Rivera Rides Again

To let the world in on the inspiration he experienced during his ten-month sojourn in the Soviet and satellites last year, Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera last week turned his own plush Mexico City gallery over to a show of his latest works: 150 oils, watercolors and drawings, all of people and places behind the Iron Curtain.

For critics who had begun to fear that Rivera was now painting more out of habit than conviction, there were some reassuring touches. His Little Soviet Girl (see cut), a flaxen-haired, blue-eyed Muscovite, clutching her school case in the cold, was a real charmer. The two major oils in the show, People's Testimony and Defile, painted from the window of Rivera's room in Moscow's National Hotel and both depicting scenes in Red Square, caught the bleakness of Moscow's winter and the immensity of the square with some of his old dash and color.

But by trying to emulate heavy-handed Soviet official art, Communist (and Unreconstructed Stalinist) Rivera too often turned out work that, in years gone by, he could have painted with his toes. His versions of Polish bricklayers rebuilding Warsaw and of collective brigades clearing ice from a waterfront in Czechoslovakia are drab and hackneyed. Like his politics. much of his new work bears the overwhelming burden of the Communist line.

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