Painters' Politics

Mexico City boasts a world-famed triumvirate of painters: doe-eyed Diego Rivera, somber Jose Clemente Orozco, fiery David Alfaro Sequeiros. To Mexican fellow artists the triumvirate is a trust, often regarded with murderous jealousy. But the public regards the triumvirate, whose members have sometimes quarreled fiercely, as an entertaining three-ring circus.

Triumvir Rivera recently organized a give-the-kids-a-chance exhibit of young painters, in protest against the Government's Department of Fine Arts, which Rivera considers stifling. Triumvir Sequeiros proclaimed Rivera's show unnecessary and based on an idea that was "old and a failure." Sixty-one-year-old Triumvir Orozco, invited to exhibit with the youngsters, flatly refused. The atmosphere burned with reports, discussions, tempestades. Painter Maria Izquierdo pronounced all three leaders publicity hounds.

Mexico City's conservative newspaper Excelsior ran a daily polemic against the Big Three, topped off by an anonymous psychiatrist who diagnosed Rivera and Sequeiros, in all the polysyllabic gobbledygook of psychiatric lingo, as absolutely nuts. Rivera, he declared, was a paranoiac operating on a 120-150 day cycle between publicity-seeking outbursts. He labeled Sequeiros as a similarly pathological disturber of the peace, and recommended as a cure that both be removed from circulation.

Last week Rivera defended himself just as loudly, but in a different key. The newspaper attack on him, he said, was the result of his denouncing some crooked art galleries that are big newspaper advertisers. According to him, the Mexican art market abounds in skulduggery (one antique dealer last year exhibited 200 European paintings, of which only five were of value and authenticity). Try to expose this scandal, said he, and what do you get? A shellacking from the public prints. Sequeiros counterattacked from a different quarter. He reputedly joined Rivera and Orozco in consultation with a local soothsayer, who promised to unmask all their enemies for a modest 3,000 pesos ($590). At week's end, the deal was still in the making.

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