Square-foot Show

San Franciscans felt superior. They had not only seen his frescoes, they owned two important examples, in the California School of Fine Arts, in the San Francisco Stock Exchange. New Yorkers were eagerly awaiting the first Eastern showing of frescoes by Diego Rivera, the only man other than Henri Matisse ever to be given a one man show by the Museum of Modern Art.

Diego Rivera is only an excerpt of his name. His Mexican parents had him baptized Diego Maria Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez de Valpuesta. Nobody ever called him anything but Diego Rivera, though many critics call him the greatest mural painter in the western hemisphere. If he is not the greatest, he is certainly the largest. His bulkiest rival. Joseph Urban, tips the scales at 230 Ib. Mural Painter Rivera displaced 250 Ib. the last time he was weighed; friends claim that he has expanded greatly since then.

Fresco painting is an untransportable art. Frescoes are part of a wall. They are painted on wet plaster with water color paints. So that they could be moved into the gallery at all, these latest Rivera murals were constructed in steel frames. Even so they had to be set up. plastered and painted in the Heckscher Building itself. Rivera arrived in New York a month ago with his faithful plasterer Ramon Alva, his pretty little Mexican wife, the former Frieda Kahlo, and has been painting his exhibition ten hours a day. only stopping to drink great quantities of milk.

Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato just 45 years ago. At the age of eight, Diego Rivera attracted considerable attention by cutting out an army of 5,000 paper soldiers. Misinterpreting this, his parents sent him to a military academy. In 1910 he was in Paris assisting, with Picasso and Braque, at the accouchement of cubism. Back in Mexico City he was the leading figure in a group of quasi-Communist artists who have become the leaders in the Mexican renaissance: Jose Clemente Orozco, Jean Chariot. Carlos Merida, Pachecho. They worked for a flat rate of $4 (eight pesos) a day and hired a plump little boy to bring them water and wash their brushes. The water boy was Miguel Covarrubias. now famed smartchart caricaturist.

Mural Painter Rivera no longer works for $4 a day, but he holds to most of his old ideas. He believes that there is no such thing as inspiration, that a painter is a workman like any other, that he should work so many hours a day. contract for so many square feet of art a week. Coming to New York last month he explained all this, said that he had no idea what he was going to paint for his exhibition but knew that it would be as fine as anything he had done and added that he had no desire for privacy. Defendants of artistic temperament gloated over the fact that what Contract Painter Rivera has been producing for New York are rearrangements of some of his old Mexico City murals (with a New York street scene still to be painted). Gaping crowds slowed up his work so that the opening of the show has had to be postponed twice.

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