Abstract
It is my intention to demonstrate that the intellectual context of the 1938 Manifesto: Towards A Free Revolutionary Art was collaborative, with Leon Trotsky, Diego Rivera and André Breton each making important contributions to its content.1 My approach will focus in on works of art since I am an art historian and since the two signatories to the manifesto were artists, but I will also bring in the writings of Trotsky. Much of my evidence is visual and I hope to shed some light on the tensions and rivalries between Rivera and Breton. In so doing, we need to trace developments of earlier decades. Furthermore, we cannot omit the personal relations between the three couples — Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova, Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Breton and Jacqueline Lamba — who spent so much time together in the Spring and Summer of 1938. When he wrote to Herschel B. Chipp, in 1962, clarifying the authorship of this Manifesto, Breton was the only one of the three men involved still alive.2 He had a vested interest — both in his prewar role as “Pope of Surrealism” and in his postwar role as public intellectual — in claiming that he and Trotsky wrote it and that Rivera “took no part in its inception.” By that time, Breton may have also harbored some residual animosity towards his friend and host Rivera, who (after 1941) had made his peace with the Stalinists and had been allowed to rejoin the Mexican Communist Party in 1955.
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Notes
André Breton and Diego Rivera, “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” Translated by Dwight Macdonald, in Partisan Review (Vol. 6, no. 1) Fall 1938, pp. 49–53. Also see “Leon Trotsky to André Breton” in Partisan Review (Vol. 6, no. 2) Winter 1939, pp. 126–127. Dawn Ades, “Rivera and Surrealism in Mexico, 1938–1940,” in Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes/The Cleveland Museum of Art/Landucci Editores, 1999), pp. 314–315, uses quotations from an English translation other than Macdonald’s.
Herschel B. Chipp (Editor), Theories of Modern Art. A Source Book by Artists and Critics. With Contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1968) pp. 483–486, reprints the Macdonald translation. Chipp, p. 457, n. 1, cites Breton’s La Clé des champs (Paris: Sagittaire, 1953) p. 40. Ades, pp. 313–315, briefly mentions the collaboration between Breton and Trotsky and then discusses the Manifesto as if it had been written by Breton. Also see, Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp. 461–464, who includes Rivera at first, but then focuses on the actual writing of the text of the manifesto by Trotsky and Breton.
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), p. 240. This book originally appeared in 1924. Compare Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Trotsky (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1977), pp. 271–275, for an overview of Trotsky’s ideas on art and the revolution between 1920 and 1924. Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics. A Letter to the Editors of Partisan Review” in Partisan Review (Vol. 5, no. 3) August-September 1938, pp. 3–10, incorporates some of the ideas he had been working out during his exile; the letter is dated June 18, 1938. Trotsky’s letter to Breton (cited above in n. 1), also gives us some insight into his ideas about art and revolution. Moreover, see Dwight Macdonald, “Trotsky is Dead. An Attempt at an Appreciation,” in Partisan Review (Vol. 7, no. 5) 1940, pp. 339–353, esp. pp. 345–347, on Trotsky’s literary style.
A photo essay in Evergreen Review no. 46 (April 1967), illustrates several of these posters. Also see, David Elliott, New Worlds: Russian Art and Society. 1900–1937 (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), pp. 74 and 75; and Robert C. Williams, Artists in Revolution. Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1905–1925 (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977).
Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, The Eternal Revolutionary (New York: The Free Press, 1991), pp. 51–52, and Payne, p. 129, on Trotsky’s association with Adler in Vienna (before 1916) and his sophistication. Also see Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson, Lenin’s Embalmers. Translated from the French by Barbara Bray (London: The Harvill Press, 1999), p. 11, for Trotsky’s objections to making an icon of Lenin by preserving his body.
Patrick Marnham, Dreaming With His Eyes Open. A Life of Diego Rivera (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 201–202, who states that Rivera was sympathetic to the Union of Former Icon Painters at Moscow; compare the references in Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life. An Autobiography (with Gladys March) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960, repr. 1991), pp. 87–94; and in Bertram D. Wolfe, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Stein and Day, 1963), pp. 221–224 and 421. Neither Rivera’s autobiography nor Wolfe’s biography should be taken as authoritative. Both accounts omit too much and have to be corroborated by other sources. For additional biographies of the artist, see David Craven, Diego Rivera as Epic Modernist (New York: G. K. Hall and Co., 1997); Pete Hamill, Diego Rivera (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000), Andrea Kettermann, Diego Rivera, 1886–1957. A Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1997), and Laurance P. Hurlburt, “Diego Rivera (1886–1957): A Chronology of His Art, Life and Times,” in Detroit Institute of Arts, Diego Rivera. A Retrospective (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986), pp. 22–115. These works each include excellent bibliographies.
William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, exhibition catalogue (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968), pp. 208–209, and Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism (London: Phaidon, 1997), pp. 299–301. Also, see Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party. Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 166–167, for Rivera’s responses (1932) to the “direct and undisguised refutation of Trotsky’s 1924 pronouncements on the place of art in revolution,” and pp. 168–170, for how George Grosz and Max Eastman responded to the Kharkov Conference.
Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. viii and 22–23; and Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 108–112. Marnham, pp. 46–47, 75, and 143; and Kettermann, Diego Rivera, pp. 9–11, further elaborate on Dr. Atl’s influence on the young artist.
Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 108–113; and Marnham, pp. 141–148. When one visits Frida Kahlo’s studio in the Casa Azul, Faure’s books are visible among those on the bookshelves.
Marnham, pp. 143–144.
Trotsky’s personal taste in art was somewhat conservative, but unlike his politburo contemporaries Trotsky sat for a portrait by Yuri Annenkov in the “cubo-futurist” style in 1923. For this now lost work, which was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1924, see David King, The Commissar Vanishes. The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), pp. 92–93. When it came to Red Army posters, Trotsky was aware, however, that traditional religious images were linked to the peasant culture and would be more “accessible” to prospective recruits, as we have seen above. It is a mistake to assume that Trotsky was an adherent of Prolekult or of Socialist Realism, as Payne does. For Prolekult, see Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin Putnam, Inc., 1997), pp. 435, 737, 742, and 745; and John E. Bowlt (editor), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde. Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934. Revised and Enlarged Edition (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), pp. xxxiv and 176–182.
The proletariat were primarily urban workers, although it was governmental policy to pro-letarize the agrarian laborers (or peasants); see Figes, pp. 594–603, especially 596–597 and 600–601. During the Civil War, great numbers of men recruited into the Red Army were from the cities rather than from the countryside. However, in 1919, the Red Army grew to some three million men, mostly from the countryside, many of whom deserted to return to their farms or to join the counterrevolutionaries. Here, we can see how his conversations with Adler shaped how Trotsky directed propaganda to specific audiences. Even if he was not always successful, Trotsky was a subtler, and more dangerous, propagandist than Stalin. Compare Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution. The Overthrow of Tzarism and The Triumph of the Soviets. Selected and Edited by F. W Dupee from The History of the Russian Revolution [in Russian, 1931] trans. Max Eastman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959 [1932]), especially Chapter 3, “The Proletariat and the Peasantry.”
Antonio Saborit, “Diego Rivera Among His Own,” in Art and Revolution, pp. 195–216, esp. 206–216.
For these, see Diego Rivera. A Retrospective, pp. 241–251. Marnham, p. 188, quotes from Anthony Blunt’s article on Rivera: “If Medieval art was the Bible of the Illiterate, Rivera’s frescos [at the Secretariat of Public Education] are the Kapital of the Illiterate.” He does not cite the source of this quotation. Wolfe, Fabulous Life, p. 440, lists the Blunt article in Section VIII of his Selected Bibliography.
For Trotsky’s ideas on agit-prop (one of the tools of Socialist Realism), see Trotsky, “Art and Politics,” pp. 5–7. McCloskey (as cited in n. 9 above), pp. 166–167, especially in the quotation on p. 167, recounts Rivera’s definition of how art functions in a revolution. Moreover, Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 118–122, countering the accusations that his Detroit frescos were propa-gandistic, exults over the response of engineers and auto workers to his Detroit frescos, but emphasizes that they understood and appreciated these works because the frescos were true to life and true to the production process he was depicting.
Now the Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo; see Diego Rivera. A Retrospective, pp. 253–259.
Marnham, pp. 188–189, and 192–195, gives the most readable account of this time in Rivera’s life. Compare Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 188–192; and Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 81–83.
In setting the scenes on the opposing walls of the former nave, Rivera followed traditional conventions. In medieval and renaissance churches, scenes of the Old Testament (or “Old Law”) appeared on the left wall (as you faced the altar), while scenes of Christ’s life and the events of the New Testament (or “New Law”) appeared on the facing wall. Here “the old law” of natural evolution appears on the right wall (which means that the focus of the interior was shifted from the former altar to the entrance of the chapel), and “the new law” of social revolution on the left. The change in focus within the space denotes its new use as an assembly hall.
Chipp, pp. 461–462. Significantly, an excerpt from Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1924) immediately follows this text in Chipp. The famous photograph showing Rivera and Kahlo marching under the banner of the Syndacio de los peinturas en escriptores in 1930, indicates that he joined other Marxist associations as well.
Wolfe, Fabulous Life, p. 151; Rivera, My Art, My Life, p. 78; and Marnham, pp. 165, 168, and 172–173.
Primary among the ideas he began to question were those about the “collective” nature of medieval art, especially frescos. He knew from his own experiences, in 1923–26, that in fresco painting there had to be a single artist “in charge” of the commission, with the others carrying out his ideas: to work otherwise was to court chaos and disaster. His Moscow students, however, insisted that each artist involved should work independently to produce the collective or communal work. Moreover, Rivera seems to have felt limited by the restrictions placed upon him by various committees that were drawing up commissions for him. See, Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 220–223 and 421; and Marnham, pp. 200–203.
Bowlt, p. 275, reproduces this image, but does not discuss it. Bowlt, pp. 273–279, gives a translation of “October — Association of Artistic Labor Declaration, 1928,” which program seems to parallel the earlier Prolekult and constructivist movements. Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 217–218 and 221–224, discusses Rivera’s ties to the October group and gives the following account of Rivera’s address to his Moscow peers (p. 221): “In his lectures he pointed out the weakness of easel painting for immediate mass consumption. A score of artists rushed to reply as if he had denied the role of easel painting altogether. The Russians had erred, he said, in not seeking to fuse the developed technique acquired in Paris with the peasant and popular tradition of Russian folk art. ‘Look at your icon painters,’ he bade them, ‘and at the wonderful embroideries and lacquer boxes and wood carvings and leather work and toys. A great heritage which you have not known how to use and have despised!’ Voices answered charging him with glorifying icons and the Church, admiring backward peasant handicrafts, underestimating the role of the machine, of industrialization, of the economic plan.”
Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, had commissioned Rivera to decorate the Red Army Club in Moscow. This commission was canceled even before the final act of “individualism” on Rivera’s part that led to his leaving the Soviet Union. See Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 217–218, 220–221, and 421; Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 92–93; and Marnham, pp. 201–203. Rivera was in Moscow from late October 1927 until May 1928. In January 1928, Trotsky was taken by force and sent into exile in Alma-Alta, but Rivera did not include any mention of this in his autobiography.
This expulsion was one of several that had occurred between 1922 and 1929, but this one would last until 1955, see Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 225–239. Rivera, in My Art, My Life, pp. 98–100, and 141, gives his expulsion from the party as his rationale for supporting Trotsky in Mexico.
Perhaps the women who were married to him best understood this need to challenge authority and its limitations and to test their love. Although he had betrayed each of them by having affairs with other women while they were married, his former wives and current wife still loved him for his best qualities — his intelligence and his generous spirit. Or as Angeline Belloff concluded: he was an amoral man, but not an evil one. See their statements appended to Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 183–190. Wolfe, Fabulous Life, p. 425, likens Rivera’s behavior (both to his wives as well as to figures of authority) to the Freudian “Death Wish.”
For these, see Diego Rivera. A Retrospective, pp. 299–301; Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 333–338; and Alberto Hijar, “Painting After Trotsky,” in Art and Revolution, pp. 261–269. Add, McCloskey, pp. 157–168, especially pp. 158–159 and 162, with fig. 54, which author clarifies the links between Wolfe, Lovestone, and Rivera. Rivera’s writings from c. 1932, demonstrate the influence of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution; see McCloskey, pp. 166–168. King discusses briefly a photographic source for one of the panels of the New Workers School frescos (p. 48).
For the Rockefeller Center commission, see Diego Rivera. A Retrospective, pp. 295–297 and 303–304; and Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 335–337; Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 129–130; Marnham, pp. 257–258; Irene Herner, “Diego Rivera: Paradise Lost in Rockefeller Center, Revisited,” in Art and Revolution, pp. 235–259; and Hijar, pp. 261–269.
See Bertram D. Wolfe, Portrait of America, with Introduction by Diego Rivera (New York: Covici Friede, 1934). This book was a best seller. Also, see McCloskey (pages cited in n. 28) for Jay Lovestone; Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War. The CIA. And the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The Free Press, 1999), pp. 87, 147, 154, and 329–330, wherein are told Lovestone’s later activities with the CIA; and Sam Tanenhaus, “Ella Goldberg Wolfe, b. 1896. A Tale of Three Centuries,” in The New York Times Magazine, January 7, 2001, pp. 28–30. Rivera finally broke with Wolfe in the late 1940s when his links to the CIA became known and when Frida Kahlo rejoined the Mexican Communist Party; see Bertram D. Wolfe, “The Strange Case of Diego Rivera,” Arts Digest 26 (January 1, 1955), pp. 6–8; and The Letters of Frida Kahlo. Cartas Apasionadas, compiled by Martha Zamora (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995), especially those written between 1934 and 1940 to Ella Wolfe and Lucienne Bloch. Frida’s last letter to Ella is dated 1946. In addition, see Wolfe’s autobiography, Bertram D. Wolfe, A Life in Two Centuries (New York: Stein and Day, 1981).
See Diego Rivera. A Retrospective, pp. 303–304; Herner, pp. 235–259; and Hijar, pp. 261–269.
Selected bibliographies of Rivera’s writings appear in both Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 436–437, and at the end of Diego Rivera. A Retrospective. In addition, French translations of his writings appeared under the title, Diego Rivera, Ecrits sur L’Art (Selection and translation of texts by Catherine Ballestro), (Paris: Editions Idées et Calendes, 1996). As a public intellectual, Rivera wrote for the popular media, newspapers and magazines. Until recently, these resources were little studied by scholars, who preferred to limit their researches to academic journals and books. One of Rivera’s articles, “Lo que opina Diego Rivera sobre la pintura revolucionaria,” which appeared in Octubre (Mexico City), October 1935, and in Claridad (Buenos Aires), February 1936, suggests that he and Trotsky had much to discuss before Spring 1938. Hijar, p. 263, refers to this article as “Rivera’s Defense and Attack against Stalinists.” McCloskey (cited in note 9 above), p. 166, states that, in 1932, Rivera “claimed Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution as the basis for his own convictions about art’s revolutionary importance”; therein on p. 162 (fig. 54) the issue of Worker’s Age with the photograph of Rivera painting the frescos at the New Workers School is reproduced.
Volkogonov, pp. 384–387; Payne, pp. 385–386 and 391–393; Rivera, My Art, My Life, p. 141; and Marnham, p. 277.
Marnham, pp. 280–281; and Hayden Herrera, Frida. A Biography of Frida Kahlo (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 208–214. The Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky, 1937 is in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. and was given to that museum by Claire Booth Luce. Also, see Andrea Kettermann, Frida Kahlo, 1907–1954. Pain and Passion (Cologne: Benedikt Taschen, 1993), p. 41, who quotes André Breton: “I have for long admired the self-portrait by Frida Kahlo de Rivera that hangs on a wall of Trotsky’s study. She has painted herself in a robe of wings gilded with butterflies, and it is exactly in this guise that she draws aside the mental curtain. We are privileged to be present, as in the most glorious days of German romanticism, at the entry of a young woman endowed with all the gifts of seduction.” Is it any wonder Natalia Sedova insisted that Trotsky leave this painting at the Casa Azul when they left in early 1939? Also see, Margaret A. Lindauer, Devouring Frida. The History and Popular Celebrity of Frida Kahlo (Hanover, NH and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1999), pp. 36–40.
Marnham, pp. 285–289 and 293; and Volkogonov, p. 394. Compare Herrera, p. 247; Volkogonov, pp. 394–395; and Payne, p. 409. Even Herrera credits political differences between Rivera and Trotsky for their falling out, pp. 247–249. Her main evidence appears in the letter Trotsky wrote to Frida early in 1939 in which he states: “The only thing I could extract from him was his indignation at my reluctance to recognize those characteristics in him which would make for a good revolutionary functionary. I insisted that he should never accept a bureaucratic position in the organization, because a’ secretary’ who never writes, never answers letters, never comes to meetings on time and always makes the opposite of the common decision is not a good secretary. And I ask you, why should Diego be a’ secretary’? That he is an authentic revolutionary needs no proof, but he is a revolutionary multiplied by a great artist and it is even this ‘multiplication’ which makes him absolutely unfit for routine work in the party.” Also see Jean van Heijenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacán (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 136–137; and Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left. Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California, 1999), pp. 201–205, esp. 203–204, for the political differences between Rivera and Trotsky in early 1939. The Rivera — Kahlo marriage ended in divorce in 1939, but the couple remarried in San Francisco in December 1940. Neither ever cited the affair with Trotsky as a reason for this divorce. Ella and Bertram Wolfe, who knew the couple best, remained silent on this matter, too. Marnham, p. 288, quotes Trotsky: “He has the full right to make one more political mistake instead of one good painting.” Marnham, pp. 287–288 and 293, holds that “Rivera’s break with Trotsky was personal,” and, on pp. 294–298, he discusses the aftermath of Rivera’s finding out about Frida’s affair with Trotsky, including their subsequent divorce and remarriage. Also, see Lindauer, pp. 40–44.
These six paintings, three of which appear in Diego Rivera. A Retrospective, including the Copalli landscape now in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, were done from life near Taxco. They are among Rivera’s works usually described as Surrealist, and have been discussed as having been painted while Rivera was under Breton’s influence. Since their execution predates Breton’s arrival in Mexico by almost six months, they are more probably works of Rivera’s own imagination. Compare, Ades, pp. 318–320. Moreover, Frida Kahlo’s paintings of 1938–1940 are also called Surrealist, see Gale, Dada and Surrealism, pp. 367–368, although, as she emphatically stated: “I did not know I was a Surrealist until Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me that I was one.” Nevertheless, Frida was happy to exhibit with other Surrealist painters in New York, Paris, and Mexico City. And both Rivera and Kahlo furnished works for the Surrealist exhibition of 1940 at the Museum of Modern Art.
Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 133–135; compare Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 349–352; and Marnham, pp. 267–269. Also see Maltby Sykes, “Diego Rivera and the Hotel Reforma Murals,” Archives of American Art (Vol. 25, nos. 1–2, 1985), reprinted in Archives of American Art (Vol. 30, nos. 1–4, 1990), pp. 101–112, especially, 111. Sykes assisted Rivera in the painting of the Hotel Reforma frescos. Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 238–239, quotes from Trotsky’s “Art and Politics”; see especially p. 239, where Wolfe adds to the statement about the damage’s having been done by Stalinists: “So far as I have been able to observe, this charge is not justified.”
Trotsky, “Art and Politics,” pp. 4–8. Moreover, according to Marnham, p. 288, Trotsky had often stated that he “could convince people of socialism by the ones and fives, but Rivera, with his paintings, could influence them by the scores and hundreds.”
Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 133–134, but articles also appeared in Mexico City and American newspapers decrying the damage to his Hotel Reforma frescos throughout the Summer of 1936 (cited in Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 349–352, esp., 352, and compare, pp. 238–239). Also see Sykes. Rivera undoubtedly communicated these charges (which sound very like those Frida makes in some of her letters to Ella Wolfe at this time) to Trotsky during the early months of Trotsky’s stay at the Casa Azul. Moreover, Diego Rivera, “Protesta contra el Vandalismo en la Destruccion de los Pintura de Juan A I’Gorman,” in Clave-Tribuna marxista (Mexico City), December 1938, decries damages done to O’Gorman’s airport murals by governmental workers.
Only Polizzotti, pp. 453–454, gives the exact dates of the Bretons’ departure from France (April 2, 1938) and arrival in Mexico (April 18, 1938), and, pp. 464–465, of their departure from Mexico (August 1, 1938) and their arrival back in France (August 11, 1938).
Marnham, p. 282; and Polizzotti, p. 454, who states that Rivera met the Bretons when their ship docked at Veracruz and upon hearing of their plight, invited them to stay in his house for the duration of their visit to Mexico.
For Pátzcuaro in Michoacán and the nearby sights, see the Michelin Guide to Mexico, Guatemala and Belize, p. 237; Michael D. Coe, Mexico from the Olmecs to the Aztecs (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), pp. 154–156 (who discusses the pre-Columbian heritage of the area — which would have delighted both Rivera and Breton); and Marnham, pp. 283–284. Payne, pp. 399–400, does not specifically name Pátzcuaro or the presence of Rivera, Frida, Jacqueline and Natalia. Compare Polizzotti, pp. 461–462. Ades, p. 313, note 3, adds “The photographs of Breton, Rivera and Trotsky are poignant documents of their relationship, and of the awe Breton felt for Trotsky. It was a male union — Frida Kahlo and Jacqueline Breton were excluded from their debates.” Ades seems unaware that some of these photographs were cropped to leave out Jacqueline.
Polizzotti, p. 462, who cites van Heijenoort; and Ades, p. 314.
Rivera lived for almost fifteen years in France, but within artistic circles, mainly those connected to the resident Russian emigrant community. Although he “hung out” at La Rotonde, he must have known that his French was inferior to that of Breton. Rivera learned to speak Russian with his first wife, Angeline Belloff, and her associates, and with his mistress Maverna Vorobiev and her friends, which included the poets Ilya Ehrenburg and Maxim Voloshin.
Marnham, pp. 283–284. Plus, favorite phrases of Trotsky’s appear throughout the Manifesto of 1938. Anyone who reads the excerpt of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution in Chipp, pp. 462–466, and Trotsky’s “Art and Politics,” pp. 3–10, along with the Manifesto of 1938 will immediately recognize the same vocabulary in each. Compare Polizzotti, pp. 461–464; Ades, pp. 313–320, and Gale, Dada and Surrealism, pp. 366–367, who discuss the text as a Surrealist document reflecting mainly Breton’s style. Both Ades and Gale use an English translation different from Dwight Macdonald’s, printed in the Partisan Review. One’s perception of “Bretonian Surrealism” in the Manifesto of 1938 may depend upon whose translation of the Manifesto one is reading. For Breton’s other writings, see André Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism. Translated from the French by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972); and Polizzotti, pp. 625–626.
Marnham, p. 284; and Polizzotti, p. 462, who cites van Heijenoort.
Marnham, p. 283. Gale, Dada and Surrealism, p. 368: “She was, as such, the very embodiment of the creative revolutionary envisaged in ‘Towards an Independent Revolutionary ‘Art.’ “ Perhaps scholars should focus more on the reasons why Frida and Jacqueline Breton were so bored by the theoretical discussions in Mexico and less on their acting out in response to the restrictions placed on them by Trotsky and Breton. The low regard with which the women Surrealists were held by their male counterparts, especially Breton, may have been a factor. See Lindauer, pp. 98–103, for a discussion of Breton’s attitudes towards women Surrealists. Lindauer cites additional authors concerned with Surrealism and women.
This is, perhaps, the most endearing thing about Trotsky, and it speaks to his understanding of what these retablos (or icons) meant to the largely illiterate Mexican peasants who painted them and donated them to churches. To Breton, they were merely folk art paintings that shared some aspects of his own Surrealist images and which he wished to include in his upcoming exhibition in Paris. Compare Herrera, p. 227; and Polizzotti, p. 460.
Trotsky called for the institution of the Fourth International from Norway in 1936 and both Rivera and Breton joined at that time. According to Wolfe, Fabulous Life, p. 338, in 1934, “When Diego had finished his murals in the New Workers’ School, he still had a little Rockefeller money left, so he moved into the headquarters of the New York Trotskyites and did two small panels there representing the Russian Revolution and the ‘Fourth International,’ which Leon Trotsky was then beginning to proclaim.” McCloskey, p. 170, states that the participants in the March 1934 Symposium held at Madison Square Garden in New York engaged in an attack on the CPUSA (Communist Party in the United States of America) bureaucracy and “called for the foundation of a new International.” The Fourth International was officially inaugurated in France in September of 1938 and the wide publication of the Manifesto of 1938 coincided with this official event. Trotsky in “Art and Politics,” p. 10 (dated June 18, 1938), states: “The ideological base of the conflict between the Fourth and Third International is the profound disagreement not only on the tasks of the party but in general on the entire material and spiritual life of mankind.” He goes on to call for “the overthrow of the domination of the Kremlin bureaucracy,” and ends, “May your magazine [Partisan Review] take its place in the victorious army of socialism and not in a concentration camp!” Compare, Herner, p. 259, and Hijar, pp. 261–269.
Rivera’s reputation as a colorful figure in Paris is well known and documented. During his Paris years, Rivera had joined the Section d’or group of Cubist painters, who had a more theoretical bent than others, but rather than talk about how the fourth dimension is depicted in his paintings, Rivera invented a device (he called it “le chose”) that allowed him to construct his pictorial space; see Wolfe, Fabulous Life, p. 107, quoting André Salmon. Moreover, Rivera’s differences of opinion with one of the Cubist critics led to a fistfight between them and to his rejection by the more theoretically disciplined French painters; see Marnham, pp. 126–130, and William H. Robinson, “Cubist Heresies: Diego Rivera and the Parisian Avant-Garde, 1913–1917,” in Art and Revolution, pp. 105–127, but especially, pp. 121–124. Rivera’s argumentative streak can be seen in the articles (published in the popular press, some of which are cited above in n. 32 in which he countered Siquieros’s accusations throughout the 1930s as well as in his attack on Stalin, published in the May 1940 issue of Esquire magazine.
Rivera, My Art, My Life, p. 146.
Ades, pp. 313–315, reproduced on top of p. 314. Could this be a portrait of Andre Breton? Breton’s Les Vases communicants, which strived to demonstrate that Marx and Freud are not incompatible, was published in 1932. Also see Gerard Durozoi, “Les Vases communicants: Marx — Freud,” in Surrealism et Philosophie (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1992), pp. 31–48. Rivera issued a defense of Breton’s lecture of May 13, 1938 in his “More Literature Before Bread: The Europe-loving Stalinist Clerics and the Case of the Great Poet Andre Breton,” in Novedades (Mexico City), June 23, 1938.
See Ades, pp. 316–320, for Rivera’s impact on Breton. Rivera’s Surrealist period works are usually dated to 1940, although he had been exploring the special, almost lunar, landscape of Mexico from early 1937.
Breton and Rivera, “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,” p. 51 and Chipp, p. 485 (compare the translation given in Ades, pp. 314–315).
Ehrenburg’s critique of 1933 was reprinted under the title, “The Surrealists,” in Partisan Review (Vol. 2, no. 9) October–November 1935, pp. 11–16. For Ehrenburg, see Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life: 1891–1921. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). Ehrenburg’s Julio Jurenito (1921) was based on Rivera. Gale, Dada and Surrealism, pp. 338–339, gives a short account of the dispute between Ehrenburg and Breton. For Breton’s version, see Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, pp. 244–245; his Les Vases communicants (1932); and Polizzotti, pp. 367–369. In addition to his woodcut of 1938 (mentioned above in n. 56), Rivera also wrote a defense of Breton, published in Novedades on June 23, 1938, in which Breton’s Mexican critics are called “Europe-loving Stalinist clerics.” Moreover, in a letter to Breton (dated December 22, 1938), published in Partisan Review (Vol. 6, no. 2) Winter 1939, p. 126, Trotsky asks: “Why speak of the Aragons, the Ehrenburgs and other petites canailles?” Louis Aragon had attended the Kharkov Conference (1930) and had signed the condemnation of Surrealism issued by that Conference. In the post-war years, Breton will still be hampered by Ehrenburg, who figured in the World Congress of Peace, held in Paris in April 1949, and by Aragon. According to Saunders, Cultural Cold War, pp. 67–68, the World Congress of Peace was a “Cominform affair from start to finish” and Aragon was one of its organizers.
For the terms of his exile, see Payne, pp. 385–387 and 392–399; and Kettermann, Diego Rivera, p. 58. It is clear that Trotsky intended to be politically active while in Mexico; see Volkogonov, pp. 372–394.
Polizzotti, pp. 471–472; Herrera on Frida’s letters from Paris, pp. 241–244 and 251–253. Also see The Letters of Frida Kahlo, pp. 95–99 (to Ella and Bertram Wolfe) and p. 100 (to Jacqueline Breton). For Breton’s initial appreciation of Rivera, especially the letter he wrote in September 1938 (cited by Marnham, p. 284), see “Souvenirs du Mexique” in Minotaure 12/13 (1939). This issue of Breton’s journal included two contributions by Rivera as well as reproductions of two of the landscapes the artist painted in 1937.
Compare, Polizzotti, pp. 511–512, on the breakup of the Breton marriage and on Jacqueline’s affair with David Hare, whom she married in 1944.
Breton had been called up for military service in the Fall of 1938 (the Reserves) and in late August 1939 and had served until he was demobilized in July of 1940; see Polizzotti, pp. 469–470 and 476–483. Breton had also served in the medical corps in the First World War. He was one of the francophone exiles who worked for the Voice of America; Gale, Dada and Surrealism, p. 382; and Polizzotti, pp. 509–510. Breton’s work for the Voice of America, together with the cover for his Young Cherry Trees Secured Against Hares (1946), designed by Marcel Duchamp and showing the Statue of Liberty with its face cut away to expose Breton’s (Polizzotti, p. 519), triggered Tzara’s criticisms in 1947; see Polizzotti, p. 544.
Marnham, pp. 292–296; and Rivera, My Art, My Life, pp. 140–143 and 148–149. Also, see Lee, Painting on the Left, pp. 210–205. Rivera’s article entitled “Stalin, The Undertaker of the Revolution,” appeared in the May 1940 issue of Esquire. This is cited (and quoted) by Wolfe, Fabulous Life, p. 386.
Marnham, pp. 288–289; and compare Hamill (as in fn. 8), pp. 192–195. Both give accounts of Paulette Goddard’s role (assisted by the United States Government) in Rivera’s escape from Mexico in May 1940. That both Rivera and Trotsky had made entreaties to representatives of the United States Government underscores the actual danger they were in between 1938 and 1940.
This point was made by Trotsky in a letter to Frida in early 1939; see Herrera, pp. 247–248, and Lee, Painting on the Left, p. 204. Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood. Soviet Espionage in America — The Stalin Era (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), pp. 30–32 and 272–274, and elsewhere throughout the text, demonstrate the ongoing campaign by Stalin to eliminate Trotskyites. No wonder Frida Kahlo claimed “I was never a Trotskyite,” in The Diary of Frida Kahlo, An Intimate Self-Portrait. Introduction by Carlos Fuentes (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995), p. 255. She wrote this on November 4, 1952 and follows it with a list of her five heroes: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung. In spite of these words — written when she was near the end of her life and in extreme pain — it is to her credit that Frida (along with Rivera) was active as a Trotskyite throughout the 1930s. Compare, Herrera, pp. 395–396.
Biographers of Rivera and Kahlo disagree on who was the more committed party member, but Frida was welcomed back first and her subsequent activities indicate that she may have been more committed to the ideas of Marxism and Communism. This seems to be confirmed in her diary, pp. 255–258, although the words were written while she was influenced by pain killers. I do not question that Frida is sincere in her statements. Also, see Herrera, pp. 395–396. Wolfe, Fabulous Life, pp. 383–390 and 415–426, tries to analyze Rivera’s Marxism and Communism, and concludes that he was actually a Mexican nationalist who held a romantic conception of the native agrarian worker as his ideal. Perhaps we should best describe Rivera as a pragmatic Marxist who also espoused nationalist views.
Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, pp. 196, n. 119, and 216; Gale, Dada and Surrealism, pp. 401–410, 412–413, and 415–418; and Polizzotti, pp. 544–545 and 550–557.
Chipp, p. 457; and Rivera, My Art, My Life, p. 146. Also see Polizzotti, pp. 608–613, for Breton’s activities in the early 1960s. Breton’s insistence that “Rivera took no part in its inception” must be read with the knowledge that Rivera enjoyed unlimited access to Trotsky from January 1937 until after October 1938 (or for over 22 months), while Breton had eight to ten meetings with Trotsky between mid-April and July 31, 1938 (which includes the two sightseeing trips to Guadalajara and Pâtzcuaro). Polizzotti, p. 464, questions the “tactical” reasons for Trotsky’s wanting Rivera’s name on this Manifesto. He believes that the Old Man simply thought it would be better if two artists signed it. Moreover, here and there throughout his text, Polizzotti calls the reader’s attention to Breton’s manipulation of facts to conform to some hermetic ideal. One must read Breton’s words carefully.
Wolfe, Fabulous Life, p. 437, paradoxically includes the Manifesto of 1938 (giving Breton as the coauthor) in his listing of Rivera’s writings in the Selected Bibliography at the end of the book, but makes no mention of it (or of Breton) in the text. One should also look at Wolfe, A Tale of Two Centuries, for his own political reinvention.
Raquel Tibor, An Open Life. Frida Kahlo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 162.
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Scillia, D. (2004). A World of Art, Politics, Passion and Betrayal: Trotsky, Rivera and Breton and Manifesto: Towards A Free Revolutionary Art (1938). In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Does the World Exist?. Analecta Husserliana, vol 79. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0047-5_30
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