MAN ABOUT MOSCOW: DIEGO RIVERA'S MAY DAY SKETCHBOOK

May Day, Moscow, 1928. Watercolor and crayon on graph paper, 4 1/8" x 6 3/8"

Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art, MOMA’s winter painting exhibition, brings together key works, drafts, and ephemera related to Rivera’s now famous 1931 MOMA mural exhibition, but what caught my eye in this otherwise lackluster show was a remarkable collection of 45 small and individually framed crayon and watercolor sketches that, on the surface, don’t seem to have anything at all to do with that original exhibition that helped make Diego such a superstar.

Exhibition notes reveal these small works to be pages from a notebook kept by the Mexican muralist on a 1927 trip to Moscow—a sort of tourist’s diary in pictures, if you will. The so-called Moscow sketchbook, according to the notes, is a record of his 1927-28 visit to the Soviet capital for the tenth anniversary of the Russian revolution, that follows an anonymous family as it prepares for the big day's festivities, highlighting the outsize spectacle of the event—colorful banners, posters, and floats—with the city's landmarks (the Kremlin, Lenin's tomb and St. Basil's Cathedral) in sight. While intimate in scale (4 1/8” x 6 3/8"), the sketch’s focus, as to be expected from an artist otherwise famous for portraying sweeping historic narratives, was the exuberant and swelling crowd—men and women, soldiers and civilians—turning out for the celebrations. In short, history in the making, hardly the subject of small sketches.


May Day, Moscow, 1928. Watercolor and crayon on graph paper, 4 1/8" x 6 3/8"

Rivera had been invited to the Moscow May Day celebrations by the Soviet government itself and, upon his arrival, was soon invited to teach monumental painting and composition at the State University there. He was also contracted by Anatoly Lunarcharsky, the first Soviet People’s Commissioner of Enlightenment, to create a mural in the reception room of the Red Army's high command, the actual impetus for Rivera’s sketches in the Moscow sketchbook, a detail that the exhibition notes fail to mention. It may seem a fine distinction, but while the small sketches currently hanging on MOMA’s walls certainly speak for themselves, it seems important to clarify that the Moscow sketchbook  wasn’t so much a “record” of a sight seer's trip, rather sketches toward a major commissioned work.

Rivera was quite surprised by his near-instant celebrity in Moscow, but a healthy dose of hindsight explains all. Historical circumstances had created a special bond between the Soviet Union and Mexico. Both had recently emerged from revolution and artists in both countries confronted many of the same issues, including the relationship of the avant-garde artist  to a mass audience. As a result, Mexican artists and intellectuals eyed the new Soviet state for relevant models to identify and engage with their own revolution and, as milestone anniversaries seem to demand some sort of an assessment, the Soviets were looking for new models of historical narrative to continue to engage their own revolution as it embarked on its second glorious decade.


May Day, Moscow, 1928. Watercolor and crayon on graph paper, 4 1/8" x 6 3/8"

Besides, Rivera, a member of Mexico’s own Partido Comunista since 1922,  was already fairly well known among Soviet intelligentsia. In 1925, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky had visited Mexico and returned home with reproductions of Rivera's work, which he used to illustrate his own lectures and readings. The poet's praise, which included a declaration that Rivera's murals were "the world's first communist frescoes," helped to establish the Mexican’s bona fides in Soviet cultural circles.

But if MOMA’s new exhibition is a celebration of Rivera’s earlier exhibition in New York, why include the Moscow sketchbook at all? According to the exhibition notes, Abby Rockefeller, an early admirer of the Mexican's work, bought Rivera's sketchbook for $2,500. (Rockefeller gifted it to the museum in 1935.) What they don’t tell us is that the funds were meant to partially offset the artist’s expenses while in New York preparing for the 1931 exhibition--the missing detail which links it to this somewhat slipshod exhibition that runs until May 14, 2012.

Comments

[olisa]

Those sketches were my favorite part of the exhibition. It was amazing to see so many of his sketches together, scene after scene and row after row... to see how he approached sketching large groups of people in an unfamiliar landscape.