Many of us know Diego Rivera for his vast cosmogonies depicting Mexican history or Detroit laborers in his murals. We think of him as friends with Trotsky and husband of the mangled beauty, Frida Kahlo. But at the Meadows Museum’s current exhibition, “Diego Rivera: The Cubist Portraits, 1913-1917,” the formative years prior to his mural work are on display. Living in Paris for about fifteen years, often traveling to Madrid, Toledo, and the Balearic Islands, Rivera became part of the European cubist tradition. He worked alongside Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Juan Gris, and Maria Blanchard. In this group, cubism grew and prospered. It was only when Pierre Reverdy, a critic of modernist art, blasted cubism (and Rivera’s use of it) as incapable of portraiture that Rivera split with the group and headed back to Mexico. (Picasso had also accused him of plagiarism)

But was Reverdy right? In Rivera’s works of 1913, Portrait of a Painter and Girl with Artichokes, wobbly, mildly unfocused portraits, Rivera captures the multiplicity and fragility of the modern condition. Beauty, Rivera suggests, comes both in the figure’s unity as the subject and in its disunity as a framework upon which the modern condition can be captured. The point Rivera seems to be making is that the human is no longer his or her own individual. Instead, every one’s portrait, shaking in and out of focus, speaks to a collective warping.

Sailor at Lunch (1914)

In Sailor at Lunch (1914), a sailor-hat’s vividly red pompom draws the eye inwards to the spell of the jumbled figure. For whatever humor the rotund sailor implies with his exaggerated mustaches, brows, and imbalanced eyes, the stain-like quality of the red pompom upon his blue cap, “Patrie” emblazoned across the cap, reiterates the cost of nationhood. While everything else in the image is cubed and creased by the cut of separate lines, only the hat remains whole. “Patrie” sticks. Its integrity as an idea cannot be broken up; only its wearers can.

In Two Women (1914), a portrait of Angelina Beloff (standing) and Alma Dolores Bastien (sitting), the two are engaged in conversation. With their virginal colors of blue and white, they seem representative of Mary and Elizabeth. A temple-like building that holds shapes of a half circle and triangle divides them. Herein seems to lie the cosmic order (man as triangle, woman as circle): knowledge is placed within the temple by the image of the book, other pyramidal structures ascend from it, and the women themselves form a traingle. A red book lies in the woman’s lap; from this book the other triangles erupt, suggesting the trinity. Yet despite Marian images, Two Women intimates that what once united the world from out of a woman’s loins has been disjointed by knowledge.

In other works such as Portrait of a Poet (1916) and The Painter at Rest (1916), even fewer of the body’s distinct features are visible. In these works, we see something akin to Rodin’s Le Penseur—arms draped in some kind of cogitative posture—along with hints of Brancusi’s smushed, block-like features in The Kiss. These portraits point to images that will later crop up in the hulking, brooding monstrousness of Max Ernst’s sculptures. Rivera seems to capture the slow metamorphosis of man into Minotaur, bullish head and torso with great paws for hands, yet still capable of creation and thought.

Two Women (1914)

Throughout this exhibit (which circles around the medieval gallery in the center of the hall, recalling that at the very heart of modern Mexican and Spanish art stands Spain’s deep Catholicity and its embroilment with the Inquisition) the human drives it. From the center of Europe, Paris, Rivera’s portraiture displays the rapid transition of the human as World War I wages and man slowly cracks and collides with himself. It is a short period. The war ends and cubism begins to dissolve and refocus in the ensuing years. Rivera leaves it behind to go and depict fuller bodies, rehumanized, who move towards a vision of unity through progress.

Yet it is in seeing Rivera’s work move from hints of fullness in his early cubist works, to total blankness in the later period, and back to features again in the murals, that we see Cubism’s accomplishments. When the world seemed wiped clean by the rage of war, cubism depicted the trauma it had upon the human soul and the human physique. In rejecting cubism and turning to murals, Rivera again engages with narratives where the human is more than the sum of its parts.

Diego Rivera: The Cubist Portraits, 1913-1917
Through September 20 at the Meadows Museum
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