Mexico's Rivera

In Mexico it is wise to carry a pistol. Most Mexicans do it. In Mexico City there is a man who stands, peaceably enough, on a scaffold and paints pictures of his countrymen on walls and ceilings. Sometimes even he carries a pistol, a very large pistol with a commensurate cartridge belt. But this pistol is not a weapon. It is an artist's symbol.

Artist Diego Rivera believes in revolution, so he dresses the part. He is, however, no ferocious cinema "greaser." He is genial, cultured, industrious. His repute grew, his geniality increased, when last week he was awarded the annual Fine Arts Medal of the American Institute of Architects.* Artist Rivera's concept of revolution has nothing to do with either Pope or bombshells. It might be described as a patient communism, and it is reflected in his art. For him, art is a proletariat function, growing out of the hot little huts of peons, expressing their lives. "If I try to speak of my painting," he wrote last winter in Creative Art, "I do not know how to do it unless I speak of the life of these comrades of mine." His subjects are in the panorama of Mexican modes and mores. His frescoes are devoted to the city and country laborer, miner, country school teacher, market place, burial, festival, harvest, battle. Satirically bent, he has depicted a dinner table group including John Davison Rockefeller, John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford. Ticker tape winds among the wine glasses. There is a radio loud speaker, a steel safe door, a lamp shaped like the Statue of Liberty, an artificial female in a backless gown. But satire is a rarity with Artist Rivera. Most of his work is a sympathetic tale told with figures that have the bare graphic form of Giotto and the incandescent coloring of the South. Now in his 40's, he was born in a mining town of Guanajuato. His middle-class parents gave him Spanish and Aztec blood. It is only the Aztec heritage that he prizes in himself and in his country. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Mexico, studying art at the Mexican National Academy where his early work showed the soft imitative convention. Like most young artists he looked first to the Old World. He lived a dozen years in Paris, married a Russian. His restless, probing intellect carried him into Cubism, for a while, but he traveled to Italy and saw the Primitives, compared their simple legends with the confusion of the Paris theorists.

He returned to Mexico shortly after the Obregon government came into power. The new government, socialist-labor, saw the virtue of popular art and commissioned native artists to decorate government buildings in a way that peons could understand. Native talent was abundant. After six years, Diego Rivera has emerged as the leader of many.

Thousands have seen him at work. He cultivates no studio privacy. Like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, he mounts his scaffold and paints, as the fresco process demands, directly on the wall. A huge man, he sometimes works 16 hours without ceasing. Once, overcome from exhaustion, he toppled, split his head. Often during his long labors, his second wife, a vivid intelligent Mexican, brings him milk and bananas. If a lady visitor from across the Rio Grande is standing below, Artist Rivera is apt to toss her a half banana, especially if she is handsome. He delights in inviting lady lionizers to help him work.

Artist Rivera uses a collection of jars and tin cans filled with paint for a palette. He mixes his colors on a tin plate. Once when he had painted himself in a fresco he found an obscene word scratched across the figure. "Ah," he said, "somebody has signed his name."

He has refused lavish offers from the Russian government for paintings in Moscow. He has been known to alter his work according to the suggestions of a peasant onlooker. Conversation is his hobby. He will talk to anyone about anything, pouring out opinions, telling amazing yarns about real and dubious persons. If his truth is questioned he says succinctly, "I was there." A short while ago, when he was put on a vegetable diet, he trained his solemn cat to eat lettuce. His religion is completely unorthodox, a private affair. He believes in People, and their ghosts.

Persistent Fisher

President Lawrence P. Fisher of Cadillac Motor Co. of Detroit was vexed when he -- and the public -- learned that a graceful portrait of the Duchess-Countess of Sutherland, for which he paid $200,000, was not by fashionable Painter George Romney (1734-1802), but by someone else, a copyist. No easy man to thwart, either in the art of making motor cars or the business of collecting art, Mr. Fisher recovered his money and instructed Art Dealer Howard Young of Manhattan to get the real thing, to buy the Romney original from the present Duke of Sutherland. This Dealer Young was able, last week, to do. Persistent Mr. Fisher paid a sum estimated at $350,000.

*Last week the Institute also gave attention to Washington city planning (see p. 9).