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Diego Rivera’s First Peasant

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/695756

2328-207X

Kathryn E. O’Rourke,

Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeDiego Rivera’s First PeasantKathryn E. O’RourkeKathryn E. O’Rourke Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFifteen years before Diego Rivera’s idealized depictions of Mexican peasants in fresco helped make him one of the most famous artists in the world, he rendered them in oil as a student in the atelier of Catalan painter Antonio Fabrés Costa at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. In 1904 Rivera created El Albañil (The Builder or The Bricklayer), an oil-on-canvas figure study of an unidentified man, which, for many decades, was considered lost (fig. 1).1 The full-length portrayal resembles a portrait and depicts the model in his own clothes: a loose white linen suit, brown leather sandals, a blue serape, and a broad-brimmed straw hat. Unsmiling and unsentimental, the man looks directly at the viewer with his weight balanced on both legs. His right hand rests on his hip, and he leans lightly on a shovel propped on the floor in front of a wooden bucket. The man’s furrowed brow, direct gaze, and drooping black mustache command attention, and the position of his right hand reinforces the sense of self-assuredness conveyed by his firmly planted feet and almost confrontational expression. Rivera rendered the figure in a postimpressionist style, which other Mexican artists explored around 1900 as well. It was one of several Rivera tried as a student. His individuation of the subject and style did not anticipate his later frescoes, and the canvas bears no ideological critique of President Porfirio Diaz’s government, which controlled the Academy.Fig. 1. Diego Rivera (1886–1957), El Albañil, 1904, Mexico. Oil on canvas, 85.4 × 55.6 cm. San Antonio Museum of Art, on loan from Pagent and H. Rugeley Ferguson, Jr., in honor of Rugeley and Kittie Ferguson, Kittie and Charles Schreiner, Jr., L. 2013.17. © 2017 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Peggy Tenison.Yet El Albañil was Rivera’s first important portrayal of a member of the working class, and it illuminates the controversies at the Academy during Rivera’s time there, particularly Fabrés’s use of photography. The canvas shows the continued importance of costumbrista imagery from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries in Mexican art, and reflects the interplay of painting and architecture that continued throughout Rivera’s career and formed the tumultuous backdrop to his studies.2 Having been created during a period of upheaval at the Academy, the canvas helps reveal the workings of one of the hemisphere’s major art schools as it modernized and as Mexico City was transformed more radically than it had been since the sixteenth century.3Until the 1990s, El Albañil was known only from a reproduction in a 1904 review of a student art exhibition at the Academy by Mexican critic José Juan Tablada.4 The painting was likely purchased from the artist by a Texas collector in Mexico City in the 1920s, but it reappeared in public only in 1998, after its owner requested help from a curator at the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) to authenticate it. Although the painting was damaged, the curator suspected it was genuine and referred the owner to Rivera scholar Ramón Favela, who identified it as the lost work.5 After extensive restoration, El Albañil hung in SAMA and then was shown briefly at the McNay Art Museum. Thereafter, the painting again disappeared from public view, only to resurface in 2012 on the Antiques Roadshow television program, having been brought to a filming in Corpus Christi, Texas, by its new owner. El Albañil is now on long-term loan to SAMA and is probably the earliest Rivera canvas in the United States.In his 1904 review, Tablada also reproduced a very different depiction of the same sitter by Rivera’s classmate Roberto Montenegro, made during the same studio exercise (fig. 2). Unlike Rivera, Montenegro stood behind and to the left of the model, facing the man’s left leg, left arm, and the back of his serape, which cloaked his right arm. Rather than the sitter’s face, the viewer sees the side and back of his hat. The head of the shovel is almost entirely hidden by the bucket, only the top third of which is visible in the lower left corner. Although they stand farther back in the picture plane, the shovel and bucket in Rivera’s painting seem more prominent than in Montenegro’s: both implements are fully visible and occupy their own space rather than being crowded against the edges of the composition. In this way, Rivera, unlike Montenegro, draws attention to the objects as props and symbols. Both painters depict shadows and depth, but Rivera suggests the presence of a corner behind the figure, locating him in an interior space. Montenegro, by contrast, provides no clue about the model’s location. Tablada praised Rivera’s color and technique. Although Tablada remarked on the “airiness,” “elegance,” and “poetic” quality of Montenegro’s painting, he lamented that the work lacked “truth” and “power.”6Fig. 2. Roberto Montenegro (1885–1968), El Albañil, 1904, Mexico. Oil on canvas, dimensions and location unknown. © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOMAAP, Mexico City. Image from Tablada, “El ‘Salon’ de Alumnos en Bellas Artes,” Revista moderna de México (December 1904).Peasants had been the subjects of Mexican art for several decades by the time Rivera and Montenegro entered the Academy. Both painters’ canvases belong to the artistic tradition of representing Mexican “types,” although Rivera’s exemplifies the genre more completely. His subject’s frontality, the greater prominence of the props, and the interior location make the scene seem more obviously posed than Montenegro’s. Artists depicted peasants regularly in eighteenth-century casta paintings, which were visual taxonomies of race and class. In the mid-1850s, the prints in the book The Mexicans Depicted by Themselves codified thirty-five “types,” who were chiefly urban working- or middle-class people distinguished by their professional or social roles. At the same time, costumbrista (or genre scene) drawings, prints, and paintings portrayed peasants in “typical” Mexican settings, such as markets, often wearing traditional regional dress. Costumbrista imagery became further popularized in the third quarter of the century by Antíoco Cruces and Luis Campa, who ran a photography studio in Mexico City from 1862 to 1877. There they created cartes-de-visite of approximately eighty Mexican “types” by posing working-class Mexicans with props recognizable as the tools of specific trades. The photographs were frequently identified only with the name of the sitter’s occupation, such as “Fisher,” “Tamale Maker,” or “Soldier.”7 Since Rivera’s El Albañil has no specific context and was an uncommissioned depiction of an unnamed figure, it was neither a genre painting nor a true portrait. With its obviously staged quality, prominent props, and as a depiction of a Mexican “type,” the painting recalls the Cruces y Campa photographs much more pointedly than Montenegro’s work.With the ascendency of history and landscape painting in Mexican art in the late nineteenth century, costumbrista imagery fell out of favor in the Academy. Rivera’s teacher, Fabrés, however, helped revive the tradition after he joined the faculty in 1902.8 Controversially, he used photography to help achieve the intense realism in painting for which he was known, and served as director of photography at the Academy.9 Brought to Mexico to help reinvigorate academic painting, Fabrés famously dressed sitters in costumes from his large wardrobe and staged dramatic, complicated, multi-figure compositions.10 His collection of props included medieval armor, weapons, military uniforms, tapestries, and Oriental rugs.11 In February of 1904, he exacerbated tensions with the school’s director, architect Antonio Rivas Mercado, whose position he sought. Fabrés had students sign a letter, whose contents they could not see, that supported the separation of the school of architecture from that of painting, sculpture, and engraving, and requested Fabrés’s promotion. Rivera was one of two students who refused to sign. In the resulting upheaval Fabrés stormed out of the Academy, taking his legendary wardrobe with him. But his props had become so integral to instruction that their loss caused Rivas Mercado to write with consternation to Mexico’s education minister that “students have been drawing from the model just as he happens to be; that is, in the clothing of the lower classes to which he belongs.”12 As Favela suggested, it was likely during Fabrés’s absence that Rivera painted El Albañil, a contention supported by the discrepancy between the painting’s title and its composition.13Although a bricklayer might use a bucket, the conventions of costumbrista imagery dictated that he hold a trowel, rather than a shovel. It is unclear what the source of the painting’s title is (the canvas carried its current title in Tablada’s 1904 review). It is likely that in attempting to carry on instruction in figure painting without Fabrés’s props, teachers gathered whatever objects they could find around the building for their now very simply dressed sitters. The few props and the incongruity of the tools with the title draw attention to the model’s dress and his face in a way that must have been striking for viewers accustomed to costumbrista painting and the Cruces y Campa photographs, as Rivas Mercardo’s comment implies. That he felt compelled to inform the education minister of the situation in the studios suggests that frank depictions of the working class in portrait-like oil paintings had destabilizing effects on academic norms and expectations.The same year Rivera painted El Albañil, he combined the lesson of his experience of painting a peasant “just as he happen[ed] to be” with landscape, the genre in which he was considered most accomplished.14 Although José Maria Velasco influenced Rivera’s development as a landscape painter more, he also studied landscape with Fabrés, who took students to draw and paint at semi-rural sites at the edges of Mexico City. Rivera’s painting, La Era, depicts a lone peasant holding the reins of two workhorses in the stables of a hacienda (fig. 3). Beyond the walls, fields lead to gently rising yellow hills with a giant snow-capped mountain in the distance. As in El Albañil, the peasant in La Era wears a serape and a straw hat. However, the figure turns to the side, away from the viewer, in a pose that more closely resembled the model’s in Montenegro’s El Albañil.Fig. 3. Diego Rivera (1886–1957), La Era, 1904, Mexico. Oil on canvas, 100 × 114.6 cm. Museo Casa Diego Rivera (INBA), Guanajuato, Mexico, Marte R. Gomez Collection. © 2017 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Bridgeman Images.The formal similarities among the three peasants and the discrepancy between “El Albañil” as a title, the props of its sitter, and the setting of La Era indicate that in 1904 Rivera was a sophisticated observer of urban change. “El Albañil” can be translated as “builder” or “bricklayer.” The peasant of La Era is in the place where, because he is an agricultural worker, we expect to find him. “Bricklayer,” however, calls to mind the urban worker, and, in the context of early twentieth-century Mexico City, the laborers who constructed new buildings throughout the growing metropolis. Rivera’s other early paintings show that he regularly traveled in and around the capital, where he would have seen firsthand Mexico City’s architectural boom and its sprawl, and perceived the erosion of clear distinctions between urban and rural Mexico that accompanied it. Around 1900 men who dressed as Rivera’s sitter embodied the juxtaposition of cosmopolitan and provincial life in the capital, to which many had come to work only recently.The same year Rivera painted El Albañil, he also created some of his strongest early landscapes, including Paseo de los melancólicos, which depicted the grounds of the mental asylum in Mixcoac, then on the southwestern edge of the capital. Another painting, now lost, showed Paseo de la Reforma, where new houses and neighborhoods for the Porfirian elite were rising rapidly. He also portrayed Mexico’s new national cemetery in Chapultepec Park. In moving through the city to reach sites like these in 1904, Rivera traveled from the newly-renovated Academy building in the colonial center, past the construction site of the iron-framed National Theatre, and toward the suburbs where new houses and institutions were rising. The contrast implied by the building by peasants of new works in up-to-date styles with modern materials must have been striking to the artist. In these years one of his close friends was the architect Jesús Acevedo, who was among early twentieth-century Mexico’s most thoughtful writers on history, architecture, and the role of indigenous people in Mexican art.15 The transformation of the capital was surely among the topics he and Rivera discussed.Although brick was not a significant building material historically in Mexico City, it was a signature material during the Porfiriato, when public and private patrons sought to modernize the city by using styles popular abroad to differentiate new works from Mexico’s colonial architecture. Large brick-clad houses in eclectic and revival styles were popular among the rich and stood in or near many of the places where Rivera painted his early landscapes. One of the most prominent was in Mixcoac and belonged to the brother of José Yves Limantour, Diaz’s powerful finance minister who had brought Fabrés to Mexico. Architects also used brick on new institutional buildings, such as schools and asylums, built to advance the goals of Porfirian positivism, and governmental ones, including the guard house at the military school in Chapultepec Park (1898) and the Office of Roads building (1880), located at a prominent traffic circle on Paseo de la Reforma.In part because Rivera sought a scholarship to study in Europe at this time, his work largely conformed to Porfirian expectations.16 But through his unsentimental depiction of a peasant who would have been understood as a builder of works that embodied Porfirian tastes and that were radically altering the capital, Rivera alluded to the dynamics of urban transformation in a way unexpected in an academic exercise. The contrast between his El Albañil and Montenegro’s version is striking in this respect. Ultimately Rivera’s albañil was a rural worker on the verge of becoming an urban one: a person in the midst of change, like the Academy and the city. As the descendent of the figures in costumbrista paintings and prints and those in Cruces y Campa’s cartes-de-visite, but one marked by the naturalism associated with Fabrés, he bridged nineteenth-century depictions of peasants and the often-politicized versions of them that appeared in coming decades.Notes1. The painting had been reproduced in some publications. Fausto Ramírez, “Aesthetic Horizons in Mexico at the Turn of the Twentieth-Century: The Learning Years of Diego Rivera,” in Diego Rivera: Art & Revolution (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1999), 54–55. Diego Rivera: catálogo general de obra de cabllete (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1989), 13.2. Rafael López Rangel, Diego Rivera y la arquitectura mexicana (Mexico City: SEP, Dirección General de Publicaciones y Medio, 1986).3. On the National School of Fine Arts, see Eduardo Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes: Antigua Academia de San Carlos, 1781–1910 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2009).4. José Juan Tablada, “El ‘Salon’ de Alumnos en Bellas Artes,” Revista Moderna de México (December 1904): 206–12.5. Ramon Favela’s study of Rivera’s early development remains the definitive work on that period of the artist’s career: “‘Rivera Cubista’: A Critical Study of the Early Career of Diego Rivera, 1898–1921” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1984). I thank Marion Oettinger for generously sharing his knowledge of the painting’s history.6. Tablada, “El ‘Salon,’” 209.7. Patricia Massé Zendejas, Simulacro y Elegancia en tarjetas de vista: fotografías de Cruces y Campa (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1998), 110–25.8. Favela, “Rivera Cubista,” 82.9. Ibid., 73.10. Favela (“Rivera Cubista”) provides perhaps the most thorough account of Fabrés and his influence, 68–85.11. Ibid., 73.12. Quoted in Jean Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785–1915 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 149–50.13. Favela, “Rivera Cubista,” 82–84.14. Jesus Acevedo said that Rivera was “above all, a landscape painter.” Quoted in ibid., 167.15. Jesús T. Acevedo, Disertaciones de un arquitecto (Mexico City: Ediciones México Moderno, 1920). Rivera’s cubist painting El Arquitecto (1915) depicts Acevedo.16. Favela, “Rivera Cubista,” 54–55. 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