In 1923, Manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors is published in El Machete, stating a centralized motive behind and trajectory for the ‘Mexican Mural Renaissance’ of the 1920s. Signed by Diego Rivera and several of his contemporaries, the manifesto exhibits how the creators rally behind the indigenous peasants and working class, rejecting the bourgeois and heavily-saturated European influence within Mexico. Essentially, these creators argued for collectivist and political artistry, in opposition to individualist and solely decorative pieces.
When taking Rivera’s participation in the aforementioned manifesto and his influence in the social realism movement, his Portrait of Marevna c. 1915 is vulnerable to the assumption of being an outlier to Rivera’s more well-known style and to the reduction of being merely evidence of experimentation. Though Portrait of Marevna cannot be linked at first glance to the politically charged, indigenismo-influenced work he created during the Mexican Mural Movement of the 1920s, inklings of this era are present within the portrait’s construction.
This paper explores how Portrait of Marevna embodies the spirit of the Diego’s work in the Mexican Mural Movement, through its familiar subject matter, harmonious coloration, and collectivist cubism. Before any deep contextual reading into Portrait of Marevna occurs, a description of the piece’s basic format is necessary. Measuring in at 145. 7 cm by 112. 7 cm, the piece is relatively large work of oil on canvas. Though Portrait of Marevna is a painting, it may not give the initial appearance of being so, due to Rivera’s adoption of synthetic cubism.
Rivera layers color contrasted, geometric shapes, to construct the illusion of not only a collaged-work but also the illusion of figures and depth. These geometric shapes are manipulated by Rivera to reveal the female figure at the center of the painting. Her head takes the form of a triangle imprinted with a frown and a squinting expression, perhaps suggesting an unfavorable view of this woman on part of Rivera. Underneath the woman is a cool-toned male figure, contrasting with warm and earth tones that dominate the rest of the painting.
Unlike the female, the male’s expression is unreadable, his body is reduced to a single color and renders him more as a shadow than a figure with emotion. Beneath both their bodies rests an arm chair, supporting the contorted couple’s weight. Starting with the barebones of the portrait, the subject matter of Portrait of Marevna is personal and familiar to Rivera, evoking notions of the movement towards local culture post-Mexican Revolution. Marevna, the cubist rendition of the woman at the center of the piece, is the nickname for Rivera’s former Russian mistress, known as Maria Vorobyov-Stebelska.
Rivera is not a stranger to suggesting a personal nature in his work, often depicting his wife Frida Kahlo in murals such as in Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park c. 1947 and in In the Arsenal c. 1928. Accurately noted by Jose Pierre, Diego Rivera’s venture into Cubism is, “a very personal Cubism, austere and solid both in construction and colour. ” Furthermore, Marevna is familiar to Rivera, as local culture is familiar to the Mexican people.
Prior to the Revolution, the reigning dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, perpetuates favoritism for European artistic endeavors and constructs many Neo-Classical style monuments and buildings. Under Porfiriato, Mexico is opulent and refined with innovative construction across the country; however, the working class, indigenous and peasantry suffer abuses as a result of the new modernization. This of course results in the Mexican Revolution and the overthrow of the Porfiriato in 1910, opening the floodgates for the muralist movement and a local sense of national identity.
With the election of General Alvaro Obregon in 1921 and Jose Vasconcelos as Minister of Public Education, the muralists are given a space on walls and in education to become the proprietors of the indigenous and working class, contrasting greatly with the European academic teachings of the former Academy of San Carlos that begins to lose power as the muralists grow. The European influences of yesteryear are of foreign origins to the Mexican people, who now hunger for local representation in conjunction with social-justice efforts.
Therefore, the parallel can be drawn to Portrait of Marevna, who is familiar to Rivera as is his depiction of laborers in In the Arsenal are familiar to himself and the Mexican people. Furthermore, Portrait of Marevna demonstrates Rivera’s apt use of color juxtaposition to convey a sense of harmony, which he popularly manipulates in his later work to highlight the serenity of indigenous peoples and culture. In Portrait of Marenva, in order to render his figures as readable, Rivera must juxtapose colors in a way that is balanced.
This general clarity in the subject’s rendering is elicited from purposeful placement of colors that will generate great contrast. This is demonstrated in the female figure excellently, most notably in her neck, which is sliced into two black and white wedges to give the appearance of shadow and her turned head. Rivera is able to create vast contrast without sacrificing any aesthetic pleasure, demonstrating, “…a basic palette of earth colours and black, set off with carefully placed bright colours. This coexisting of contrast and a stylized palette, therefore, produces an effect of harmony that rings true in many of his later pieces, such as in Flower Festival c. 1925. In conjunction with the darker skinned figures, Rivera combines eye-catching whites and vibrant pinks evenly across the canvas in Flower Festival, allowing the viewer to drift to many points of focus and again, evoking a sense of compositional harmony. This suggestion of harmony when coupled with the darker skinned figures, renders the local ethnic scene as bordering utopic.
To portray figures of indigenous heritage or mestizaje as being utopic, is to suggest superiority in this division of Mexican society and thus, being linked to the El Machete manifesto and the ideology of the muralist movement that celebrated the indigenous past. Rivera’s utilization of stylistic contrast in Portrait of Marevna is almost necessary to portray the subjects with clarity in the cubism mode that Rivera took on. Therefore, through working with contrast in cubism, Rivera honed in on his ability to effectively manipulate color, which he utilized in his later years to create allegorical pieces uplifting Mexican’s indigenous past.
As a whole, the entire construction and execution of cubism as a genre explored by Rivera can be connected to the mural movement in the 1920s due to it being a collectivist genre at its core. Rivera showed great artistic potential in his earlier years, allowing for him to attend the Academy of San Carlos and to garner, “a travel grant to Europe, and in 1907 he went to Spain, settling in Paris two years later. ” It is in Paris where Rivera witnesses the workings of cubism in its birthplace, meeting household cubist names like Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris.
The innovative genre makes an impression on Rivera, enough to make him weary of the traditional and Neoclassical teachings he received at the Academy of San Carlos. This exposure to cubism, a foreign genre to Mexico, perhaps planted the seeds of Rivera’s later descent into a style that was, “not unlike that used by the Mayas and the Aztecs: he painted in broad bands, one laid above the other, and using no perspective, he created an effect of depth, both in physical space and symbolically in time.
Furthermore, the construction of a cubist piece like that of Portrait of Marevna, is inherently collectivist in its assembly. It requires the artists to synthesize a variety of differing parts into a single coagulated piece, being reminiscent of the inclusivity of the collectivist movement mentioned in the El Machete manifesto. There is a multitude of factors that count against Portrait of Marevna for being considered as representative of Diego Rivera’s signature social realist style. For example, portraiture is inherently an individualist medium, differing greatly from collectivist murals.
Moreover, cubism is a European invention and the subject matter is devoid of the political flare that brightens Rivera’s social-realist murals. Though these claims ring true, the progress and alignment with the politics of Rivera’s later years evident in Portrait of Marevna are parallels of sublety. Portrait of Marevna does not fully subscribe to the criteria laid out by the El Machete manifesto, however, it provides the groundwork for it to blossom into something as prosperous and promising as the calla lilies in Rivera’s Flower Festival.
