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Postcolonial modernism in the work of DiegoRivera and Jos Carlos
Maritegui or new lighton a neglected relationshipDavid Craven aa
Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies , University of
NewMexico ,Published online: 19 Jun 2008.
To cite this article: David Craven (2001) Postcolonial modernism
in the work of Diego Rivera and Jos CarlosMaritegui or new light on
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Third Text, Spring 2001 3
Postcolonial Modernism in theWork of Diego Rivera and
Jos Carlos Mariteguior New Light on a Neglected Relationship
David Craven
1 Carlos Fuentes, 'Writing inTime', Democracy, vol 2,no 1,
January 1981, p 61.
2 Carlos Fuentes, NuevoTiempo Mexicano, 1994,trans, Marina
GutmanCasteneda, Farrar, Strausand Giroux, New York,1996, p 18.
Several years ago, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes was
traveling through thecountryside of Morelos, the home province of
the legendary revolutionary leaderEmiliano Zapata. Fuentes and his
companions became lost in this mountainousregion with its maze of
rice paddies and sugar-cane fields. When they finallycame to a
village, Fuentes asked an old peasant the community's name.
Thepeasant from Morelos replied: 'Well, that depends. We call it
Santa Maria intimes of peace. We call it Zapata in times of
war.'1
This encounter reminded Fuentes of something often lost sight of
in the West.At any given moment, especially in Latin America, there
is more than oneconcept of time in operation - and each of them is
replete with its own distinctivehistorical and spatial coordinates.
One of the first artworks to encapsulate thismultilateral 'montage'
of various temporal modes - which I refer to here as'uneven
development' - was a magisterial 1915 painting by Diego Rivera
entitledPaisaje Zapatista: El Guerrillero (Zapatista Landscape: The
Guerrilla), and this is awork to which we shall return shortly.
Inspired as it was by the MexicanRevolution from 1910-20, this
commanding artwork reminds us immediately ofwhat Fuentes has
recently noted in Nuevo Tiempo Mexicano (New Time in Mexico)from
1994, namely, 'Only the Revolution made present all of Mexico's
pasts [withequal force] - and this is why it deserves a capital
R.'2
Another encounter also made evident the distinctive set of
historical conver-gences that were occurring in the 1920s not only
in Mexico, but throughout thehemisphere. This interchange is
represented by a little known but quiteimportant portrait photo of
Diego Rivera that was autographed by the Mexicanartist and mailed
to the editorial staff of a remarkable Peruvian journal, Amauta,to
which it was also dedicated in 1926. The Rivera photograph was
thenpublished in the fifth issue, in January 1927, of this vanguard
journal, whichlasted from 1926 to 1930. It was founded as well as
directed throughout its entireexistence by the philosopher Jos
Carlos Maritegui, who is as important to Latin
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43 Adolfo Snchez Vzquez,'El marxismo en laAmrica Latina', Casa
delas Americas, vol 30, no 178,1990, pp 3-14; and VickyUnruh,
'Mariategui'sAesthetic Thought', LatinAmerican Research Review,vol
24, no 3, 1989,pp 45-69.
4 V M Miroshevsky, 'Elpopulismo en Per', 1941,reprinted in
Maritegui ylos origenes del marxismolatinoamericana, ed, JosArico,
Mexico City, 1973,p 6; and David Craven,Diego Rivera as
EpicModernist, Boston, 1997,pp 93-99.
5 Jos Carlos Maritegui,Siete ensayos cie la realidadperuana,
1928, trans,Marjory Urquidi, Austin,1988, pp 130-131. BothNestor
Garca Cancliniand Gerardo Mosqueralater agreed withMaritegui's
criticisms ofVasconcelos.
6 On this literature, see,David Craven, 'TheRecent Literature
onDiego Rivera', LatinAmerican Research Review,forthcoming.
7 Alberto Hijar, 'DiegoRivera: contribucionpoltica', Diego
Rivera Hoy,Mexico City, 1986,pp 37-72.
American thought as DiegoRivera is to the art of theAmericas.3
There was more thanan elective affinity linking them,since, as we
shall see, theirmutual admiration was firmlygrounded in a
comparableanalysis of society that drewthem to each other.
Their similarly heterodoxviews of socialism, in tandemwith an
alternative concept ofindigenismo, caused both ofthem to be
denounced asultra-leftists and populists bythe orthodox leaders of
theCommunist Party and Comiternin these years.4 Moreover, theterms
of their agreement politi-cally also account for theiralmost equal
distance from thecentrist politics of Jos Vasconcelos,the one-time
patron of Rivera'smurals in Mexico. Vasconceloswas someone with
whomMaritegui remained in contacteven though Maritegui
criticisedthe ethnocentrism of the Mexicanphilosopher's particular
Conceptof mestizaje (or ethnic fusion), aswell as its concomitant
andquite condescending view ofpre-colonial culture in
theAmericas.5
Before returning to DiegoRivera's overlooked photographic
tribute to Maritegui and Amauta (which wasreciprocated textually by
Amaut), I should outline briefly the theoretical point ofdeparture
that will lead to a far more emphatic linkage of the art and
thought ofRivera and Maritegui, than has so far been realised in
the Diego Riveraliterature. Even the wonderfully comprehensive
catalogue and chronology putout by scholars at the Detroit
Institute of Arts in 1986 overlooked this significant,indeed,
signal relationship between Rivera and Maritegui. Not
surprisingly,then, the most recent biography of Rivera - by Patrick
Marnham in 1998 - doesnot even mention Maritegui, much less his
noteworthy relationship with Riverathat I shall explore.6
As the contemporary Mexican philosopher Alberto Hijar has
convincinglyargued, the visual result of Rivera's work from this
period was a form ofdissident or alternative indigenismo. This was
particularly the case with Rivera'sbrilliant mural cycle for the
Secretaria de Education Pblica (the Ministry ofEducation) - nine
panels of which appeared in black and white reproductions
forAmauta, in 1926-27 when it also published two articles about
Rivera and in 1929Amauta even featured a drawing by Rivera on its
front cover.7
Diego Rivera : el artista de una clase
Toda ob a de a t h i nntncwd S^ ^-^V-jt}T$ff S . f* %
I n on n ha do ampo o ha s do n i # * ***>& t f P V
^HC-^r* ,t a am e o na q e d en tsen a A es *" j * *? *-* S iben s
abo P O S E e end m be i "** 4 ^ f - '*'%** n > ^!Tepo J^de P P
* m a " J hgSd* a"^ *^&k^-S?r *v ^
-
58 Ibid.
9 Michael Lwy, 'Marxismand Romanticism in theWork of Jos
CarlosMaritegui', LatinAmerican Perspectives,vol 25, no 4, July
1998,pp 76-88.
10 Jos Carlos Maritegui,Siete ensayos, op cit,pp 130-131.
AN ALTERNATIVE CONCEPT OFHYBRIDITY
Contrary to the 'classless' ideals of ethnic unity, and even the
melting potethnicity crucial for the official Mexican discussions
of mestizaje, such as thosefound so famously in the writings of
philosopher Jos Vasconcelos and anthro-pologist Manuel Gamio from
1916 through 1926, there is a notably divergentposition in the
artworks and writings of Diego Rivera, as well as in the
contem-porary essays by Jos Carlos Maritegui. In the telling words
of Hijar, thehegemonic indigenismo in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin
America - which wasan objective correlative for Vasconcelos'
concept of mestizaje (or hybridity) andthe so-called 'raza csmica'
- presupposed a resolutely essentialist notion of race,a
Rousseauian paternalism towards Native American culture, a
stridently anti-Marxist conception of society, a strictly
evolutionary as well as quite linear viewof historical development,
and an economistic concept of progress that wasentirely in keeping
with the mainstream Western ideology of modernisation,however much
Vasconcelos is often seen as having arrived at an alternative to
it.8
None of these various positions can be found, however, in a
sustained way inthe pictorial logic of Diego Rivera's indigenista
paintings - nor in the analyticalessays by Jos Carlos Maritegui on
the 'Indian problem' as it is labeled in his
now classic text Siete ensayos de interpretation de larealidad
peruana from 1928. (It is this text more than anyother that has
caused Maritegui to be considered the'Antonio Gramsci of Latin
America'.)9
Just as Vasconcelos would erroneously criticiseRivera in the
late 1920s for being 'anti-Spanish' (oranti-European actually), so
Maritegui would simulta-neously praise Rivera in his private
correspondence as'one of us' and publicly take Vasconcelos to task
in Sieteensayos as follows (undoubtedly along lines that
Riverawould have embraced):
Vaseoncelos, who tends to depreciate the native cultures
ofAmerica, thinks that without a supreme law [underlyingtheir state
formations] they were condemned to disappearbecause of their innate
inferiority... [Yet] Inca culture... hasleft us a magnificent
popular art... [and] social and politicalorganization all the more
remarkable.10
But before we go any further, let me change coursefor a moment
and indicate the route that the rest of thisarticle will take.
First, I need to affirm that images alwayscome before words and are
never simply reducible tothem. Second, I must emphasise that
important art -such as that of Diego Rivera - creates theory,
withoutever simply illustrating or mechanically reflectingtheory.
(I realise, of course, this is not a popular view ata time when the
'right' quotation from Foucault orBaudrillard supposedly exhausts
what we can sayabout an object. Yet anyone who has ever read
Foucaulton Las Meninas knows how much more is still left to besaid,
and how little this French author actually did say,about an artwork
that ultimately attests to his own
Diego Rivera, 'Jos Guadalupe Rodriguez', drawing on thecover of
Amauta, no 24, June 1929, Lima, Peru.(Rodriguez was a leftwing
labour leader in Mexico who wasassassinated by counter
revolutionary forces in the mid-1920s.)
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611 On Foucault's unabashedEurocentrism, see: EdwardSaid,
'Michel Foucault', InThese Times, September 5,1984, p 22, and on
histheoretical writings seePeter Dews, 'Foucault'sTheory of
Subjectivity',New Left Review, no 144,March/April 1984,pp
72-95.
12 David Craven, Diego Riveraas Epic Modernist, op cit,pp
34-35.
13 Linda Bank Downs, 'VivaZapata!', Art News, vol 98,no 6, June
1999, pp 100-101.As Downs notes, 'Riverahad first seen the image
ofa revolutionary soldier ona postcard sent to him by afriend in
Mexico'.Moreover, she points outthat the sarape, fromSaltillo in
the North, couldsignify Pancho Villa, butthat the wide-brimmed
felthat and the distinctivepose with the rifle actuallyderived from
a famousphoto of Zapata, from theSouth, which Rivera hadseen. See
also: RamnFavela, Diego Rivera: TheCubist Years, Phoenix ArtMuseum,
1984, pp 106-107.
highly limited, if also very intelligent and quite resourceful,
epistemic purview.)11In short, I shall first focus in a concerted
way on the art object - and its internalpictorial logic - before
trying to extract theoretical projects from it, whether thoseof
Maritegui or anyone else. Thus, the first half of this paper
addresses some ofthe attributes that cause Diego Rivera's pictorial
rendition of indigenista values tobe far more innovative and still
timely, than do, say, the contemporary indigenistapaintings from
Mexico of Fernando Leal or the subsequent work of FranciscoZuniga
from Costa Rica - and even perhaps the contemporary images of
JosSabogal from Peru. Then I will refocus in the latter part of
this paper on thetheoretical conclusions that one can develop out
of the prior and overdeterminedpaintings of Diego Rivera.
RIVERA'S ZAPATISTA LANDSCAPE ANDUNEVEN PICTORIAL
DEVELOPMENTAmong the first major artworks to operate by means of a
heightened sense oftemporal hybridity, thus being a 'collage' of
different historical modes andhistoric moments (if not of various
materials), was a splendid 1915 painting byDiego Rivera. This image
epitomised a non-Eurocentric tendency withinEurope's symbolic
cultural centre, namely, the Parisian artworld where Riverapainted
it. Entitled Paisaje Zapatista: El Guerrillero, this large painting
(144 x 123cm) now enjoys pride of place in the National Museum of
Mexico. At first itappears to be a collage, since it features a
virtuoso treatment of materials thattrick the spectator into
thinking that these things have been physically appendedto the
canvas, although they in fact have not. Here Rivera's 'pure' oil
painting oncanvas trumps and ironically inverts the 'impure' logic
of the actual cubistcollage, with its mixture of various media.
Moreover, this irreverent paintingtriggered a major controversy in
the Cubist enclave of Paris and apparentlycaused poet Pierre
Reverdy and Max Jacob to deride Rivera in quite ethnocentricterms
as a 'Courbet of the savannahs' - as if any place in Latin America
couldsimply be described in ways normally reserved for sub-Saharan
Africa colonieswithin the French empire.12
Labelled by mexican art historian Justino Fernandez as a
paradigmaticexample of 'Anhuac Cubism' ('Anhuac' was the Aztec's
name for the Valley ofMexico), this pictorial tour deforce also
contains a hybrid element in the form ofthe trompe l'oeil depiction
of the paper in the right foreground. The latter conjuresup
recollections of Spanish colonial images of the Baroque period,
such as thosedone by Francisco Zurbarn (whose work was often
shipped to the New Worldin the 17th century). Moreover, this image
also leaps forward in time to harboura reference to a famous photo
of Zapata (whether by Hugo Brehme orVictor-Augustin Casasola) -
which was then widely circulated by means ofmechanical reproduction
over the international wire services.13
However, as it is more agrarian in feel than either pastoral or
bucolic incharacter (to think of landscape paintings by European
Cubists and Fauvists),this painting by Rivera - which we could
label a type of agrarian Cubism inhomage to the distinctive
political project of Zapata - elicits through itscrystalline
setting a more topical allusion both geographically and
historically to'la region ms transparente del aire', as author
Alfonso Reyes would call the Valleyof Mexico in his 1915 novel
entitled, appropriately, Vision de Anhuac. (LikeMexican novelist
Martfn Luis Guzman, a one-time secretary of Pancho Villa,Alfonso
Reyes was a friend of Rivera in this period. And, of course,
Rivera
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714 Ramon Favela, ibid,p 104.
15 Dore Ashton,'Speculations onModernism', Museum ofFine Arts,
Santa Fe, NewMexico, Public lecturegiven on April 15, 1994.
Diego Rivera, Zapatista Landscape: The Guerrilla, 1915.National
Museum of Mexican Art
executed a well-known Cubist portrait of Guzman in 1915.)14
Among the notablyinnovative things about this hybid example of
Anhuac Cubism by Rivera is itsdistinctive type of conjunctural
modernism that reminds us so well of DoreAshton's astute
observation that early modernism at its best possessed
amultilateral trajectory that shifted about in dynamic fashion,
moving both forwardto the past and back to the future
simultaneously?3 What results visually andotherwise is not a
melted-down mixture or monolithic mestizaje, but rather aglittering
multi-ethnic mosaic of cross-cultural references and
syncopatedfragments. They no more allow a mere return to roots,
than they permit closureat any one moment in time, but at most only
the montage of different temporalmodes. As such, Rivera's painting
is an early, perhaps the earliest, example ofwhat is now known as
'postcolonial art' because of the way it hinges on a
dartinginterplay, which is both multi-class-based and multi-ethnic
in nature. Unlike theother and more binary tradition of
anti-colonial art, the postcolonial work of Riverashowcases an
unsettled interchange of the urban and the rural, of the centre
andthe periphery, of the mass produced and the artisanal, of
illusionary mass andmodernist flatness. The Rivera image thus
embodies the ebb and flow of post-colonial art as it has only been
recently defined in a major study: 'By the term
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816 Bill Ashcroft, GarethGriffiths, and Helen Tiffin,eds, The
Post-ColonialStudies Reader, New York,1995, p 3.
"postcolonial" we do not imply an automatic, or seamless and
unchangingprocess of resistance, but a series of [critical]
linkages... and critiques of imperialrepresentation'.16
What emerges from this inaugural 'postcolonial' modernist
painting by DiegoRivera (and Desmond Rochfort has rightly called
him the first great'postcolonial' artist, not just anti-colonial
painter) is a complex, and open-endedto-and-fro, with all sorts of
lessons and concretising components in a variety ofdirections. This
is a radically new image and one notably at odds with the
morestatic and one-dimensional frieze of 'heroic' revolutionary
cadres that one sees inthe contemporary 'anti-colonial' art of
painters like Fernando Leal. Such is thecase with the latter's
popular and very illustrative 1921 oil painting entitledZapatistas
at Rest, (a favourite of Vasconcelos). In Rivera's alternative
modernistpainting, historical narrativity emerges in mdias res as a
delta-like expanse ofcompeting stories. Conversely, in Leal's
realist image history is simply a
Fernando Leal, Zapatista at Rest, 1921. Private collection.
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917 Gladys March, DiegoRivera: My Art, My Life,New York, 1995, p
31.
18 Jos Carlos Maritegui,Editorial, Amauta, vol 1,no 1, September
1926, p 1.
highway going in one direction with unpaved andsoon superceded
peasant paths denoting its singularstory-line, its allegiance to
conventional concepts ofdevelopment.
Look, for example, at Fernando Leal'ssentiment-laden 1920 work
Indian with a Red Sarape.Less an active engagement with historical
change,than a passive snapshot of an essentialising imagethat
purportedly encapsulates the 'timeless' andindigenous roots of
Mexico, this painting by Leal isnot about critical hybridity nor is
it about thealternative and transformative indigenismo ofRivera's
work. In the latter work everything offersus competing visual
choices and nothing centres thepainting (as does the main motif) or
commands ourattention so exclusively (as does the marvelous
redsarape in Leal's paradoxical painting). At one andthe same time,
the Leal image would have usconcentrate on a return to 'purely'
indigenous form- and yet it attempts to do so by means of
atechnique, language, media, and conventions thatare overwhelmingly
those of official Europe and itsimperial identity.
Nor is it by chance, for our purposes, thatRivera's collage, or
impure hybrid, which is not justanti-European in texture, would
nevertheless laterallow him to claim of Zapatista Landscape that it
wasa postcolonial artwork. It had vanquished his'Mexican-American
inferiority complex' and hisuncritical 'awe before historic Europe
and itsculture'.17 In this work, which is both Western
andnon-Western at once, we see white shadows, orspecters, that are
as palpable as the fragments ofreality that they shadow. Similarly,
in the first issueof Amauta (a word which comes from Quechua
andmeans 'wiseman' or 'teacher,' Maritegui referred tothis journal
of 'vanguard artists, socialists, and
revolutionaries', as an apparition or spectre that haunted the
status quo in Peru.18A deftly calibrated balancing act of the
declarative and the indirect, Rivera's
Zapatista Landscape is at once formally dense and
compositionally dispersed. Thealmost camouflaged image of the
figure in the painting forces the viewer tosearch for shifting
pictorial traces, thus eliciting an analogy between Cubist cluesand
a guerrilla's elusiveness - someone who is here one moment and gone
thenext, like the vision of a spectre. Using brash but 'authentic'
colours for the peasantpancho, or campesino sarape, this painting
by Rivera both refers to the familiar andtransfigures it, so as to
evade easy recognition and defer final identity. In thisregard, as
in others, Rivera contradicts the fixed and essentialising
contemporarydiscourses of Vasconcelos and Gamio, as well as of
Fernando Leal. For the latterthree figures the indigenous is
conclusively recognised and is only of the past,where it is simply
a rustic prologue to the present. According to this hegemonicview
in the 1920s, indigenismo was merely an identity already
established thatawaited its illustrator, or perhaps its mortician,
and certainly called for a pictorial
Fernando Leal, Indo-American with Red Sarape, 1920.Private
collection.
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19 Gladys March, op cit, p 58.For more on 'alternativemodernism'
in LatinAmerica, see: DavidCraven, Diego Rivera asEpic Modernist,
op cit,pp 42-56.
archaeologist - not a bricoleur, or bricollagist, like
Rivera.The pictorial logic of the visual language used by Rivera,
though, entailed an
affirmation and expansion of oil painting's communicative
resources, thennegation and contraction of the aesthetic claims on
behalf of Western Europeanart. This happens, for example, through
the abbreviated use of chiaroscuro, thecoy and inconsistent usage
of overlapping planes, and the fleeting figurative
references that flirt with illustrativeforms, then leave them
behind. Justhow the highly original internal logicof Rivera's
paintings related to theunique external developments of theMexican
Revolution was summed upwell enough by the painter himself:
It [Cubism] was a revolutionarymovement, questioning
every-thingthat had previously been said and donein art. It held
nothing sacred. As the oldworld would soon blow itself apart,never
to be the same again, so Cubismbroke down forms as they had
beenseen for centuries, and was creating outof fragments new forms,
new objects,new patterns, and - ultimately - newworlds.19
Nor did Rivera fail to consolidate thecompelling image from 1915
that hepresented to contemporaries in themiddle of the Mexican
Revolution. For,in the Secretara de Educcacin frescoesthat so
attracted the attention of theeditorial staff at Amauta, as well as
inlater mural cycles from 1940 and 1954,Rivera consolidated a
conception ofaltern-ative indigenismo through atreatment of uneven
historicaldevelopment that placed him at theforefront of all those
who sought toarrive at a radical but still plausibleframework for
social transformation.(Not surprisingly, these works in theMinistry
of Education earned both theanimosity of Vasconcelos and
theadmiration of Maritegui.)20
Furthermore, he did so throughoutthe rest of his career with
therenovative possibilities of Cubism evermost at hand. In a
certain sense, then,Rivera never really abandonedCubism. Instead,
he simply pulledback from what Jos Ortega y Gasset
Diego Rivera, Day of the Dead (November 2),fresco, 1924,
Ministry of Education
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11
20 For Vasconcelos' criticismsof Rivera as 'anti-Spanish',see
Jos Vasconcelos,'Sobre Diego Rivera', inElisa Garcia Barragan,
ed,Antologia Tributaria,Mexico City, 1986,pp 227-228.
21 For more on this, see:D Craven, Diego Rivera asEpic
Modernist, op cit,pp 33-35.
22 For a classic overview ofRivera along these lines,see Justino
Fernndez, ArteModerno y Contemporaneode Mexico, vol 11, El Arte
delSiglo XX, 1952, MexicoCity, 1994, p 44.
termed the 'fury of plastic geometrism' that largely dissolved
everything intoabstract structures. Since historical narrativity as
part of his epic modernism wasalways symptomatic of his mature
work, Cubism as a pictorial idiom andsyntactical strategy
underpinned the structural logic of his presentation ofhistory,
even as the otherwise dispersive logic of Cubism meant that
manydifferent historical routes remained open. In this regard,
Rivera always conjuredup a heterodox use of Cubism against the
orthodox Cubists, which was thesource of his controversy with the
Cubist circle in the teens.21
On the second and third levels of the Court of Labour in the
Ministry, forexample, scenes of modern Western science, as in the
personification forChemistry, are balanced with scenes from ancient
pre-Colombian thought, as inthe figure for Geology. The spectator
is thus denied a one-dimensional overviewof the history of science,
which would have us simply march in single file frompurely
non-Western superstition to the radiant enlightenment of 'pure'
Westernscience. Rather, there is a more complex sense of modern
science as the collective,but still incomplete, achievement
throughout history of both non-European andEuropean cultures,
neither to the exclusion of the other, as part of a broaderprocess
of uneven historical development. Similarly, and to greater effect,
Riverapainted in 1953 a striking mural for the Hospital de la Raza
in Mexico City,entitled The History of Medicine in Mexico: The
People Demand Better Health. Thiswork is a coda to an entire
postcolonial visual tradition in his work.
In the latter mural, we see Rivera balancing the achievements of
pre-Colombian medicinal culture and art forms with the
accomplishments of modernscience and post-Renaissance art from the
West, neither to the exclusion of theother and with a radically
democratic political twist that demands unprece-dented popular
access to both. The visual language is a commanding andcohesively
hybrid embodiment of pre-Colombian figures, such as Tlazolteotl
andIzcuitl, interwoven with Renaissance-Baroque conventions for
evoking realistforms. All of it is within a gridded structural
framework that takes AnhuacCubism to another plane entirely.
Similarly, part of this fresco is a visualrepository of the ancient
homeopathic practices and herbal cures of theprecolonial periods
and the other is a showcase of modern surgical practicesfrom
Western science. A very complex situation thus emerges in which
thepresent has lessons to teach the past, but it is also one in
which the past still haslessons to teach the present, along with
the future. To be of the past, Rivera'smural shows, is not simply
to be historically superceded in all respects. For thereare senses,
in which the past is the past - but there are other senses in which
thepast is not simply of the past, but also of the future.22
MARITEGUI AND 'INDIGENOUS' SOCIALISM IN PERUTo approach the
problem of land reform in Rivera's murals, as in the Ministry
ofEducation, is to approximate even more clearly the related and
equallyheterodox political vision of Jos Carlos Maritegui,
particularly as articulated inhis Siete ensayos and in Amauta. It
is also to understand quite profoundly the gapthat separates both
of these still germane figures from the more anachronisticthought
of Vasconcelos and Gamio (however important the latter two
thinkersundoubtedly were to the 1920s). But, at issue here is not
only one's significanceto the 1920s, but also to the 1990s and
beyond. Here, both Rivera and Mariteguicarry the day handsomely,
and evidently in terms we can now rightly call'postcolonial' in the
most insightful sense.
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Diego Rivera, The History of Medicine in Mexico, fresco, 1953,
Hospital de la Raza, Mexico City
23 See notes 3 & 9.
24 Jos Carlos Maritegui,'Arte, Revolucin yDecadencia', Amauta,
no 3,November 1926, pp 3-4.
Before discussing the presentation of Rivera's art by Amauta to
the Peruvianpublic between 1926 and 1929,1 should perhaps introduce
Jos Carlos Mariteguimore formally and outline his innovative, even
brilliant, response to the issues ofindigenismo, class-based
inequities, avant-garde art, and the relation of NativeAmerican
economic formations to the contemporary problem of land reform.
Inhis surprisingly short but remarkably accomplished life from 1894
to 1930,Maritegui began as a journalist, developed into a poet and
a political activist,and emerged as one of the foremost political
theorists from the Americas in thefirst half of the 20th century.23
Along the way, he managed to write one of themore astute critical
assessments of avant-garde art from the left of the
politicalspectrum, which allowed ample space for engaging with the
diverse artisticpractices to which he was most allied - from Diego
Rivera and Jos Sabogalthrough Dada and Surrealism.24 In addition,
he was also originally a keysupporter of the Alianza Popular
Revolucionaria de las Americas (APRA), ananti-imperialist movement.
Then, in fairly rapid succession, he founded firstAmauta in 1926
and the Socialist Party of Peru in 1928.
At a point when, in official circles, indigenismo merely meant
that one fosteredan appreciation of pre-Colombian culture,
Maritegui (like Rivera) gave a radicaltwist to this discussion
through his insistence on the inseparable link betweenrace and
class, or, more precisely, between the division of labour and
ethniccultural traditions. Conversely, at a time when the Communist
Party in Latin
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25 Jos Carlos Maritegui,'Dos concepciones de lavida', 1925,
reprinted inThe Heroic and CreativeMeaning of Socialism:Selected
Essays of Jos CarlosMaritegui, ed, MichaelPearlman,
AtlanticHighlands: HumanitiesPress, 1996, p 349.
26 Rosa Luxemburg,'Einfhrung in dieNationalkonomie', 1925,in
Gesammelte Schriften,vol 5, Dietz Verlang, Berlin,1975, p 658. See
also:Michael Lowy, op cit, p 83.
27 Jos Carlos Maritegui,'Programa del PartidoSocialista
Peruana', 1928,reprinted in The Heroic andCreative Meaning
ofSocialism, op cit, p 92.
28 Jos Carlos Maritegui,'Aniversario y balance',Amauta, no 17,
September1928, p 3.
America, under the leadership of the Comitern, held an orthodox
Marxist view,at once economistic and covertly positivistic, of how
socialism must take the samepath in every country, Maritegui took
issue with this position and had thetemerity to find an antecedent
in the writings of Marx. In doing so, Mariteguiattacked the modern
'superstition of [uncritical] respect for the idea of progress'in
Europe - both on the right and the left.25
It was Maritegui's supposedly 'outrageous' precept that the Inca
civilisationof pre-Conquest Peru, for all of its undeniable
problems, still offered somehistorical lessons of striking
significance to the socialist movement in LatinAmerica. In
rejecting outright the Stalinist position that Peru first had to
gothrough capitalist development under the tutelage of the West
before it couldgain its national independence, Maritegui followed
up the work of the CentralEuropean philosopher Rosa Luxemburg. She
had earlier praised the economicformations of the Inca as examples
of so-called 'primitive agrariancommunism'.26 Perhaps surprisingly,
Maritegui's hybrid project in response touneven historical
development meant that one could combine the popularcommunal
configurations of the Incas (even though they occurred within
anauthoritarian political system that must be rejected) with an
insistence on themodern civil liberties insured by liberalism (even
though they have oftenassumed prominence within the modern
capitalism of which Maritegui wasdeeply critical). Accordingly, his
political and economic montage of differentepochs in Peruvian
history meant that he was able to avoid the evolutionistdogma of
progress that was, oddly enough, common both to Vasconcelos and
theComitern, with their primarily linear and quite punctual
conceptions ofcontrolled development. More surprisingly, perhaps,
he was able to reject inconsistent theoretical terms the
backward-looking illusionism of return-to-rootsindigenismo, found
in the likes of Leal's artworks. As Maritegui emphasised, hisview
about reclaiming certain aspects of pre-colonial culture:
in no way signifies a romantic and anti-historical tendency
toward thereconstruction or resurrection of Inca socialism, which
corresponded to historicalconditions that have been completely
superseded, and of which those habits ofcooperation and socialism
among the peasants remain a factor.27
Perhaps Maritegui's most audacious and equally heretical
proposal wasdeveloped at this irregular intersection when he
emphasised that the democratic,communalist and proto-socialist
afterlife of formations among indigenouspeople in the highlands of
Peru would provide the fundamental starting pointfor social
transformation in the present. Thus for him, Peruvian socialism
wouldbe both national and international, both Western and
non-Western, both futureoriented and backward-looking all at once.
In Amauta in 1928, he put thispeculiarly amphibian and historically
ambidextrous conception of socialism anddemocracy into motion. On
the one hand, Maritegui maintained, 'Socialism iscertainly not an
Indo-American theory... And socialism, although born in Europeas
was capitalism, is neither specifically nor particularly European.
It is aworldwide movement.'28
But, on the other hand, Maritegui insisted that:
Socialism is ultimately in the American tradition. Incan
civilisation was the mostadvanced primitive communalist
organisation that history has yet known. Wecertainly do not wish to
claim that socialism in the Americas will copy thistradition. It
must be a heroic new creation. Yet, we must also give life to
an
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29 Ibid.
30 On the importance ofMaritegui (and Gramsci)for the Cuban
andNicaraguan Revolutions,see Donald Hodges,'Promoting the
NewMarxism', in IntellectualFoundations of theNicaraguan
Revolution,University of Texas Press,Austin, 1986, pp 179-184.
31 Ibid.
32 'Diego Rivera: Biografasumaria', Amauta, no 4,December 1926,
p 5.
Indoamerican socialism reflecting our own language. This mission
is worthy of awhole new generation.29
For this reason and others, one can understand why recent
historians of LatinAmerican thought would claim the following of
Maritegui's legacy.30 Hisresourceful analysis demonstrated how the
integration of the indigenouspopulation into this struggle for
democratic rights, both economically andpolitically, will be
essential to any process of development with equity in Peru -and
indeed elsewhere in Latin America. More broadly, though, the
theoreticalnovelty and historical acuity of Maritegui's work help
us to understand why hiswritings would have been so highly valued
by Che Guevara in the 1960s and bythe Sandinistas in the 1980s. (In
fact, my first sustained encounter withMaritegui's ideas came from
several visits to Nicaragua and Cuba during the1980s. In each
place, his work triggered some important discussions about
thenature of development and 'appropriate technology'.)31
RIVERA ACCORDING TO AMAUTAThe inaugural article about Diego
Rivera was a one-page chronology by the artisthimself for issue
number 4 in December 1926. This Biografla sumaria', we are toldby
Maritegui himself, was compiled and edited by the artist himself
('han sidoordenados y redactados por el propio artista'). The page
on which it appears (p 5) isaccompanied by two reproductions - an
academic drawing of Rivera by an artistnamed Builen and a rapid
caricature of Rivera by the Mexican satirist MiguelCovarrubias. The
first shows the Mexican muralist soberly looking upward witha
visionary, if troubled gaze, while the second features a lively as
well asirreverent look at Rivera's comical visage.
From the standpoint of self-revelation, this annotated life by
the artist ishighly instructive because of the way in which he
quite soberly refers tolandmark moments in his own development. To
quote Rivera's rather modestassessment, it was in 1921 while he was
doing drawings in the Yucatan andPuebla that 'Aparece al fin la
personalidad del pintof. Nonetheless, he is sharplycritical of the
subsequent mural in 1922 for the National Preparatory School,which
he considers unsuccessful. The reasons are telling: 'No logra una
obraautonoma y las infiuencias de Italia son extremamente visibles'
(He does not achievean autonomous work, and the Italian influences
are extremely obvious). By hisown account, and here I think most
scholars are in complete agreement with him,it was in the
magisterial murals from 1923-26 in the Ministry of Education and
inthe National Autonomous University of Chapingo where 'poco a poco
se deprendede las influencias y extiende su personalidad'(little by
little he leaves his influencesbehind and develops his own
personality).32
Nor can there be any doubt but that Maritegui agreed with this
judgement,since of the fifteen works by Rivera reproduced in
Amauta, no less than ninewere from the Ministry of Education, which
is a choice that also makes sense interms of the local ideological
project of both Maritegui and of the journalAmauta, which, as noted
above, means 'teacher'. Overall, this unusually largenumber of
reproductions of works by Rivera in Amauta means that the
Mexicanartist had the second largest number of works in this
publication of all the artistswho were featured in its pages. Only
the Peruvian indigenista painter JosSabogal, who designed the
original cover of the journal and had more thanthirty-four
illustrations in it, surpassed Rivera in terms of absolute
numbers.Among the artists who had fewer works showcased were
Matisse, Picasso, Georg
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33 Renato Poggioli, Teoriadell'arte d'avanguardia,1962, Harvard
UniversityPress, 1968, Chapter One.
Grosz, Carlos Mrida, and Emilio Pettoruti.Perhaps not
surprisingly, the Rivera murals from the Ministry of Education
were ones that addressed many of the same themes that were
handled with suchacuity in Maritegui's Siete ensayos, namely: (1)
class-based inequities as a motorof historical change, (2)
indigenous traditions as a means of constructing a
newtrans-regional social bond within disruptive circumstances, and
(3) thefundamental role of militant teachers as 'organic
intellectuals' not only forspreading literacy, but also for
mobilising the popular classes - as, for example,was the case with
Otilio Montano, the schoolteacher from Morelos who helpedZapata
draft the 1911 Plan de Ayala.
Moreover, the way that Rivera's work is conceptually framed in
Atnauta isdoubly revealing for reasons that are threefold. First,
his work is seen as
exemplary of 'un movimiento' in thearts and beyond that
qualifies asavant-garde. As Renato Poggioli hasnoted, avant-garde
art is advancedby a movement, rather than by amere school in the
conventionalsense. Such art goes beyond thelimits of artistic
values per se inorder to create a more compre-hensive
Weltanschauung, orworldview.33 Such a formulation ofthe role of
modern art so as toencompass engage artists like Riverawas
articulated both in Maritegui'sgeneral 1926 'Prsentation de
Amauta'in Issue No 1 cited above and evenmore brilliantly in his
justifiablyfamous essay in No 3 from the sameyear: 'Arte,
Revolution y Decadencia'.Accordingly, the first piece onRivera, in
No 4,1926, was presentedin conjunction with an essay by thePeruvian
author and labour activistHaya de la Torre entitled,appropriately
enough, 'NuestroFrente Intellectual', which wasillustrated by two
of Rivera'sfrescoes from the Ministry ofEducation.
Second, Rivera's avant-garde artis presented here in organic
relationto vanguard politics, specifically as abeachhead for
working-class mobili-sation on the left of the politicalspectrum.
Consistent with this view,the article and interview with Riveraby
Esteban Pavletich, which isaccompanied by the aforementionedphoto
of Rivera signed 'Para Amauta'by the artist himself, is
entitled
Amauta, no 4, December 1926, 'Diego Rivera: Biografa sumaria',
Lima, Peru
D I E G OB i o g r a f l a s u m a r i a
I8S6.Naci en U Ciudad de Ciuamjual.1891.Se estableci en la
Ciudad de Mexico
con sus padres.1897.Empczo a asistii a las clases de dibujo
rtocturno en U Escuela Nacional de Bellas Arles.Rtcibi lecciones
de Don Andres Ros.
1699-1901.-Recibi lecciones de Don Santiago Rebull, Don Jos
Marfa Velascoy Don Flix Parra.
1902. Empezri a (rabajar libremente en el cam-no, disgustado de
la orientacin de la escuela bajori catalan Fabrs.
1907.March i Lspafia d.oiwte t l choque en-1rt la tiaicin
mexicana, los tjmptos de pntura in-t i i a y el ambiente y
proijnccion moderna espaiiolade entonces, obrando sobre su timid
educada en elreipcto a Europa lo desortentaron, hacindole
producrcuadros dtestables muy inferiores a los hechos poril en
Mexico antes de marchar Europa, f.n esC4>otrabaj en cl taller de
Don EJuardo Chicturro.
1908--I910.Vjaja por Francia, Btgica, Holun-d i e Inglaterra;
trabaja poco. Tctas anodinas, de esteperfodo y et anterior son las
que pose la Escuela Na-cional de Bellas Artcs.
Octubre de 191.Vuelvea Mexico donde per-manece hasta junto de
191!. Asist al principiode 1*rcvolucin Mexicana en los E&tados
de Murdos y deMexico, y al movimiento Zapatista. Nopinta njdj p-ro
en su espfritu definen los valores que otiemarnsu vida dx. trabajo
hasta hoy.
Jtilo de 1911. -Vuelve a Paris y empieza or-denadamente su
trabajo.
191l.-!nflueiicias no-impicsionisias (Scutal.VH2 niiuencias
greco-cezanianas. I913 Ititinciiciapiesssianas; amislad cou
Pisarro.
1914.Aparecen dentra de sus cuatlrus cubistas(discipiilo de
Pisarro) los indido* de su pcrsonalidadtir Mexicano.
Oirqo ttivtra, dibuio da Bullen.
1915.Sus comparieros cubists condenan su exo-tismo. 1916
Desarrollo de ese exotistno (coeficiente mexica- 'no).Paris.
1917.Empii a anunciarse en su pintura el lesut-tado de su
trabajo sobre h t ruc lun de la obra de arte yapirtanse sus cuadros
del tipo cubista.
1918.Nuevas influencias de Czanne y Renoir.Amistad con Elle
Faure.
1920-21.Viaje por Italia. 350 ibujos segn losBiiantinos
Primitvos Cristianos, pre-renacentistas y delnatra!.
Setiembre de 1921.Vuelve a Mexico. Oleos enVucatin y PucbU,
dibujos al choque con la belleza de Mexi-co. Aparece al fin la
personalidad del pintor.
1922.Dccoracin del Anfiteatro de la tscueta Na-ciona!
Preparatoria. No logra hacer una obra autonomay Its influencias de
Italia son extremadainente visibles.
1923-192. Murales en la Scrta rfa de ta Educa-tion Pdblica y
Escuela Nacional de Agricultura de Cha-pingo.Esta obra comprende
ciento sesenta y ocho fres-cos en donde poco a poco te desprende de
las influenciasy exttende su personatidad, la que segn su intuiein
y sujuico y de algunos criticos slempre tendi a la
pinturaniura!.
(stos datos ban sido ordenados y dactadoj port l ptopio
artista.)DUg Rivara, oot Covorrubioi,
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34 Estban Pavletich, 'DiegoRivera: el artista de unaclase',
Amauta, no 5,January 1927, pp 8-9.
35 Ibid, p 7.
'Diego Rivera: el artista de una clase' (Diego Rivera, painter
of a social class).Among the points made by the author are that
Rivera is 'el pintor de una clase
universal' (painter of a universal class) and that 'Rivera, no
es un creador... es elreceptor substantivo surgido del seno de una
porcin social en el instante culminante desu historia' ('Rivera is
not a creator... he is a receptor born amidst a specific
socialclass at a historical crux in time). Moreover, Rivera is
characterised as 'uncombatiente de vanguardia' (a fighter of the
avant-garde), who is committed tonothing less than the conception
and construction of the 'autentico Hombre Nuevo'(the authentic new
man). Surprisingly enough, since it has so far gone unincludedin
the Rivera literature, there is an interview with the artist in
which he stakes outa theoretical position very much in keeping with
that of Maritegui and Amauta.These remarks include comments on the
potential resources of Cubism for artistsallied to a revolutionary
movement, as well as on the role of an artist within arevolutionary
movement and the ideological cohesiveness of a necessarilyhybrid
revolutionary art.
Here I quote from Rivera's interview with Amauta's staff:
el pintor revolutionario no se ridiculo y excelso creador de
obras maestras, sino uncombatiente de vanguardia... a veces puede
ser un guerrillero... el artista sera revolu-cionario o no sera'...
sirve para que la obra arte positiva, es decir revolucionario....En
nuestro tiempo - como en todos los tiempos - es necesario que la
pasiendominante coindda con la aspiration colectiva de las masas,
(the revolutionarypainter is not a ridiculous and honourable of
master works of art but a fighter ofthe avant-garde ...sometimes a
guerilla fighter ...the artist will be revolutionary orwon't be
...it serves so that the work of art is positive, that is
revolutionary...In ourtime - as in all times - the dominant passion
must coincide with the collectiveaspiration of the masses).34
From here, Rivera goes on to praise modernism generally and
Cubism morespecifically in terms of their potential, but not always
their actuality (and hereagain Rivera is in accord with Maritegui's
most famous line on this issue).35Nonetheless, Rivera also
criticises certain things about modernist art - mostrevealingly,
its 'tendencia a la regresin arqueolgica'. The art of Fernando
Lealstands accused on this score, at least implicitly.
Significantly, one of Rivera'smurals, with a critical or
alternative indigenista logic, namely, his hybriddepiction of
Xochipili in the stairway of the Ministry of Education, is used
toprovide a visual coda in Issue No 4 for 'La Misin de Amauta', the
concludingsection of Haya de la Torre's essay on the intellectual
front embracing Rivera,Maritegui, and the authors of Amauta. This
work takes us full circle to themontage of temporal modalities
introduced at the beginning. For, Rivera's muralfeatures a work
that combines Gauguin's pictorial innovations with awell-known
Aztec sculpture, along with a use of space that is both Maya
andCubist in almost equal measure - so that it made manifest what
Carlos Fuentescalled at the outset un 'Nuevo Tiempo Mexicano' in
which the past and the presentwere reassembled pictorially to
striking new effect. Yet this synthesis happenedwithout ever
leaving behind entirely some of the older and more
insightfullessons to be taught by a deeply fragmented, yet still
valuable, past.
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