Diego Draws

Publicity-wise Diego Rivera, whose varied tastes have led him to paint Lenin in a Rockefeller Center mural and to advocate cannibalism, last week chalked up a new achievement. He took a pot shot at a Mexico City bus driver--something many a Mexican has always wanted to do.

For a time, the truth was hard to come by. The aggrieved bus driver said that, when he failed to pull his bus out of the way of Rivera's car, the famed muralist had pumped bullets at him from a .45 semiautomatic. "Nonsense," cried Artist David Siqueiros. At the moment Rivera was supposed to have been squeezing the trigger, he was actually in Jose Clemente Orozco's apartment heaving charges of artistic ineptitude at his host and Siqueiros himself.

At week's end, Rivera ungraciously exposed Siqueiros' attempt to supply him with an alibi. In a letter to El Popular Diego admitted that he had indeed shot at the bus driver--but with a blank cartridge. Denouncing efforts to picture him as a lover of the proletariat who went around shooting proletarians, Rivera said that he had shot in self-defense after the bus driver had tried to run him down. He had been coming home peacefully in his station wagon, he said, when he found the Calle Centenario blocked by a bus. There were excited words, spiced with the best Spanish profanity, then action. But, said Diego solemnly: "I insist on affirming that the incident holds no greater importance than those common ordinary things we see daily on the streets of Mexico arising out of difficulties of transit."

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