Trotsky Read online

  It was at this same time that Rivera joined the Mexican Communist Party, which had been formed by aspiring politicians in 1917 under the influence of events in Russia, but which had since evolved into a party of radical painters with only a few dozen members. Inevitably, Rivera was one of its leading figures. Wolfe, whose radicalism had caused him to flee the United States for Mexico in order to avoid arrest, also joined the party at this time. It did not take him long to figure out that while Rivera was a great painter, in politics he would never be more than “an amateur and a passionate dilettante,” and an impulsive one at that. Diego’s ideology, Wolfe discovered, was “an undigested mixture of Spanish anarchism, Russian terrorism, Soviet Marxism-Leninism, Mexican agrarianism—the redemption of the poor peasant and the Indian.” Nor was the painter sufficiently read in the Marxist classics to pass muster as a credible communist: “All that Diego ever knew of Marx’s writings or of Lenin’s, as I had ample occasion to verify, was a little handful of commonplace slogans which had attained wide currency.”

  Rivera made one extended visit to Soviet Russia, beginning in November 1927. He accepted an invitation to attend the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution. In Red Square on November 7, Rivera sat on the reviewing stand alongside Lenin’s mausoleum beneath the Kremlin wall, observing the daylong passing parade of Red Army soldiers, factory workers, Communist youth, and countless others through the square. Never a mere onlooker, Rivera had by day’s end produced forty-five watercolor sketches and filled dozens of small notebook pages with penciled notes and sketches—raw materials for the Russian murals he hoped to paint.

  Away from Red Square and undetected by Rivera’s panoramic vision, Trotsky and the Left Opposition attempted to stage their own anniversary demonstrations, which were broken up by the GPU. Stalin’s thugs stoned Trotsky’s automobile as it traveled along a Moscow street, shattering its windows as he ducked down in the backseat. That morning, Stalin had sat down in the Kremlin with Sergei Eisenstein to supervise the editing of his new feature film, October, with the result that Lenin’s role was considerably reduced, while Trotsky was cut out altogether.

  Rivera remained in Moscow for five months. Invited to address public audiences about his art, he used these occasions to encourage Soviet artists to draw inspiration from Russian folk art. “Look at your icon painters,” he exhorted them. In his own country such advice would have seemed superfluous; in the birthplace of socialism it had the ring of heresy. Voices from the audience objected that he was glorifying icons and churches and endorsing backward peasant handicraft while minimizing the importance of industry and of economic planning.

  Nor was Rivera’s artistic vision warmly endorsed by the Soviet establishment. The People’s Commissar of Enlightenment had commissioned him to paint a fresco in Moscow’s Red Army Club, but the enterprise was undermined by shortages of materials and assistants and by constant delays. He was continually told that something had to be put off until tomorrow—“Zavtra budet”—a Russian variation of the Mexican mañana, but in Moscow the sabotage felt deliberate. Perhaps his mood was darkened by his one meeting with Stalin, who sat for the painter. “Judging from the sketch he did,” says Wolfe, “he does not seem to have been impressed by his subject.” Disillusioned, he stayed long enough to sketch the May Day parade through Red Square, then quietly left the country.

  Upon his return to Mexico, Rivera found himself increasingly under fire from fellow Communists and artists, who accused him of political fraud. These attacks intensified as he began to paint what would become one of his most celebrated murals, The History of Mexico, in the National Palace, the seat of the government. This new commission was cited by the Mexican Communist Party as fresh evidence that Rivera was a “millionaire artist for the establishment,” a charge that had dogged him throughout the twenties. He had also been criticized by fellow Communists and artists as a “painter for millionaires” because of his private commissions. What really mattered in 1929, however, was the Party line laid down in Moscow, where Stalin, having eliminated Trotsky and the Left Opposition, had turned his sights on Nikolai Bukharin and the right-wing Bolsheviks. The Kremlin now directed the member organizations of the Communist International to unmask the “Right Danger,” and in Mexico the Communists decided that Rivera fit the description and expelled him from the party. Appalled at the idea of being classified as a right-wing anything, Rivera declared himself instead to be a Trotskyist. He had little to back up this claim, but it hardly mattered. Rivera was now an ex-Communist.

  These political machinations barely registered north of the Rio Grande, where Rivera’s reputation as a fashionably radical painter continued to rise. His acceptance of a mural commission in San Francisco inaugurated a three-year sojourn in the United States, the high point of which was a popular one-man show at the new Museum of Modern Art in New York City in December 1931: a retrospective of his drawings and oils, together with movable fresco panels he painted especially for the exhibit. Rivera’s exhibit was the second such event at the museum, Matisse being the other artist to have been so honored.

  Rivera arrived in San Francisco in November 1930, just as the Great Depression set in. There he completed murals at the Stock Exchange Tower and the California School of Fine Arts—now the San Francisco Art Institute—in 1931. The following year he painted his Detroit Industry frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Arts with funds donated by Edsel Ford, president of the Ford Motor Company. These works added luster to Rivera’s reputation and they survive as part of his oeuvre. Not so his next project, the mural he was commissioned to paint in the lobby of the new RCA building in New York City’s Rockefeller Center in 1933.

  The Rockefeller family asked Rivera to produce a work based on the uplifting theme “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.” His elaborate written proposal for the painting, which reads like an encomium to socialist revolution, leaves little doubt that he saw the Radio City mural as an opportunity to answer his critics on the left by demonstrating his unimpeachable Bolshevik credentials. The plan was approved by the family and would likely have been executed without incident had Rivera not departed from his design by replacing the anonymous face of a prominently placed worker-leader with that of Lenin. The discovery, before the mural was completed, of Lenin’s iconic countenance touched off a public controversy, prompting Nelson Rockefeller to request its removal, followed by the artist’s refusal, and then an order to suspend work. That was in May 1933. Nine months later, contrary to the reassurances of his patrons, Rivera’s unfinished mural was sandblasted into oblivion.

  It was in the immediate aftermath of this Battle of Rockefeller Center that Trotsky first established contact with Rivera, in the form of a brief appreciative letter sent from Turkey, dated June 7, 1933. It is curious that this message fails to mention the standoff with the Rockefellers, which must have inspired it. Trotsky expressed his admiration for Rivera’s art, which he said he first came upon inadvertently in an American book during his exile in Central Asia in 1928. From the sound of it, he had chanced upon reproductions of the Education Ministry murals. “Your frescoes struck me with their combination of masculinity and gentleness, almost tenderness, their internal dynamic and tranquil equilibrium of form.” And such a “magnificent freshness in approach to man and animal!” This generous praise is followed by what would prove to be a telling admission: “I was infinitely far from the thought that the author of these works was a revolutionary, standing under the banner of Marx and Lenin. Only relatively recently did I discover that the master Diego Rivera and that other Diego-Rivera, the close friend of the Left Opposition, were one and the same person.” Rivera may have considered this a mixed review, but Trotsky was honored to have him as a comrade. “I am not losing the hope to visit America, see your works in the original, and talk to you in person.”

  Rivera was paid in full for his unfinished Radio City fresco, and before leaving the United States he was det
ermined to use his Rockefeller earnings—“the money extorted from the workers by the Rockefeller exploiters,” as he called it—to paint “the revolution.” At the moment Trotsky’s letter arrived in New York, he was at work on the next of his epic historical murals, Portrait of America, in the New Workers’ School on West 14th Street in lower Manhattan. Here Trotsky makes his first appearances in Rivera’s art. In the fresco panel titled “World War,” Rivera included a passage on the Russian Revolution, represented by a winter scene on Red Square, where Trotsky, his right hand pressed to his forehead in a salute, his left hand clenched in a fist and raised above his head, reviews passing Red Army troops under the banner of the Third International, while behind him Lenin looks on approvingly. Another panel, “Proletarian Unity,” re-creates at its center the Lenin of the Radio City mural, here flanked by other revolutionary figures, including the hirsute Marx and Engels, a sinister Stalin lurking in the upper left corner, a frightfully cherubic Bukharin, and a rather harmless-looking Trotsky, with clenched fist raised above a soft-serve hairdo.

  Rivera then exhausted his Rockefeller funds at the headquarters of the American Trotskyists, where he painted two minor fresco panels on the Russian Revolution and the Fourth International, which Trotsky had recently begun to proclaim.

  After his return to Mexico at the end of 1933, Rivera was able to re-create the Rockefeller Center mural in Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts. In this second version, the objectionable Lenin returns, now accompanied by Marx and by Trotsky, who helps hold up a banner inscribed with the slogan, Workers of the World/Unite in the IVth International! Like nearly all of Rivera’s depictions of communism’s high priests, prophets, and contenders, these effigies are unconvincing, “lifeless faces, clichés not men,” to quote Wolfe, who observed generally that “Diego’s art was poorly served by his attempts at propaganda.” Aesthetically, his smokestack-and-tractor utopias cannot compete with his idealized narratives of Mexico’s past and present. He was a populist and nationalist. Zapata, not Lenin, was his revolutionary ideologist and hero. His true subject was the Mexican land and people. Labor, in Rivera’s art, is not an object of exploitation, as orthodox Marxism instructed, but a “rhythmic dance,” in Wolfe’s phrase. Industry is not the scene of class struggle, but of intricately beautiful machines, affectionately and, in the Detroit murals, erotically rendered. It is hardly surprising that Trotsky’s first impression put him “infinitely far from the thought” that the painter was a Marxist revolutionary.

  Having re-created Man at the Crossroads in Mexico City, Rivera resumed work on his National Palace mural, completing this and one other mural by the end of 1935, at which point he entered into a kind of exile from the muralist movement that had been inseparable from his name. Nine years would pass before he would be offered another government wall in Mexico. His sense of isolation was magnified by his continued ostracism at the hands of former comrades, led by muralist Siqueiros, a master of political vitriol. No wonder Rivera was increasingly attracted to the figure of Trotsky, a fellow exile, a heroic and tragic figure, and a man with an enlightened view of the arts.

  In the autumn of 1936, when Trotsky was imprisoned in Norway as a result of Soviet diplomatic pressure in the wake of the first Moscow trial, and when no other European country would allow him entry, Rivera agreed to approach President Lázaro Cárdenas and ask him to offer Trotsky asylum in Mexico. When Cárdenas granted the request, the Communist attacks on Rivera became an onslaught. Now he really was a Trotskyist.

  Diego Rivera’s frescoes are far more impressive viewed in the original than as reproductions on the page—a claim not all his fellow muralists could make—and thus Trotsky’s estimation of his art was bound to rise accordingly as he was introduced to the murals in Mexico City and Cuernavaca in the beginning of 1937. The sheer physical scale of the murals and their grand narrative sweep could not but inspire awe. Here was class-conscious art accessible to the masses and on permanent public display. “Do you wish to see with your own eyes the hidden springs of the social revolution?” Trotsky wrote in the summer of 1938. “Look at the frescoes of Rivera. Do you wish to know what revolutionary art is like? Look at the frescoes of Rivera.”

  Trotsky was no less fascinated by the artist himself, his imposing physical presence and outsize personality. He admired the passion and devotion Rivera brought to his work. Naturally, he felt a strong sense of solidarity with him for the unceasing slander campaign he had to endure as a so-called Trotskyist painter. And of course he was delighted to have a great artist associated with the Fourth International.

  Trotsky’s secretaries shared the Old Man’s enthusiasm for Diego and his art, but it was not long before they began to take a more skeptical view of his professed Trotskyism, and even of his Marxism. Diego was a free spirit, and he made no attempt to hide this fact from them. Perhaps he enjoyed scandalizing them. “You know, I am a bit of an anarchist,” he liked to say to Van, and he would tell stories about how the political repressions in the Soviet Union had begun before Stalin, in the time of Lenin. “He would say nothing of this, however, to Trotsky, to whom he showed another face.” Van recalled that on one occasion when he allowed his skepticism about the painter’s politics to peek through, Trotsky reproached him for it: “Diego, you know, is a revolutionary!”

  Trotsky and Diego were drawn together by circumstances beyond mutual respect, fascination, and dependence. Diego was fifty years old, only seven years younger than Trotsky, who in his exile years was surrounded mostly by much younger acolytes. Both men were world-famous and they thus experienced that unspoken bond that exists between celebrities. Both were well traveled and had overlapped for several years in Paris, where Diego fraternized with Russian émigrés and even took a Russian as his common-law wife. Among his friends was the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who based the title character of his 1922 satirical novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, on Rivera and his anarchic ideas and temperament. Trotsky and Diego addressed each other in French and in English, and their conversation was enriched by the occasional Russian word or expression.

  All of this helps explain why these two apparently mismatched individuals were able to establish a special connection. “Of all the persons whom I knew around Trotsky from 1932 to 1939,” Van testifies, “Rivera was the one with whom Trotsky conversed with most warmth and unconstraint. There were indeed limits that could never be crossed in conversation with Trotsky; but his meetings with Rivera had an air of confidence, a naturalness, an ease, that I never saw with anybody else.” Trotsky even tolerated Diego’s penchant for telling risqué jokes in French, even though they made him squirm.

  Diego’s friends and acquaintances understood that his artistry extended to the telling of tall tales. Trotsky knew how to tell a story well, how to make the truth compelling—witness his inspired recollection of the Cirque Moderne. Diego’s imagination, however, often became un-tethered to any reality. Stuffed with elaborate supporting details, his tales were as wide as they were tall. Often they related to his personal background and experiences. He was of Spanish-Indian and Portuguese-Jewish descent, but apparently this was not exotic enough. He once declared to an audience in Mexico City that his ancestry was “Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and—I am proud to say—Jewish.” He told a reporter that he was “three-eighths Jewish.” He also claimed that his great-grandmother was Chinese. On one occasion he boasted that his mother “passed on to me the traits of three races: white, red, and black.”

  Frida used hand signals to alert potential victims when Diego was embroidering or inventing out of whole cloth. She defended her husband’s fabrications as products of his “tremendous imagination” besides, “I have never heard him tell a single lie that was stupid or banal.” Trotsky, who was disposed to categorize individuals, was prepared to make generous allowances for the demands of “artistic temperament,” but he should have realized early on that there was no one like Diego Rivera.

  Diego’s
precarious politics and infinite imagination aside, those who observed their interactions up close must have wondered whether the two contrasting friends were bound to clash: the rigid, prickly, angular Trotsky and the reckless, riotous, gargantuan Diego. The lion and the elephant. Diego bathed irregularly, dressed carelessly, and seldom arrived on time for anything. Trotsky, meanwhile, was a stickler for neatness, regimen, and routine. Both men had tremendous work ethics, but Diego’s self-discipline was restricted almost entirely to his painting. And with brush in hand, he tended to lose track of everything else.

  Frida, whose supply of patience had to have been titanic, called her husband the “enemy of clocks and calendars.” She once painted him as an overgrown infant in her arms, which must give some indication of what it was like to be married to the man. A British economist, upon meeting Diego for the first time in Mexico in 1938, was struck by the contrast between “the considerable subtlety that his work often displays” and the “childlike simplicity, friendliness, and frankness” of his personality. He loved to make mischief and may have enjoyed flaunting his artistic temperament in Trotsky’s presence, as when he greeted him at home in San Angel with a parrot on his head. James Farrell observed of Trotsky that there was an “exactness” about him: “There was not, however, much spontaneity in him—or, rather, his spontaneity was kept in check.”

  Estimations of Trotsky’s personality tend to shade into explanations for his political downfall. His rigidity is seen as of a piece with his haughtiness, which constrained him as a politician. He could inspire the masses, but once Bolshevik rule had been consolidated and the masses had been taken out of the equation, he lacked the personal qualities necessary to organize and lead a political faction in the struggle against Stalin following Lenin’s death. The odds were in any case heavily stacked against him, not least because of his late entry into the Bolshevik Party, the extensive paper trail of his often corrosive polemics with Lenin before 1917, his ethnicity, and the vastly superior political instincts and unmatched ruthlessness of his opponent. Hubris alone, therefore, cannot explain Trotsky’s downfall, but to the extent that the limitations of his personality are held responsible, it is seen as the tragic flaw.