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Diego put a whole history of Mexico on the walls of the Education Building and the National Palace. The paintings are full of Marxism, but they owe much more to Diego's vision of a glorious golden age of Mexico before the Spanish conquest. Karl Marx's glowering visage crowns one mural, but it seems flat and lifeless beside the rich, raw portrait of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl. Perhaps more than the work of any other artist, writes Wolfe, these murals succeed in expressing "a land and an age."
Machines Like Nudes. The masses did not take to Diego's murals as they were supposed to. They dubbed his squat figures "monkeys" and coined an apt word to describe the murals: feismo (uglyism). In the presidential election campaign of 1923-24, one candidate made a promise to whitewash the murals, and others took up the cry. Diego's work was saved only by the critics. New York and French critics wrote such glowing reviews that Diego's fellow countrymen grudgingly gave in and agreed to live with the murals.
North of the border, Diego was the rage. In the 1930s, U.S. art was in the doldrums, and the Mexicans—Rivera, along with Orozco and Siqueiros—seemed fresh and exciting; here were artists with a social conscience. Diego was commissioned by Edsel Ford to paint murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts. In spite of his Communist beliefs, Rivera fell in love with U.S. industrial might and produced a massive mural of curving, convoluted machinery that has the sensuousness of nudes.
Next, Diego went to New York, at the invitation of young (then 25) Nelson Rockefeller, to paint a mural for the RCA building in Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller had been warned: Diego had once painted his grandfather, old John D., devouring ticker tape. RCA officials grew more and more nervous as they saw red flags and sickle-swinging workers taking shape before their eyes. When Lenin's face appeared. Nelson Rockefeller requested another face instead. Diego refused, and the "Battle of Radio City" was joined. In the words of Diego, "a platoon of sappers, hidden in ambush, charged upon the scaffold." They routed Diego and his "proletarian" assistants and draped the whole mural. Nine months later, the Rockefellers had the mural pounded to bits. U.S. capitalists had had enough of their Communist painter.
Diego returned to Mexico, where in time he mellowed—and so did his talent. He tried to make peace with his enemies, who by this time included almost everybody. In bad odor with the Communist Party for consorting with the capitalists, Diego got back in the party's good graces by doing a flattering portrait of Stalin. In 1956, the year before Diego's death, he journeyed to the Soviet Union, where he claimed he had been miraculously cured of cancer (he also reported witnessing a marvelous experiment in which a white man had been produced in the ninth generation of crossings between Negroes and Mongols).
The same year Diego made his peace with the church. One of his murals in Mexico City had been covered for years because of an atheistic inscription: "God Does Not Exist." At rush hour one evening, Diego ostentatiously mounted a scaffold and blotted out the words. "I am a Catholic," he announced from his perch to the startled throng below. Diego was a great ham to the end.