A year of weekly interviews (1949-1950) with artist Diego Rivera by
poet Alfredo Cardona-Pena disclose Rivera's iconoclastic views of
life and the art world of that time. These intimate Sunday
dialogues with what is surely the most influential Mexican artist
of the twentieth century show us the free-flowing mind of a man who
was a legend in his own time; an artist who escaped being lynched
on more than one occasion, a painter so controversial that his
public murals inspired movements, or, like the work commissioned by
John D. Rockefeller, were ordered torn down. Here in his San
Angelin studio, we hear Rivera's feelings about the elitist aspect
of paintings in museums, his motivations to create public art for
the people, and his memorable, unedited expositions on the art,
culture, and politics of Mexico. The book has seven chapters that
loosely follow the range of the author's questions and Rivera's
answers. They begin with childlike, yet vast questions on the
nature of art, run through Rivera's early memories and aesthetics,
his views on popular art, his profound understanding of Mexican art
and artists, the economics of art, random expositions on history or
dreaming, and elegant analysis of art criticisms and critics. The
work is all the more remarkable to have been captured between
Rivera's inhumanly long working stints of six hours or even days
without stop. In his rich introduction, author Cardona-Pena
describes the difficulty of gaining entrance to Rivera's inner
sanctum, how government funtionaries and academics often waited
hours to be seen, and his delicious victory. At eight p. m. the
night of August 12, a slow, heavy-set, parsimonious Diego came in
to where I was, speaking his Guanajuato version of English and
kissing women's hands. I was able to explain my idea to him and he
was immediately interested. He invited me into his studio, and
while taking off his jacket, said, "Ask me..." And I asked one,
two, twenty... I don't know how many questions 'til the small hours
of the night, with him answering from memory, with an incredible
accuracy, without pausing, without worrying much about what he
might be saying, all of it spilling out in an unconscious and
magical manner. A series of Alfredo Cardona-Pena's weekly
interviews with Rivera were published in 1949 and 1950 in the
Mexican newspaper, El Nacional, for which Alfredo was a journalist.
His book of compiled interviews with introduction and preface, El
Monstruo en su Laberinto, was published in Spanish in 1965.
Finally, this extraordinary and rare exchange has been translated
for the first time into English by Alfredo's half-brother Alvaro
Cardona Hine, also a poet. According to the translator's wife,
Barbara Cardona-Hine, bringing the work into English was a labor of
love for Alvaro, the fulfillment of a promise made to his brother
in 1971 that he did not get to until the year before his own death
in 2016.
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