Palacio Nacional Mexico City
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Diego Rivera Murals Page Two

George And Audrey DeLange

Diego Rivera the man is very different than Diego Rivera the artist. Rivera the political man is also of almost as much interest as Rivera the artist. The painter was a lifelong militant atheist and revolutionary Marxist. One day when Diego was 6 years old, he was taken to the Church of San Diego to pray to the Virgin Mary. When he walked in, anger took hold of him for he did not believe in god and found the religion to be a joke, eventually he could hold his feelings in no longer, and ran from his aunt to the altar. In a strong and confident voice, he addressed the following speech to the crowd: "......... Stupid people! You reek of dirt and stupidity!....If there really is a Holy Virgin or anyone up in the air, tell them to send lightening to strike me down ...If God doesn't stop me, then there must be no God. Get out of here! You see, there is no God! You're all stupid cows!" Diego's harsh words caused the people in the church to run out screaming that the devil had appeared. The people made sure to run home and shut their windows and doors against this evil force. Diego Rivera, even at the young age of 6, knew how to shock a crowd. A lifelong atheist, he experienced a "deathbed conversion" late in life. At age 70, Rivera marched into the Hotel del Prado and painted over the inscription "Dios no existe" on his controversial work, "Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda". He then held a press conference to proclaim his faith in Catholicism. As a human being, he was capable of great folly. He was a liar, a mythomaniac, an artificer. He could be devious and selfish. He was not always brave. His exuberant creativity was shared between his art and his public self. No artist wore so many masks of his own invention. There was the mask of Diego the Marxist Revolutionary. There was Diego the Womanizer. There was Diego the Archaeologist. And there were more: Diego the Biologist, Diego the Sophisticate, Diego the Union Leader, Diego the Bohemian, Diego the Propagandist, Diego the Art Critic. Of Diego Rivera it could be truly said that if you peeled away the mask you would find the mask underneath. He had done something that few artists have ever done: he’d given a nation an identity. Rivera put his stamp on Mexico the way Bernini placed his on Rome. It is impossible to think of Mexico today without also seeing the images of Diego Rivera. In his best mural paintings, he merged past, present, and future into dense, crowded visions of an essential Mexico. He drew on Mexican history, folk art, the discoveries of archaeology and other sciences. He mixed them in his own powerful imagination, refined by long years of apprenticeship in Europe, and made something that was not there before: a unifying, celebratory image of Mexico. In his art, he unified a people long fractured by history, language, racism, religious and political schism. He said in his art: you are all Mexico. Inside the palace there are murals painted by Diego Rivera, they were painted between 1929 and 1945. His México a Través de los Siglos (Mexico Through the Centuries), on the main stairwell leading to the first floor, depicts every major event and person of Mexican history, from Cortés’ conquest of the Aztecs and Mexico to the Mexican Revolution, all with Rivera’s typical Marxist twist. The most famous being the "Epic of the Mexican People in their Struggle for Freedom and Independence", which condenses two thousand years of history onto the space of a wall. Our favorite is "The Legend of Quetzalcoatl" which shows the famous tale of the feathered serpent bringing a blond-bearded white man to the country. When Cortés first arrived, many Aztecs, recalling this legend, believed him to be Quetzalcoatl. Soon they realized that he was anything but this beloved god. Another mural tells of the American Intervention when American invaders marched into Mexico City during the War of 1847. It was on this occasion that the military cadets of Chapultepec Castle (then a military school) fought bravely to the last man. The most notable of Rivera's murals is the Great City of Tenochtitlán, a study of the original settlement in the Valley of Mexico. Diego Rivera died in Mexico City two weeks before his seventy-second birthday. Date of his death is November 24, 1957. These pictures were taken January 12, 2005 and on January 18, 2005.

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