Scratched Face

Diego Rivera's new mural in a Mexico City hotel had stirred up a tequila tempest: the Archbishop refused to bless the hotel because the mural in the dining room contained the words "God does not exist" (TIME, June 14). Last week the ideological brew boiled over, and some of it spilled on the painting.

Zealous students had tried to get rid of the offending words, but Rivera had simply painted them back in. Two days later some other zealot sneaked to the Del Prado Hotel, scraped out the words once more, and added three long scratches to Rivera's portrait of himself as a boy. At that, the government stepped in, boarded up the dining room with three thicknesses of heavy lumber, and assigned it a 24-hour police guard.

Rivera's fiery colleague, Muralist David Siqueiros, offered a more subtle solution. Hire a Catholic painter, he suggested, to paint a mural alongside Rivera's, with the words "God is omniscient." Nobody in Siqueiros' atheistic, revolutionary crowd would touch it, he promised. The offer went untaken.

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