Tribeca Dispatch. 2.

Portrait of Diego: The Revolutionary Gaze, by Gabriel Figueroa Flores and Diego López Rivera, is a composite picture - a walk through Diego Rivera's work, reminiscences from Rivera's children and grandchildren of the rotund muralist who reigned over Mexican art, and an introduction to footage from a never-completed documentary made by Rivera with the extraordinary photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo and the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (who shot Los Olvidados and other films with Luis Buñuel).

Rivera is the kind of cultural figure that doesn't exist in our times. After studying in Paris and passing through impressionism, cubism and other styles, he returned to Mexico to make Mexico his canvas, to paint so many of its walls - literally - that he would depict himself coyly as an architect in the vast murals that he made of Mexico's history and folklore. Rivera so dominated Mexican art during his lifetime - overshadowing his muralist peers David Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco and his dutiful mournful wife, Frida Kahlo - that our images of Mexico in the 20th century are more often than not drawn from some image that Diego Rivera made of fruit, flowers, Indians or conquistadors. In a country that called its political party the Institutional Party of the Revolution, Rivera was the institutional artist.

The new doc by Rivera's granbdson and Figueroa's son personalizes the man who looked like a cross between Buddha and a toad - and who painted himself unflatteringly as just that again and again. Rivera knew that his strength wasn't his appearance; it was his skill at creating inspirational evocative appearances that seduced (almost) an entire population - from a pampered cultured class that wanted to seem close to the "people," to ordinary Mexicans, mostly illiterate, who could view his grand paintings and read the imagery in the way that medieval European peasants could experience stained-glass windows.

In the doc from 50 years ago that snakes through the new doc like a twisted spine, Rivera is filmed sketching, like a portly Mexican Alfred Hitchcock with a notebook and a big hat. We've already seen pictures of Rivera the man. What he's looking at is what catches your eye - luminous scenes in which Indian women (dressed in the clothes that Frida Kahlo would later wear) are carrying the same white lilies that you see in Rivera's paintings. (Alvarez Bravo had already observed the Mexican landscape in black and white still photographs - some magical, some achingly severe.) Rivera, the star, ended up directing the movie, but died in 1957 before a final version was finished.

Rivera, it turns out, was fascinated by photography, even jealous of the new medium that Edward Weston used so effectively with nudes. You can imagine that a man of appetites like Rivera would envy the tactility of Weston's pictures. The muralist is quoted as saying that if the Spanish 17th century painter Diego Velásquez were working in the 20th century, he would be a photographer - quite a remark for a painter who never let himself be tied down to realism.

Given Rivera's stature in Mexican history, the doc tries to minimize Diego-worship, with mixed results. We are told that Orozco called him a "player piano," among other things, presumably for the volume of repetitive work that Rivera produced. And we see that Mexican art, especially film and photography, went beyond Rivera, into realism (which the government found hard to tolerate when it dealt with poverty) and surrealism (which explored the nightmarish side of Rivera's folkloric reveries.)

Let's not forget that Rivera and Kahlo were shameless Stalinists, which we hear nothing about in Portrait of Diego. But isn't that how Stalin wanted to be depicted, as an amiable grandfather?

More on Tribeca here.

Posted by dwhudson at April 26, 2008 5:35 AM