Word: frescoing
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...subject is a certain Don Ascencio Julia, who was the painter's, only real pupil and of whom Goya did two other portraits. He assisted his master in at least one large fresco and left a few works of no great importance. But he had the right personality to make a good subject for the great artist...
Rubenstein employed the "true fresco" technique for the murals, a method used by the great Italian masters of the Renaissance. In this style the painting is done directly on the damp, freshly plastered wall. Since the plaster remains damp only for about fourteen hours, the artist must work quickly and must plan his work carefully day by day. He must plaster only as large an area as he can complete in a single day's work. The pigment employed in the "true fresco" technique is mixed with slaked lime and water, while the retouching of the various seams made...
Probably the ablest, certainly the best known living fresco painter is paunchy Diego Rivera, twice a member of the Communist Party, once expelled for disobedience. Because the owner of the Hotel Reforma, Alberto J. Pani, onetime Mexico's Secretary of Finance, was a friend, Artist Rivera agreed to decorate his hotel for 4,000 pesos, just enough to pay his expenses...
Muralist Rivera contributed a series of brilliant panels in true fresco of oppressed Indians, galloping bandits, donkey-faced professors, starving peons. One panel expressed Muralist Rivera's opinion of dictatorships, showed a gawping creature with the Roosevelt smile, Mussolini chin, Hitler brow and mustache, waving a flag composed of the Nazi, U. S. and Japanese colors. Below him an officer in Mexican uniform with a calf's head was dancing with an Indian woman...
Hotel Keeper Pani waited for the fresco to dry and set, then with superficial overpainting removed the calf-faced officer, changed the colors of the flag, changed the features of the composite dictator. Muralist Rivera once had an entire fresco panel by Jean Chariot chopped off a Mexican wall because it did not match his own work on the same building, but when his mural in Manhattan's Rockefeller Center was destroyed two years ago (TIME, Feb. 26, 1934 et ante), he raised such a howl that sympathizers enabled him to repaint it in Mexico City's Palace...