Among the silliest public notices that I have ever read is at the exit to the present exhibition of Diego Rivera murals at the Museum of Modern Art. It says: “Occupancy by more than 798 persons is dangerous and unlawful.”1
This notice raised many interesting questions. At whom was it directed? At the administrators of MOMA? In which case, why the need for public display? The administrators, however, did not appear to have been making strenuous efforts to estimate, let alone keep count of, the numbers of “occupants,” so perhaps it was the responsibility of the visitors themselves to ensure that they numbered no more than 798. If this was so, which among them in excess of 798, if any, were the guilty parties, the culpable breakers of the law? The first in, or the last out? Or was the responsibility collective?
By what chain of Gogolian absurdity could such a notice have been displayed, claiming that 798 persons were safe in the gallery but 799 were not? Did no one responsible protest against such ludicrously bogus exactitude? Or are we now so accustomed to obeying orders that the divorce between what we do and what we think and believe is complete?
A world without absurdity would, I suppose, be a rather dull one; and just as, in the opinion of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim, society needs its criminals to promote moral solidarity among the law-abiding, so perhaps we need absurdity to help us draw the lines of sense. But exactly how much absurdity do we need in order to be able to discern sense?
The Diego Rivera exhibition marks the eightieth anniversary of his first show at MOMA in 1930 and 1931.
The Diego Rivera exhibition marks the eightieth anniversary of his first show at MOMA in 1930 and 1931. He was only the second living artist to be favored by the Museum with a monographic exhibition (the first being Matisse), and, as he was then known mainly as a muralist, the Museum commissioned him to produce several portable murals on steel frames for the occasion. He painted eight: four of them more or less are reproductions of the historico-political murals he had already painted in Mexican locations, one that depicted the suppression of a popular protest in contemporary Mexico, and three that reflected his response to New York. After the exhibition the murals were dispersed, except for Agrarian Leader Zapata, which was purchased by the Museum. These murals are reunited for the first time in eighty years with the exception of one, of which only the preliminary sketches are on display because the curators do not know the whereabouts of the mural itself.
When I visited, there were two groups of schoolchildren, about ten years old, who sat cross-legged on the floor in front of two of the murals, Agrarian Leader Zapata and Liberation of the Peon. One group of children was entirely black, the other black and Hispanic; they were both lively and beautifully behaved. Their teachers, white women in their late thirties, were intelligent, affectionate, patient, and authoritative—just the kind of teachers I wish I had had at these children’s age. The children were so deeply absorbed both in the pictures themselves, and in what the teachers said and asked, that they did not notice me.
The first words of a teacher that I overheard startled me. The children were sitting in front of Agrarian Leader Zapata. “This picture,” she said, “is not about violence. It is about justice.”
The picture shows Zapata holding the bit of a white horse in his left hand, with a machete hanging down from his right. The curve of the machete is faintly stained with blood; underneath the legs of the horse lies a dead bearded man in a brown costume, his sword lain out along his outstretched arm. Zapata has killed the man.
The teacher was right that the picture was not about violence, if she meant a salacious wallowing in gore for its own sake. The picture is not gory; if anything, it is rather reticent about the mechanism of death, the dead man having no injury about him. Indeed, his death is sanitized, and for an obvious reason, confirmed by the recent killing of Colonel Gaddafi: the modern sensibility is such that the unvarnished depiction of a violent death is apt to rouse sympathy for the killed, irrespective of his moral qualities. And this, I think, is right. One cannot say that Colonel Gaddafi’s death was unjust, in that he had done nothing to deserve it—indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a punishment so horrible that he would not have merited it. But we are nonetheless repelled by it, not because of an injustice done, but in the name of humanity and civilization. Justice has its claims, but they are not absolute.
The teacher was not right, however, that the picture was about justice.
The teacher was not right, however, that the picture was about justice. It is unlikely that the teacher would have stood in front of a picture of an execution—a hanging, say, after a trial—and have said, in a neutral and factual tone, “This picture is not about violence. It is about justice.” Rivera’s picture is neither about violence nor about justice: it is about justice supposedly brought about by political violence. And the teacher clearly implied that whatever had transpired—she did not deny that the man underneath the horse was dead—the cause of justice had been served, for she continued, “Who is the man under the horse?” The children hummed and hawed a bit, and one offered that he was a soldier. “He is a landowner,” said the teacher. “The peasants have killed him to get justice, to get their land back.”
This version of Mexican history was schematic, to say the least, but history taught to ten year olds must, out of necessity, be schematic. The point about this particular schema is that it was clearly preparatory for a life of resentment, in which history serves as the retrospective projection of current discontents, social and personal, and the world is divided into the one percent and the rest. There was no hint from the teacher that the Mexican Revolution and Civil War caused the deaths of a million people, not all of whom could have been landowners (a good arithmetical question would be, “How many people would be killed today in the United States if there were a revolution as bloody as that in Mexico in 1910?”); nor that Zapata himself was not a peasant, and in fact had not done badly under the ancien régime; nor that the painter, Diego Rivera, had sat out the revolution in the ateliers of Europe, having traveled there on a pre-revolutionary Mexican government bursary, meaning that his espousal of revolutionary heroism was both a salve to his guilty conscience and a reflection of his utopian longings that led him to lend his powerful support to a dictatorship far worse than that of Porfirio Diaz.
One could hardly expect a teacher to convey such complexity to ten year olds—it would be unreasonable to expect her to do so. But then why had she selected this particular exhibition for the little ones to see (I assume that they were not taken to every exhibition)? I suspected, though I could not prove, that it was not so much for an aesthetic education, as an ideological one, a way of inculcating a worldview. Give us a child for the first seven years, etc., etc.
The teacher with the children sitting down in front of the Liberation of the Peon also asked a question: “Is the painter on the side of the white conquistadors or the Indians?” The children had no difficulty guessing the right answer, and called it out enthusiastically.
The painting shows the body of a dead naked woman, Indian by the tint of her skin, scored all over with the bloody welts of a whip, being tenderly covered with a red blanket by bandoliered peasant rebels, a village in the far background in flames.
No one can deny the terrible injustices of Mexican history, or that there was a very large racial element to them. But the view of a European (“white conquistador”) irruption into an unspoilt paradise, where good, unselfish Indians lived, would not be quite accurate either: the conquistadors necessarily took advantage of Indian alliances to defeat the Aztecs, who were by no means universally loved in Mesoamerica. The complexity is not for ten year olds to grasp, of course, but once again, one sensed that the children were being primed for a life of four-legs-good, two-legs-bad resentment. As Wesley once allegedly said of the beating of children, it is never too early to begin God’s glorious work.
The pictures of Diego Rivera present us with a tension between two categories, the aesthetic and the ideological.
The pictures of Diego Rivera present us with a tension between two categories, the aesthetic and the ideological. From the aesthetic point of view he was a powerful and original artist—original here in the good sense of creating something both new and worthwhile. His ideology, however, was crude and schematic, though he was not without real feeling for the suffering of the ordinary people of Mexico, suffering that he conveys with sufficient truth in his art that he makes us feel it. (It is important not to let anti-schematizing ideology become a schematizing ideology in itself.) It was his obvious artistic merits, after all, that made him the cynosure of rich collectors.
One of the most striking things about this exhibition, for me at any rate, was the gross inferiority of the pictures with a New York subject to those with a Mexican subject. This is not surprising, perhaps, because Rivera had not long been in New York when he painted them, but they do not even have the freshness of the shock of the new that is evident in, say, the first colonial pictures of the fauna of Australia.
His Mexican pictures, illustrative of an ideological standpoint as they are, are peopled by individuals with strong characters and personal existences, good or bad; by contrast, there is a striking absence of individual visage from his New York pictures. The figures in them do not even rise to the stature of caricature, and are technically of an astonishing incompetence in one so gifted; only the skyscrapers are painted with passion, as if his imagination had digested them, as it were, so that he was able to make artistic use of them. But the people of New York meant nothing to him, qua people.
Of course, it might be said that this was precisely Rivera’s point: that the conditions of life under modern capitalism (especially in times of depression) were dehumanizing, that everyone under them became a number, a cog or a function in a vast, impersonal, faceless industrial machine.
It is no detraction from Rivera’s status as a great artist that his pictures of New York lack the vigor of his Mexican ones.
Was this so, “objectively” speaking? I suspect that the poverty of Rivera’s New York pictures was a consequence of two things. The first is a lack: a lack of time, a lack of real interest in, and a lack of sympathy for the life of New York. The second, an ideological antagonism, combined no doubt with nationalist sentiment (he despised Porfirio Diaz, and would have sent other people to their deaths to fight him, but he would surely have approval of Porfirio’s famous exclamation, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near the United States!”).
It is no detraction from Rivera’s status as a great artist that his pictures of New York lack the vigor of his Mexican ones. Rivera spent time in Moscow, too, in 1927–28, and his sketchbook of his time there is of very limited artistic value, not much above that of a gifted amateur. Despite his ideological commitment to the Red Flag (visible everywhere in his sketches, ad nauseam in fact), one has no feeling of inner life in his Moscow pieces. Everything is observed from the exterior, and an exterior through an ideological lens at that.
No, it was Mexico that inspired him, a mexicanidad that was a hundred times deeper than any ideology, and that, together with immense talent, allowed him to create art that was particular in its universality, and universal in its particularity. This exhibition is decidedly not for children.
