murals,
The History of Mexico,
in the
National Palace, the seat of the government. This new commission was cited by the Mexican Communist Party as fresh evidence that Rivera was a “millionaire artist for the establishment,” a charge that had dogged him throughout the twenties. He had also been criticized by fellow Communists and artists as a “painter for millionaires” because of his private commissions. What really mattered in 1929, however, was the Party line laid down in Moscow, where Stalin, having eliminated Trotsky and the Left Opposition, had turned his sights on Nikolai Bukharin and the right-wing Bolsheviks. The Kremlin now directed the member organizations of the Communist International to unmask the “Right Danger,” and in Mexico the Communists decided that Rivera fit the description and expelled him from the party. Appalled at the idea of being classified as a right-wing anything, Rivera declared himself instead to be a Trotskyist. He had little to back up this claim, but it hardly mattered. Rivera was now an ex-Communist.

These political machinations barely registered north of the Rio Grande, where Rivera’s reputation as a fashionably radical painter continued to rise. His acceptance of a mural commission in San Francisco inaugurated a three-year sojourn in the United States, the high point of which was a popular one-man show at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York City in December 1931: a retrospective of his drawings and oils, together with movable fresco panels he painted especially for the exhibit. Rivera’s exhibit was the second such event at the museum, Matisse being the other artist to have been so honored.

Rivera arrived in San Francisco in November 1930, just as the Great Depression set in. There he completed murals at the Stock Exchange Tower and the California School of Fine Arts—now the San Francisco Art Institute—in 1931. The following year he painted his
Detroit Industry
frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Arts with funds donated by Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company. These works added luster to Rivera’s reputation and they survive as part of his oeuvre. Not so his next project, the mural he was commissioned to paint in the lobby of the new RCA building in New York City’s Rockefeller Center in 1933.

The Rockefeller family asked Rivera to produce a work based on the uplifting theme “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and
High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.” His elaborate written proposal for the painting, which reads like an encomium to socialist revolution, leaves little doubt that he saw the Radio City mural as an opportunity to answer his critics on the left by demonstrating his unimpeachable Bolshevik credentials. The plan was approved by the family and would likely have been executed without incident had Rivera not departed from his design by replacing the anonymous face of a prominently placed worker-leader with that of Lenin. The discovery, before the mural was completed, of Lenin’s iconic countenance touched off a public controversy, prompting Nelson Rockefeller to request its removal, followed by the artist’s refusal, and then an order to suspend work. That was in May 1933. Nine months later, contrary to the reassurances of his patrons, Rivera’s unfinished mural was sandblasted into oblivion.

It was in the immediate aftermath of this Battle of Rockefeller Center that Trotsky first established contact with Rivera, in the form of a brief appreciative letter sent from Turkey, dated June 7, 1933. It is curious that this message fails to mention the standoff with the Rockefellers, which must have inspired it. Trotsky expressed his admiration for Rivera’s art, which he said he first came upon inadvertently in an American book during his exile in Central Asia in 1928. From the sound of it, he had chanced upon reproductions of the Education Ministry murals. “Your frescoes struck me with their combination of masculinity and gentleness, almost tenderness, their internal dynamic and tranquil equilibrium of form.” And such a “magnificent freshness in approach to man and animal!” This generous praise is followed by what would prove to be a telling admission: “I was infinitely far from the thought that the author of these works was a revolutionary, standing under the banner of Marx and Lenin. Only relatively recently did I discover that the master Diego Rivera and that other Diego-Rivera, the close friend of the Left Opposition, were one and the same person.” Rivera may have considered this a mixed review, but Trotsky was honored to have him as a comrade. “I am not losing the hope to visit America, see your works in the original, and talk to you in person.”

Rivera was paid in full for his unfinished Radio City fresco, and before leaving the United States he was determined to use his Rockefeller
earnings—“the money extorted from the workers by the Rockefeller exploiters,” as he called it—to paint “the revolution.” At the moment Trotsky’s letter arrived in New York, he was at work on the next of his epic historical murals,
Portrait of America,
in the New Workers’ School on West 14th Street in lower Manhattan. Here Trotsky makes his first appearances in Rivera’s art. In the fresco panel titled “World War,” Rivera included a passage on the Russian Revolution, represented by a winter scene on Red Square, where Trotsky, his right hand pressed to his forehead in a salute, his left hand clenched in a fist and raised above his head, reviews passing Red Army troops under the banner of the Third International, while behind him Lenin looks on approvingly. Another panel, “Proletarian Unity,” re-creates at its center the Lenin of the Radio City mural, here flanked by other revolutionary figures, including the hirsute Marx and Engels, a sinister Stalin lurking in the upper left corner, a frightfully cherubic Bukharin, and a rather harmless-looking Trotsky, with clenched fist raised above a soft-serve hairdo.

Rivera then exhausted his Rockefeller funds at the headquarters of the American Trotskyists, where he painted two minor fresco panels on the Russian Revolution and the Fourth International, which Trotsky had recently begun to proclaim.

After his return to Mexico at the end of 1933, Rivera was able to re-create the Rockefeller Center mural in Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts. In this second version, the objectionable Lenin returns, now accompanied by Marx and by Trotsky, who helps hold up a banner inscribed with the slogan, Workers of the World/Unite in the IVth International! Like nearly all of Rivera’s depictions of communism’s high priests, prophets, and contenders, these effigies are unconvincing, “lifeless faces, clichés not men,” to quote Wolfe, who observed generally that “Diego’s art was poorly served by his attempts at propaganda.” Aesthetically, his smokestack-and-tractor utopias cannot compete with his idealized narratives of Mexico’s past and present. He was a populist and nationalist. Zapata, not Lenin, was his revolutionary ideologist and hero. His true subject was the Mexican land and people. Labor, in Rivera’s art, is not an object of exploitation, as orthodox Marxism instructed, but a “rhythmic dance,” in Wolfe’s phrase. Industry is not the scene of class struggle, but of intricately beautiful machines, affectionately and,
in the Detroit murals, erotically rendered. It is hardly surprising that Trotsky’s first impression put him “infinitely far from the thought” that the painter was a Marxist revolutionary.