Diego's Latest

Diego Rivera, the Western Hemisphere's greatest living painter, is working on a mural that will be half under water. Last week, at 64, the frog-shaped Master was completing his work in a Mexico City tank that looks like an empty swimming pool; actually, it is the distribution chamber of a new water-supply system for Mexico City.

One surprising thing about the mural, for Rivera, is its consistent planning; he began it by picturing a drop of water in the center of the floor, showed underwater forms of life evolving out and up from the center. Along the walls are people and symbols of the civilizations they have created in Mexico. The ceiling, when done, will represent the sky, heavy with rain.

Rubber & Reflections. When the mural is half submerged, the protoplasmic life painted on the floor will waver greenly and the figures along the walls will stand reflected upside down in the pool. To protect his work from the water, Rivera has mixed a plastic called polystyrene with his fresco pigments, plans to varnish the whole with transparent rubber.

He made no tight, preparatory sketches, believing that murals should be designed on the spot. "If you work in a small scale," Diego explains in his slow, benign way, "your amplifications are never in scale or in real relation to the light of the building or the possibilities of looking at the painting."

The west wall, through which the water will enter the tank, shows two huge hands cupping the inflow, and workmen and engineers presenting the water to the people in construction helmets. The south wall is dominated by a huge, bewildered-looking Negro. Near him stand a dried-up old woman--Rivera's idea of the Mexican aristocracy--and a boy leading a monkey. The monkey, Rivera says, "represents the Mexican middle class and also intellectuals, not excluding many politicians. During the 19th Century, they tried to imitate French culture and the English way of life, and now in the 20th Century they imitate the U.S., through babyish skyscrapers, hot dogs, bad English--especially 'O.K.'--and all the characteristics of the Coca-Colonial period."

Negroes & Mongols. To complement the Negro on the south wall, Rivera painted on the north wall an oriental woman, with a white fetus cuddled in a transparent uterus. The white races, Diego elaborately maintains, are actually half-Mongol, half-Negro.

Part of the north wall is taken up with Rivera's gloomy conception of Mexican history. To him it is symbolized by three things: a pre-Columbian temple with a bloody sacrificial altar before it, a "pagan-Christian" temple with an altar surmounted by a cross, and a "pagan-Christian-capitalist" temple with the altar this time surmounted by a dollar sign.

"Our revolution," sighs Marxist Rivera, "never came off."

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