Rivera, Diego (1886-1957)
Composición con reloj (Composition with clock)
1914
Oil on cardboard, 27 x 22 cm
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires
In 1960, Diego Rivera commented: «Picasso will tell you that if you don’t go to this country, he will come back to you. I accept the invitation […] and immediately with my friends Foujita and Kavishima […] [nous sommes allés] à l’atelier de Picasso […] qu’il avait fait et quel avenir nous réservait. une « nouvelle » form d’art. »
In Diego Rivera’s recollection of his meeting with Picasso in 1914, the transcription of the questions that haunted them, referring to what the purposes had been and what were or would be the paths of this “new” art form, offers some clues that allow us to doubt the monolithic perspective that art historiography used to give to Cubism. Rivera’s memory exhibits some nodes of this communication network that was established in a way that was as fluid as it was productive and that gives the possibility of advancing on one of the premises that Eugenio Carmona raised when thinking of Cubism as “a plural, diverse practice, extensive in time, generating multiple poetics from its own aesthetic core and conciliating nationalities and geographies.”
At the end of 1916, the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro embarked in Buenos Aires bound for Europe. There, in the course of 1917, he passed through Madrid – a place to which he returned several times during those years – where he established literary contact with Guillermo de Torre, Ramón Gómez de la Serna and Jorge Luis Borges, and then went on to Paris. “To the poet Vicente Huidobro, who has invented modern poetry without knowing the results of the European effort and whose place among us was already marked.” Max Jacob signed this dedication in his Le Cornet à dés (1916), one of the books in the section of Huidobro’s library formed during the years of the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Jacob’s inscription shows the rapid harmony between the Chilean poet and the artists and writers he met. Among them were Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz, Diego Rivera, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, André Breton and Louis Aragon.
Rivera‘s case, like that of Lasar Segall, Torres García, Pettoruti, Barradas and so many modern nomads, shows other routes that include Paris but also incorporate other poles such as Berlin or Dresden, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, Brussels, thus enriching the map of modern metropolises. These, as unique cultural spaces, constitute the key cultural factor of modernist change, and decisively influence its direct effects on form.
The itineraries taken by each of them are superimposed, showing the encounter in certain places that, within each chosen city, indicate the coincidence in a neighborhood, in a café, in a workshop, in front of the same teacher, a gallery owner, an exhibition, a museum. This community allows to test, at least in the ten years through which Diego Rivera travels the scene, certain recurrences that offer the possibility of thinking of encounters, imagining exchanges, establishing networks that link Argentine, Spanish, French, Chilean, Belgian, Mexican, Lithuanian, Brazilian, Uruguayan artists… Giving rise, moreover, to discover the other, discovering themselves in turn.
In the case of Rivera, Madrid marks his first place to stay, between 1907 and 1909. Once in Paris, where he would live until 1921, he did not stop returning to Spain on several occasions, partly due to his relationship with Ramón Gómez de la Serna. As an early promoter of new art, he would propose around 1915 in Madrid the exhibition of Los pintores íntegros in which Rivera and María Blanchard participated. Ramón would point out the work of the Mexican and his peculiar appropriation of cubism as “Riverism”. The Ismos of Gómez de la Serna (whose cover bore Rivera’s portrait) show his selections and, in this case, the proximity with this artist that allowed him to exemplify the enunciation of another ism: “These are the paradoxes of art mocking reality itself! “Long live new portraiture!”, referring to the cubist portrait made by Diego of Ramón that same year, 1915, and exhibited at the aforementioned exhibition. “The portrait that Diego made of me is a true portrait […] cubist painting, which above all loves space, has not bottled me up and has left me free and unconfined.”
Composition with Clock is presented as a unique piece within Rivera‘s cubist process by solidly displaying the resources of analysis of forms on the plane while claiming two-dimensionality and the multiplicity of points of view. (Diana B. Wechsler | MNBA)