Rivera, Diego (1886-1957)
Retrato de Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Portrait of Ramón Gómez de la Serna)
1915
Oil on canvas, 110.5 x 90.5 cm
Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires
This portrait of the writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, signed in 1915, was made by Diego Rivera in Madrid, according to the testimony of the sitter, a few days before its exhibition in the Muestra de Arte Nuevo window. In this context, it caused a great stir, and “a communication was received from the police ordering the painting to be removed because it was causing a constant public scandal.”
It would not be a coincidence, then, that Ramón, the epicentre of the Madrid avant-garde, was the protagonist of this portrait inscribed in the poetic cubism, that lingua franca of modern art for the second decade of the century, with which Rivera had been experimenting since 1913. Towards the date he signed this portrait, Diego had abandoned the orthodoxy of cubism to compose with textured planes of vibrant and complementary colours, as occurs here with the ranges of blues/terracottas and violets/yellows and greens, some even with iridescent tints. As Olivier Debroise rightly points out, Rivera‘s was a hybrid form of cubo-futurism that he used to explore the “plurality of times” of his sitters, as can be seen in this case in the hands and eyes, which allude to different movements/moments of the writer’s actions. Also noteworthy is the use of sgraffito and sand to give roughness to a painting in which textured planes of material charge predominate. The painter had incorporated this last material into his work during the summer he spent in Mallorca in 1914.
In the autumn of that year, and unable to return to Paris in the midst of the war, the Mexican settled in Madrid with his partner, the Russian artist Angelina Beloff. He remained there until the spring of 1915. He had met Gómez de la Serna in 1907, during his first European stay, when he studied in Eduardo Chicharro’s Madrid studio. By the mid-1910s, Diego‘s expansive humanity became a loud part of the Saturday gathering at the Café Pombo, led by Ramón and proclaimed as a sort of intellectual refuge in times of war. The writer’s histrionics, the undisputed animator of this cenacle, surely had a strong influence on Diego. It was he who administered the use of words there and cultivated the delirious games with language, through ironies, metaphors and trivialities. The pictorial subjects of Rivera‘s portraits came from these environments of camaraderie; friends and colleagues with whom he was linked by intellectual and emotional ties.
Similarly, Gómez de la Serna recounted the pleasant and intense experience of being painted by Rivera in his entry dedicated to the painter in his book Ismos, from 1931. However, it was not the only time he referred to this portrait, his favourite, which appears alluded to throughout his bibliography. In it, the writer – who was then twenty-seven years old, two years younger than Rivera – can be seen in his work studio. Dressed in a suit and checked tie, he raises his emblematic pipe to his mouth with the hand that also displays his characteristic black ring. In the other he holds the pen, ready to write. As in most portraits from this period, it was a common solution for Rivera to focus on the essence of the person represented through his key attributes. This is also the case in The Architect –portrait of Jesús T. Acevedo–, from the same year, with which Ramón’s painting shares plastic resources such as a wide chromatic range, a complex composition of planes that unfold in a fan-like pattern and the use of sand to add texture. In Gómez de la Serna’s painting, a block of curly hair falls over the right eye, an unmistakable synecdoche of the way in which Ramón combed his abundant curly hair towards his forehead and the only facial feature, along with the outline of the full cheeks and sideburns, typical of the subject.
The setting evoked is that of his cluttered office on Calle Puebla, a microcosm of Ramón‘s many objects, collected in Paris and Madrid‘s Rastro, condensed his world of interests. In the foreground, on the folded table, there is a triangular inkwell, probably one of those made of Talavera ceramic, a Browning pistol, which was part of the collection of old or unused weapons collected by Ramón, papers and a copy of the recently published El Rastro. This is complemented by the two texts seen on the left: El libro mudo, published in 1911, and the Greguerías, short phrases, similar to aphorisms, which combined humour with metaphor and constituted the distinctive literary resource of the Madrid native. In the upper right corner, a window opens onto a black plane of roofs with chimneys outlined in white, probably a reference to the writer’s “nocturnalism”. Next to it, a large sword with hair on its wooden hilt. At the other end, a wax mannequin head, of the kind that abounded in his studio, opens its impassive eyes while resting on a stick. Ramón himself stated in “Riverismo”: “With this portrait I feel safe and at ease […] it is the most wonderful portrait of myself”, one that made the public reconstruct the crime committed with the pistol and the sword, the result of which was the decapitated female head. It was not by chance, then, that the narrative qualities of the work were displayed on the objects executed in a more realistic manner, the head and the revolver, giving an account of the subtle play with pictorial styles that invaded Rivera’s cubism and was extended to the fantastic fictions of Gómez de la Serna. (María Isabel Baldesarre, MALBA)
See also:
• El Rastro (Madrid) | Gómez de la Serna, Ramón (1888-1963)