Word: rivera
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...dining room of Mexico City's unfinished Prado Hotel stood Muralist Diego Rivera, critically studying a wall. President Alemán himself had ordered that the city's toniest hotel be completed in time for November's UNESCO conference, and all around Rivera's paunchy figure carpenters and electricians bent noisily to the presidential will. But Rivera's own share of the work, he at last decided, was done. An assistant handed him a round brush wet with yellow paint, and Rivera quickly added a few touches. Then he thrust his soft little hands into...
Wedge workers are aggressively nonpolitical. They think that Mexico's Big Three (Orozco, Siqueiros and Rivera) put too much propaganda into their work. Art, according to the Wedge, should concern itself with "misery, mercy, and feelings coming out of people's entrails...
...went to work on the peasant life he knew, shaping it into raw-toned, spaciously planned pictures that were quickly acclaimed by Rio's intellectuals. Soon even Brazil's granfinos (upper crust), who disliked his serious works ("He paints big feet, he paints Negroes, he imitates Diego Rivera"), were commissioning him to paint their portraits, and Portinari obligingly turned out slick & sound conventional likenesses in the best School of Fine Arts manner. He made good money painting portraits of Helena Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Artur Rubinstein...
After years of fitful quarreling, Mexican art's Big Three were on speaking terms once again. Far into the night, in Mexico City, Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros sat gesticulating across their coffee in the California Bar. They strolled down Avenida Juarez together in broad daylight, waving their arms in amiable disagreement. They met for long confabs at Orozco's midtown house...
...over, the Big Three found themselves no longer close allies. Siqueiros, a red-hot Communist, wanted to declare war on "sterile" elements in the Mexican as well as the Paris School. The "folklorism" in Mexican painting is sissy stuff, he indicated, and that was a direct slap at Rivera, who had become deeply interested in Indian dances and folk art. Rivera plugged a plan to turn Mexico City into a great capital of art. To Orozco this meant turning Mexico City into a tourist trap. The three rewrote Manifesto II more than 15 times before publishing it last week. Then...