{"id":396,"date":"2007-10-05T19:07:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-06T02:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/?p=396"},"modified":"2016-04-10T22:09:49","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T05:09:49","slug":"diego-rivera-glorious-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/diego-rivera-glorious-victory.html","title":{"rendered":"Diego Rivera: Glorious Victory!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifty years after the death of Diego Rivera, the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) in Mexico City has launched a major exhibition<\/a> to celebrate the famed Mexican Muralist. Having opened on September 28th, 2007, the important exhibit titled, Diego Rivera: Epopeya Mural<\/em> (Diego Rivera: Epic Mural), presents 170 works of art by the radical Mexican artist, including 23 monumental wall paintings, as well as dozens of drawings and studies associated with the painter\u2019s internationally renowned murals.<\/p>\n

It was of course Rivera, along with his compatriots David Alfaro Siquieros and Jos\u00e9 Clemente Orozco, who broke the dependent links to European culture, helping to create authentic visual aesthetics for Mexico and establishing the profoundly influential, socially conscious Mexican Mural School in the process. I traveled to Mexico City in 1994 and marveled at the works of Rivera, Siquieros, and Orozco that are housed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. No other group of artists has had such a profound effect upon me, and I\u2019d give my eye teeth to see this tribute to Diego Rivera.<\/p>\n

Ending December 16th, 2007, the two-month long show is mounted in eight halls of the museum, and comes on the heels of that institution having presented the largest body of Frida Kahlo\u2019s artworks to ever be put on display – a just completed exhibition<\/a> that commemorated Kahlo\u2019s 100th birthday. The focus of Epopeya Mural<\/em> is Rivera\u2019s large transportable mural, Glorious Victory<\/em>, a long missing work thought lost, but recently returned to Mexico by Russia\u2019s Puskin Museum of Moscow, where it had been in storage for nearly half a century.<\/p>\n

Painted in 1954, the mockingly titled Glorious Victory<\/em> has as its subject the infamous CIA coup of the same year that overthrew Guatemala\u2019s democratically elected government. At the center of the mural, CIA Director John Foster Dulles<\/a> can be seen shaking hands with the leader of the coup d’\u00e9tat, Colonel Castillo Armas. Sitting at their feet is an anthropomorphized bomb bearing the smiling face of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower – who gave orders to launch the military coup. In the background, a priest can be seen officiating over the massacre of workers, many of which can be seen lying slaughtered in the painting\u2019s foreground.<\/div>\n

The head of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the coup, Allen Dulles<\/a>, and the U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala during the coup, John Peurifoy<\/a>, are depicted handing out money to various Guatemalan military commanders and fascist junta officials, as indigenous Mayan workers slave away at loading bananas onto a United Fruit Company ship. I might add that Allen Dulles was on the board of directors of the United Fruit Company when the U.S. overthrew the government of Guatemala.<\/p>\n

\"Detail<\/p>\n

Detail: Glorious Victory<\/em> – Diego Rivera 1954. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower is portrayed as a bomb, and a Guatemalan stooge shakes hands with his CIA puppet master as U.S. dollars are spread all around. <\/span><\/div>\n

Epopeya Mural<\/em> will be the first time Glorious Victory<\/em> has been exhibited in Mexico. Rivera painted the mural on linen, and donated it to the workers of the then Soviet Union. The mural was shipped to Warsaw, Poland, in 1956 for an exhibition that was to travel Eastern European countries. At the end of the traveling exhibit the painting was missing. As it turned out, the mural ended up in a storeroom at the Puskin Museum, where it has been sitting since 1958. Because the painting had been sequestered away in a darkened room for safekeeping, its bright, lustrous colors are in perfect condition. Glorious Victory<\/em> is apparently a two-sided painting, as museum conservators say an unfinished section on the mural\u2019s backside depicts the exploitation of workers in U.S. factories.<\/p>\n

The U.S. overthrew the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzm\u00e1n through a covert CIA operation dubbed Operation PBSUCCESS<\/a>. Guzm\u00e1n had implemented an agrarian reform program to alleviate the suffering of Guatemala\u2019s poor Indian peasants, who comprised (and still do), the overwhelming majority of the country\u2019s population. To Guatemala\u2019s privileged elites and their military allies, as well as dominant U.S. corporations like the United Fruit Company (Guatemala\u2019s biggest landowner at the time), Guzm\u00e1n\u2019s reforms smacked of communism. CIA records referred to Guatemala\u2019s socio-economic improvements as; “an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the ‘Banana Republic.'”<\/p>\n

In May of 1997, The CIA released several hundred declassified documents relating to Operation PBSUCCESS, some of which detailed the spy agency having compiled lists of Guatemalans in the Guzm\u00e1n government, “to eliminate immediately in event of a successful anti-Communist coup.” Declassified documents also contained a 19-page manual titled, “Study of Assassination”, a how-to guide book that instructed, “The simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.” If you are interested in reading some of these revealing documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, they are available at the website of the National Security Archive<\/a> at The George Washington University.<\/p>\n

Included in the exhibit at the Palacio de Bellas Artes are sketches, notes and preparatory works Rivera made for the murals he created at Mexico\u2019s National Palace, Secretariat of Public Education, the Theater of the Insurgents, and other notable public buildings. Also on display are Rivera\u2019s drawings and preliminary sketches for murals painted in the United States, like the monumental frescos at the Detroit Institute of the Arts<\/a> that portray American workers laboring in an automobile factory. The sketches for Rivera\u2019s huge 1934 mural at Rockefeller Center in New York City, Man at the Crossroads<\/a><\/em>, will be on exhibit as well. After John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had the masterpiece destroyed because it contained a portrait of Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, Rivera recreated the massive fresco at the Palacio de Ballas Artes, but included in it a portrait of Rockefeller with syphilis bacteria floating above his head. Of course, the recreated Man at the Crossroads<\/span> is part of the Epopeya Mural<\/span> exhibit.<\/p>\n

It is important to recall that in 1954 Frida Kahlo\u2019s last public act was to participate in a demonstration opposed to the U.S. intervention in Guatemala as it was occurring. Kahlo did so from a wheelchair and against her doctor\u2019s orders – and she passed away two weeks later. Rivera painted his Glorious Victory<\/em> in the same timeframe, passing away in 1957.<\/p>\n

— \/\/ —<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/p>\n

A New Look at Rivera\u2019s \u201cGloriosa Victoria<\/a>“<\/em> is a major update that I published Feb. 2016. The article contains new information, as well as beautiful details from Rivera’s mural.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fifty years after the death of Diego Rivera, the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) in Mexico City has launched a major exhibition to celebrate the famed Mexican Muralist. Having opened on September 28th, 2007, the important exhibit titled, Diego Rivera: Epopeya Mural (Diego Rivera: Epic Mural), presents 170 works of art by the radical Mexican artist, including…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,40,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chicanarte-chicano-art","category-diego-rivera","category-mexican-muralism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art-for-a-change.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}