What guided Rivera’s art, as Blunt correctly noted, was his religious sense. He retained the inspiration he had drawn from Giotto and the masters of the Quattrocento and transferred it to his own belief system which, in so far as he had one, was not Communism but radical pantheistic nationalism. And the art lives on, irrespective of its message. The irony of Blunt’s comparison with Das Kapital was that by the time the Education Ministry series was finished Rivera had been thrown out of the Mexican Communist Party. Unlike Blunt he was too undisciplined, with far too much creative energy, to take the Comintern’s whip for more than a few years. His politics were to be as original and colourful as his painting.
Rivera had a serious interest in politics but he also had a lifelong need for patronage. In contrast to his second wife, Frida Kahlo, he came from an unprivileged background and since his idealism had driven him to select the least accessible and most expensive method of painting, he had to find wealthy or influential patrons. In Mexico he quickly fell foul of Vasconcelos’s successors for being too Communist. His next patron was the Comintern, which invited him to Moscow in 1927, to paint murals on the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Needless to say Rivera was sent home in disgrace for supporting artistic dissidents. He next accepted a commission from the US ambassador to Mexico and then went north of the border to work in the San Francisco Stock Exchange. From there he moved over to join Henry Ford in Detroit, where his superb murals in the Institute of Arts both glorified the skill of car workers and depicted the horrors of the automobile assembly line. Then he moved to Manhattan where he was employed by the Rockefellers to decorate the lobby of the Rockefeller Centre.
Rivera thought this temple of the free market would be just the place to glorify the memory of Lenin. In 1933, in what became an international cause célèbre, he was expelled from the site and his unfinished mural was pulverised. At the same time he was vilified by the US Communist Party for accepting the commission in the first place. This double humiliation broke Rivera’s spirit and effectively terminated his career as a political painter at the age of 47. He returned to Mexico and continued to work for the government but his heart was no longer in it. He was unable to resist depicting the truth about the total failure of the Mexican Revolution and his work was censored again. Some later work such as ‘The Nightmare of War and Dream of Peace’ (1952) verges on self-parody. But he did achieve one more magnificent mural, ‘Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda’ (1947) where he touchingly summarised his own life and also managed to offend the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Mexico, which was most useful for publicity purposes, and had a negligible effect on the finished painting. This final masterpiece confirms that his passionate commitment to Mexico, to the poor and to an imaginary utopian future were all as undeniable as his genius.
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