Art: Diego Stays Home

In Mexico City last week Diego Rivera, longtime Communist sympathizer, was brushing in the finishing strokes on a new mural. Its title: The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace. Rivera called it “the best thing I have ever done”; it was, at any rate, one of the most violent.

In the center panel, the mushroom cloud of an atomic-bomb explosion rose over scenes of destruction, flint-faced firing squads in U.S. uniforms, crucified and gibbeted North Koreans. At the left stood a benign Stalin, filially flanked by a boyish Mao Tse-tung, who held out the Red dove of peace to three glum cartoon villains—a gun-toting, Bible-clutching Uncle Sam, a fist-clenching John Bull, and a somewhat hung-over Marianne.

Rivera’s latest work, with its unctuous Uncle Joe, brought back memories of the famous mural he painted for Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center in 1933. Diego entered the Communist martyrology when the Rockefeller management paid him for the mural but destroyed it because it glorified Lenin and Communism. Last week Rivera was making martyr sounds again: the Mexican government had commissioned his latest mural (on movable panels) as part of a big exhibit of Mexican art to be shown in Paris this May. After a good, hard look at The Nightmare of War and the Dream of Peace, the government announced that it would exhibit the picture in Mexico, but would not send it to Paris. Ruled Carlos Chávez, director of government-sponsored fine-arts projects: “It contains grave political charges against various foreign nations.”

“Censorship,” cried Rivera. He threatened not to let any of his easel paintings go to Paris either.