Foreword

Mary-Anne Martin

About three years ago I was asked by Eric Himmel at Abrams if I would be willing to help locate illustrations for a biography of Diego Rivera. The author was Pete Hamill, the well-known writer, reporter and newspaper editor. A lunch was set up and I must confess I was skeptical about the project. What could this famous Brooklyn-born Irishman know about “my” Mexico? What could be written about Diego Rivera that had not been said already?

I came away from that lunch a convert. Pete knew a great deal about Mexico, had gone to college there on the GI bill with the intention of becoming a painter, had traveled and written extensively about the country, its people and its politics and had even done a stint as Editor of the Mexico City News. I grilled him subtly about Mexican art and he passed all my tests. We all walked back to my gallery where an Orozco show was mounted and we discussed the legacy of the muralists. I agreed to help with the book and mentioned that I would love to put together a Rivera show when the book was ready.

Time passed. The book project was delayed slightly by Pete’s short but doomed engagement as Editor-in-Chief of the New York Daily News. I doubted that a Rivera book was coming soon, even though Eric would come to the gallery from time to time to pore over our archives and mark interesting photos with colorful little flags. Then half a manuscript appeared. More photos were flagged. Emails were exchanged. Suddenly a giant galley was delivered to the gallery and I realized that not only was a book coming out but that I had volunteered to do a Rivera show!

Diego Rivera, Watercolors and Drawings is the result of that promise. Like the artist, the works are varied in character. The earliest drawings show a talented artist not yet sure of his style. Several works reveal a brilliant master of European traditions, who has yet to become his own man. Later drawings reveal his virtuosity as a muralist, his adoption of the Revolution as his subject matter and his use of art to express his political beliefs and his compassion for the people of Mexico. Still others are business-as-usual illustrations for books and lovely renditions of Mexican daily life, expertly crafted but largely meant to pay the bills.

There is no one Rivera style. Rivera adopted the appropriate mode for every situation. Hamill writes of this in the introduction to his book, in a piece called The Masks of Diego Rivera. Rather than diminish its impact by trying to quote from it, we have reprinted this article as the introduction to our catalogue. Thanks to Pete and Eric and Abrams for the opportunity to do so.

New York City, September 1999