This article was a small event when it was first published, one whose ripples are still felt today. In many ways, for a U.S. audience this was the biggest introduction to the vivid, committed artistic world of Mexico’s muralists ever had. Young, radical artist Frederic Leighton visited Diego Rivera in 1923 and met his “Union of Technically Working Painters and Sculptors”, absorbed the streets and their class struggles, saw the murals and paintings, discussed Rivera’s proclamation for the Grupo Solidario del Movimiento Obrero. And he sent back images for the Liberator audience, arguably the most cultured in the U.S., to see for themselves. The impact was immediate and laid the basis for Rivera’s future work in the States, as well as opening eyes and minds to Mexico’s politics and culture.

‘Pro-Proletarian Art in Mexico’: Diego Rivera by Frederic W. Leighton from The Liberator. Vol. 6 No. 12. December, 1923.

EARLY evening and the movement of many people homeward bound. The Zocalo, that huge square where once rose the buildings of an Aztec city, now surrounded with its heritage from Spain: the calm cathedral with bell-shaped towers, the long straight lines of the national palace, the arched and arabesqued arcades of the Ayuntamiento. Early evening in November. From a street leading to the Zocalo a dark mass rounds the corner, pours into the square, keeps turning the corner, moving swiftly like molten steel flowing from the lips of a convertor. A confused sound hoarsens. It is the shouts of the people crying; “Water, water, we want water!”

In the van, splashed with red and black banners, rattles a Ford truck filled with shouting, gesticulating figures. The mass surging behind, follows closely to the Ayuntamiento. “Water, water, down with the Ayuntamierito!” roars the crowd. As the Ford rolls up the old carved wooden gates are swung shut by municipal guards who retire into the courtyard of the building.

“Cowards, traitors, grafters! You have artesian wells while we dip our water from the sewers. Open up, open up!” A large beam used in the daytime for some repair work lies beneath the arcade. Suddenly it is no longer a beam but a battering ram whose every impact echoes with a cheer. The wooden gate bends and strains, one panel gives, a second; hands reach through to slip the bolt, the gate swings wide, swings wide to-crack! crack! A volley from within. Men drop, the crowd falls back; then with inarticulate guttural sounds surges forward and fill the gateway. Revolvers puncture the darkness with light and sound, searching out the hidden forms within. The battle’s on! The populace of Mexico City, the workers, organized and unorganized, are storming the municipal palace. Two weeks without water because of the carelessness of a shiftless, grafting city administration-two weeks of filth! The fighting lasts for several hours, the Ayuntamiento is set afire, records burned. Hundreds are wounded and twenty persons lose their lives before troops quell the disorder.

In the thick of the fight within the doorway of the Ayuntamiento, moves a bulky figure dressed in khaki flannel shirt, high boots, and broad-brimmed hat.

The scene shifts to the concert hall of the National Preparatory School of Mexico which for centuries was a Jesuit college until the anti-clerical reform laws of 1857. The hall is large with elaborate stone-carved ornamentation on walls and pillars, a reconstruction that cost the treasury of Porfirio Diaz half a million pesos. The seats mount in precipitate tiers to the roof of opaque glass. Back of the platform the cement wall rises sheer to the arched proscenium. In front of the wall stands a rough high stepladder near the top of which works a man with a brush and a gasoline blowtorch. The wall is no longer grey like the other walls of the auditorium. It is a flaming mass of line and color-long sweeping curves, balanced masses of gold and blue, green, brown, and red. The whole expanse even to the background of the organ alcove is one grand mural decoration. The bulky man on the ladder wears a khaki flannel shirt and high boots.

This is Diego Rivera, member of the central executive committee of the Communist Party of Mexico, and his country’s most renowned living painter. The name of Rivera is yet probably better known among Europeans and the followers of cubism and French symbolism than it is among the masses of his native Mexico to which he returned in 1921 after an almost continuous sixteen years in Europe. But the colossal work, “Creation,” recently completed in the National Preparatory School, and the work now being painted on the patio walls of the Ministry of Public Education are fast making him known in all parts of Mexico. A certain daily paper of the capital thinking to please bourgeois taste recently advertised Rivera widely by an ill calculated attack on his work, an attack which was quickly hushed up when it was perceived what power Rivera had attained in the thoughts and hearts of serious minded people and when it was revealed that instead of receiving a fabulous amount for his labor, as charged, he was decorating walls for a sum less than the cost of finishing them in kalsomine- a niggardly eight pesos per square yard! Imagine some public building in Washington being decorated at four dollars a square yard by John Sargent!

Rivera is one of those about whom one feels that, however diverse his characteristics, there is within him a unifying principle which resolves all dilemmas and explains all vagaries. This unity is itself elusive and mystifying, but one is certain of its presence just as one is not puzzled by the different aspects of a tree in winter, spring, and autumn. Life flows through the tree and its process reveals wonderfully changing phenomena. So it is with a human personality that has achieved naturalness of growth, and so one feels about Rivera.

Diego Rivera was born in ‘Guanajuato, a mining town high in the folds of the Sierra Madre. Guanajuato gave the Spaniards countless ingots of gold and silver which bulked large among the twenty-five millions annually that used to enter old Cadiz from the new world. In Guanajuato, Hidalgo, who started the movement of liberation against Spain, was executed by royal troops and his head hung from a nail high up at one corner of the Alhondiga, the massive brick warehouse-fortress where the grain and treasure of the masters of the land was wont to be stored. As a child Rivera saw gold and silver being carried out and away on railroad trains and on the backs of burros, to other masters, those in the United States or England, or native masters who lived in Mexico City, Paris, or Madrid as their fancy dictated. Later he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Mexico City with such success that he was given a scholarship for two years study abroad. That was the beginning of his European life, which, except for one brief interruption, lasted from 1907 to 1921. The interruption, consisting of a trip to Mexico from the autumn of 1910 until the middle of 1911, is significant because at that time Rivera was an active member of the secret revolutionary junta in Mexico City which was working for the overthrow of Diaz. After carrying out an important mission for this group, among the Indians of the sierra of the state of Puebla, Rivera was denounced to the police and escaped by vessel from Veracruz en route to the United States to join Madero who was then entering Mexico from the north. But in Havana news of Madero’s triumph determined a return to Europe for the further study of art.

Rivera’s poverty and his revolutionary sympathies brought him in contact with many political exiles and radicals, and his inquisitive intellect was forever registering not only the forms and colorings of the people and places he visited, but also their social and economic conditions. From a painter of conventional things in the usual manner he became one who attempted to externalize his feelings and thoughts by means of symbolism and the division of planes, and who eagerly studied every technical process that would aid him. From being a painter on a yard of canvas he came to seek an organic personal relationship to the work-a-day members of society and found release in mural decoration; for mural painting, being an integral part of the finest building, united him with other laborers. From symbolic integrated cubism done with grace and power in “Creation,” he has now come to the portrayal of simple human verities of the life of native Mexico with a technique that is synthetic of all his previous experience. One sees the wage-slave miner dragging himself down to work in the morning, crawling up exhausted in the twilight and being searched for high-grade ore by the foreign mine boss; one sees the native sugar industry, the weaving and dyeing of cloth, the work of the fields and smelters, plains and cities.

At the foot of several of these scenes in the great panorama of Mexican life which Diego Rivera is now unrolling on the patio walls of the Ministry of Public Education he inscribed verses by Gutierrez, a young revolutionary poet. As may be seen on the accompanying photograph of the weary miner emerging into the evening air is the following poem:

Companero minero,/Doblado por el peso de la tierra/Tu mano y erra/Cuando saca metal/Para el dinero./Haz punales/Con todos los metales/Y asi/Veras que los metales/Despues son para ti.

Translated: Comrade miner,/Doubled by the weight of the earth,/Your band errs/When it mines metal/Destined for money./Make daggers/With all the metals,/And thus you will see/That thereafter/The metals are for you.

But one afternoon not long ago Albert Pani, Minister of Foreign Relations passed by and saw the poem. Pani is known as the most conservative member of the present government. Pani went to Obregon and protested; Obregon spoke to Vasconcelos, the Minister of Education. Vasconcelos spoke to Rivera and next day the verse, together with several others of equal ardor, had disappeared. It is rumored that thereby hangs a tale of mystery which shall not be disclosed until the day of proletarian revolt in Mexico.

Rivera leads a group of young revolutionary painters and sculptors: Jose A. Sequeiros, Amado de la Cueva, Ignacio Asunsolo, Reyes Perez, Xavier Guerrero, Clemente Orozco, Jorge Juan Crespo, German Cueto, Emilio Amero, Fermin Revueltas, Carlos Merida and others. Practically all of them have had training in Europe, South America, or the United States as well as in Mexico. Their work was highly praised at the last exhibition in New York of the Society of Independent Artists. A number of them fought in the Mexican revolution. These men have formed a union called the “Union of Technically Working Painters and Sculptors” which adheres to the Moscow International, conducts a cooperative workshop, has plans for the establishment of a communal theatre in an abandoned convent now occupied by members of the proletarian Tenants’ Union, and is generally active in the propagation of its esthetic and social thought. Below is a translation of the fundamental principles of the group:

“Our ‘Union of Technically Working Painters and Sculptors’ is communist in the sense of the Moscow International to which we declare ourselves adherents with all obligations and rights.

“We believe indispensable the overthrow of the old social mechanism now in power; we believe that to arrive at this goal the producing and creating classes have the right or rather the obligation to employ whatever means of action necessary for the execution of this end. As the bourgeois world is already opposing with violence the advent of the new order, we should ourselves apply analogous means to ensure its coming.

“We recognize as the only effective means for this the temporary dictatorship of the proletariat, designed to apply the pressure necessary for the adaptation of all that which is called different social classes to the new order, a civilization which will not recognize-as actually ours does not recognize-more than one class: the class of PRODUCERS AND CREATORS.

“In short we wish to substitute from the very foundation the government of the producers for the government of the exploiters.

“By the nature of our craft we are those directly charged with working and looking out for the maintenance and development of the purity of the means of plastic and graphic expression in the Mexican region, a region which we consider of the utmost importance as the nucleus for the development of our tendencies in all America.

“We consider that the solution of the social and material problem of the painters and sculptors- of Mexico when identified with that of the other workers of the world will bring with it naturally the solution of their esthetic problem; for in this manner they will form active elements in the collective life to which until now they have not belonged; and whose work will for the same reason be the logical reflection of the popular genius…

“We call upon the Mexican painters and sculptors who are apart from our movement to abandon their legendary aspect of ‘artists’ outside the activity of society: who live from the vulgar taste of the new-rich, and by shameful political intrigue in all governments, thereby meriting the disrespect of the common people who call them drones because they feel intuitively that true art, the art collectively necessary and useful, is not that which the bourgeois minority likes.”

This document explains Rivera’s satisfaction in leaving Europe and a reputation, in refusing even an invitation from the Soviet government to decorate in Moscow, in order to come back to Mexico where he had been until two years ago only a shadowy name. Rivera holds that it is the yet non-industrial countries which today contain the seeds of revolt and revolution: India, China, Russia and Mexico. Mexico is a focal point for social revolution in the Americas; for, combined with Central America, it is the land of the greatest cultural and artistic tradition of the New World. The natives of Mexico are agrarian, unorganized, and conservative-that is to say they wish to revert to their old independent system of small and communal proprietorship. With respect to the capitalist and landlord systems of exploitation they are inherently revolutionary. And their revolt is more than economic. For to them, the pecuniary, as principal object in life, seems ugly. Basically their criteria are not moral but artistic; the Indians of the sierra do not call an object of disfavor “malo” or bad, but “feo, muy feo,” ugly, very ugly. Economically, esthetically, native Mexico is a land of protest against the metallic values of capitalist industrialism.

Rivera voices this protest in a paragraph of an article contributed to “Vida Mexicana,” organ of a group of Mexican intellectuals:

“And even though to men of false and superficial culture these Indian races and the mujik appear primitive and savage, in reality they are profoundly civilized-that is to say they are capable of harmonious relations between men and men, and between men and the earth. They are people capable of living and producing with beauty and order, and in consequence able to receive the true culture, the newest culture, which may, be successfully grafted only upon an already cultivated plant. So it results that the Indian man or woman of Yucatan is civilized, while a bourgeois man and woman, creoles of Mexico City, are absolute barbarians, and the case would be the same were they natives of New York. Indeed, the ancient civilizations have enabled their races to persist despite the false bourgeois ethnologist at Harvard University, Central America and Mexico were the home of one of four independent early civilizations, a civilization based on corn, whose people have left civilization which has just gone bankrupt with a human sacrifice of forty million lives-proof of barbarism greater than the world has ever seen.”

Recently Rivera wrote a pamphlet which was published by the Grupo Solidario del Movimiento Obrero, a group of intellectuals which has put its services as teachers, lawyers, artists, etc., at the disposal of organized labor. This pamphlet was addressed directly to the campesino or landworker. One of the obstacles to the carrying out of the Mexican agrarian program has been the opposition of the clergy who, working upon the religious superstitions of the campesinos, have in many instances told them that to accept a piece of land offered by the government was to reserve for themselves a nook in hell. Rivera, estimating that it will take generations to rationalize the Catholic peasantry, gathers in his pamphlet sayings of the Church Fathers (with precise references to book and page) which denounce the wickedness of the landlord system and establish clearly, the advocacy by primitive and historical Christianity of the communal owning and working of land. Printed to look like a religious tract, which basically it certainly is, and, with a cover drawing by Rivera showing Christ appearing in a vision to a plowman, the title page reads, “the repartition of land to the poor is not opposed to the teachings of; Our Savior, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Mother Church. The Mexican people fought and suffered ten years wishing, to realize the word of Our Master Jesus Christ.”

To Rivera then. the culture of the primitive races of Mexico was a higher culture than that of modern industrialism; it was a life of harmony and comparative peace within the social group. It was a life that gave opportunity for the satisfaction of primary human impulses and that released many people from drudgery to the life of art and to the art of human relationship. Revolution is today the slogan of a healthy individual; the healthy artist addresses himself to the discovery of his place in the hierarchy of labor as an adorner of things of common and communal use, as an integral factor in architecture. As a technician the painter· is a laborer, as an artist he is a visionary who feels and sees concretely what others appreciate but dimly and vaguely even though with overpowering force. So Rivera as artist does not preach but reveals; he stimulates and beckons to new beauties and new realities. His goal is the. mass spirit made articulate.

The Liberator was published monthly from 1918, first established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman continuing The Masses, was shut down by the US Government during World War One. Like The Masses, The Liberator contained some of the best radical journalism of its, or any, day. It combined political coverage with the arts, culture, and a commitment to revolutionary politics. Increasingly, The Liberator oriented to the Communist movement and by late 1922 was a de facto publication of the Party. In 1924, The Liberator merged with Labor Herald and Soviet Russia Pictorial into Workers Monthly. An essential magazine of the US left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1923/12/v6n12-w68-dec-1923-liberator-hr.pdf