Word: riveras
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Diego Rivera's new mural in a Mexico City hotel had stirred up a tequila tempest: the Archbishop refused to bless the hotel because the mural in the dining room contained the words "God does not exist" (TIME, June 14). Last week the ideological brew boiled over, and some of it spilled on the painting...
Zealous students had tried to get rid of the offending words, but Rivera had simply painted them back in. Two days later some other zealot sneaked to the Del Prado Hotel, scraped out the words once more, and added three long scratches to Rivera's portrait of himself as a boy. At that, the government stepped in, boarded up the dining room with three thicknesses of heavy lumber, and assigned it a 24-hour police guard...
...Rivera's fiery colleague, Muralist David Siqueiros, offered a more subtle solution. Hire a Catholic painter, he suggested, to paint a mural alongside Rivera's, with the words "God is omniscient." Nobody in Siqueiros' atheistic, revolutionary crowd would touch it, he promised. The offer went untaken...
Under the law, the hotel could not touch the mural. It was government property, in charge of the President's committee on mural painting, which happened to consist of Rivera himself, and two sympathetic colleagues: Orozco and Siqueiros. But there was no law, the hotel decided, against veiling the mural with a vast white cloth...
...cloth was swept aside one night last week by more than a hundred young students, who raided the hotel dining room and scratched out Rivera's little blasphemy with table knives. Rivera was dining, meanwhile, two blocks down the street. After a leisurely meal he marched over to the hotel, climbed up on a chair and painted the offending words right back in again...