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Postcolonial modernism in the work of DiegoRivera and Jos Carlos Maritegui or new lighton a neglected relationshipDavid Craven aa Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies , University of NewMexico ,Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

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Third Text, Spring 2001 3

Postcolonial Modernism in theWork of Diego Rivera and

Jos Carlos Mariteguior New Light on a Neglected Relationship

David Craven

1 Carlos Fuentes, 'Writing inTime', Democracy, vol 2,no 1, January 1981, p 61.

2 Carlos Fuentes, NuevoTiempo Mexicano, 1994,trans, Marina GutmanCasteneda, Farrar, Strausand Giroux, New York,1996, p 18.

Several years ago, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes was traveling through thecountryside of Morelos, the home province of the legendary revolutionary leaderEmiliano Zapata. Fuentes and his companions became lost in this mountainousregion with its maze of rice paddies and sugar-cane fields. When they finallycame to a village, Fuentes asked an old peasant the community's name. Thepeasant from Morelos replied: 'Well, that depends. We call it Santa Maria intimes of peace. We call it Zapata in times of war.'1

This encounter reminded Fuentes of something often lost sight of in the West.At any given moment, especially in Latin America, there is more than oneconcept of time in operation - and each of them is replete with its own distinctivehistorical and spatial coordinates. One of the first artworks to encapsulate thismultilateral 'montage' of various temporal modes - which I refer to here as'uneven development' - was a magisterial 1915 painting by Diego Rivera entitledPaisaje Zapatista: El Guerrillero (Zapatista Landscape: The Guerrilla), and this is awork to which we shall return shortly. Inspired as it was by the MexicanRevolution from 1910-20, this commanding artwork reminds us immediately ofwhat Fuentes has recently noted in Nuevo Tiempo Mexicano (New Time in Mexico)from 1994, namely, 'Only the Revolution made present all of Mexico's pasts [withequal force] - and this is why it deserves a capital R.'2

Another encounter also made evident the distinctive set of historical conver-gences that were occurring in the 1920s not only in Mexico, but throughout thehemisphere. This interchange is represented by a little known but quiteimportant portrait photo of Diego Rivera that was autographed by the Mexicanartist and mailed to the editorial staff of a remarkable Peruvian journal, Amauta,to which it was also dedicated in 1926. The Rivera photograph was thenpublished in the fifth issue, in January 1927, of this vanguard journal, whichlasted from 1926 to 1930. It was founded as well as directed throughout its entireexistence by the philosopher Jos Carlos Maritegui, who is as important to Latin

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43 Adolfo Snchez Vzquez,'El marxismo en laAmrica Latina', Casa delas Americas, vol 30, no 178,1990, pp 3-14; and VickyUnruh, 'Mariategui'sAesthetic Thought', LatinAmerican Research Review,vol 24, no 3, 1989,pp 45-69.

4 V M Miroshevsky, 'Elpopulismo en Per', 1941,reprinted in Maritegui ylos origenes del marxismolatinoamericana, ed, JosArico, Mexico City, 1973,p 6; and David Craven,Diego Rivera as EpicModernist, Boston, 1997,pp 93-99.

5 Jos Carlos Maritegui,Siete ensayos cie la realidadperuana, 1928, trans,Marjory Urquidi, Austin,1988, pp 130-131. BothNestor Garca Cancliniand Gerardo Mosqueralater agreed withMaritegui's criticisms ofVasconcelos.

6 On this literature, see,David Craven, 'TheRecent Literature onDiego Rivera', LatinAmerican Research Review,forthcoming.

7 Alberto Hijar, 'DiegoRivera: contribucionpoltica', Diego Rivera Hoy,Mexico City, 1986,pp 37-72.

American thought as DiegoRivera is to the art of theAmericas.3 There was more thanan elective affinity linking them,since, as we shall see, theirmutual admiration was firmlygrounded in a comparableanalysis of society that drewthem to each other.

Their similarly heterodoxviews of socialism, in tandemwith an alternative concept ofindigenismo, caused both ofthem to be denounced asultra-leftists and populists bythe orthodox leaders of theCommunist Party and Comiternin these years.4 Moreover, theterms of their agreement politi-cally also account for theiralmost equal distance from thecentrist politics of Jos Vasconcelos,the one-time patron of Rivera'smurals in Mexico. Vasconceloswas someone with whomMaritegui remained in contacteven though Maritegui criticisedthe ethnocentrism of the Mexicanphilosopher's particular Conceptof mestizaje (or ethnic fusion), aswell as its concomitant andquite condescending view ofpre-colonial culture in theAmericas.5

Before returning to DiegoRivera's overlooked photographic tribute to Maritegui and Amauta (which wasreciprocated textually by Amaut), I should outline briefly the theoretical point ofdeparture that will lead to a far more emphatic linkage of the art and thought ofRivera and Maritegui, than has so far been realised in the Diego Riveraliterature. Even the wonderfully comprehensive catalogue and chronology putout by scholars at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1986 overlooked this significant,indeed, signal relationship between Rivera and Maritegui. Not surprisingly,then, the most recent biography of Rivera - by Patrick Marnham in 1998 - doesnot even mention Maritegui, much less his noteworthy relationship with Riverathat I shall explore.6

As the contemporary Mexican philosopher Alberto Hijar has convincinglyargued, the visual result of Rivera's work from this period was a form ofdissident or alternative indigenismo. This was particularly the case with Rivera'sbrilliant mural cycle for the Secretaria de Education Pblica (the Ministry ofEducation) - nine panels of which appeared in black and white reproductions forAmauta, in 1926-27 when it also published two articles about Rivera and in 1929Amauta even featured a drawing by Rivera on its front cover.7

Diego Rivera : el artista de una clase

Toda ob a de a t h i nntncwd S^ ^-^V-jt}T$ff S . f* %

I n on n ha do ampo o ha s do n i # * ***>& t f P V ^HC-^r* ,t a am e o na q e d en tsen a A es *" j * *? *-* S iben s abo P O S E e end m be i "** 4 ^ f - '*'%** n > ^!Tepo J^de P P * m a " J hgSd* a"^ *^&k^-S?r *v ^

58 Ibid.

9 Michael Lwy, 'Marxismand Romanticism in theWork of Jos CarlosMaritegui', LatinAmerican Perspectives,vol 25, no 4, July 1998,pp 76-88.

10 Jos Carlos Maritegui,Siete ensayos, op cit,pp 130-131.

AN ALTERNATIVE CONCEPT OFHYBRIDITY

Contrary to the 'classless' ideals of ethnic unity, and even the melting potethnicity crucial for the official Mexican discussions of mestizaje, such as thosefound so famously in the writings of philosopher Jos Vasconcelos and anthro-pologist Manuel Gamio from 1916 through 1926, there is a notably divergentposition in the artworks and writings of Diego Rivera, as well as in the contem-porary essays by Jos Carlos Maritegui. In the telling words of Hijar, thehegemonic indigenismo in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America - which wasan objective correlative for Vasconcelos' concept of mestizaje (or hybridity) andthe so-called 'raza csmica' - presupposed a resolutely essentialist notion of race,a Rousseauian paternalism towards Native American culture, a stridently anti-Marxist conception of society, a strictly evolutionary as well as quite linear viewof historical development, and an economistic concept of progress that wasentirely in keeping with the mainstream Western ideology of modernisation,however much Vasconcelos is often seen as having arrived at an alternative to it.8

None of these various positions can be found, however, in a sustained way inthe pictorial logic of Diego Rivera's indigenista paintings - nor in the analyticalessays by Jos Carlos Maritegui on the 'Indian problem' as it is labeled in his

now classic text Siete ensayos de interpretation de larealidad peruana from 1928. (It is this text more than anyother that has caused Maritegui to be considered the'Antonio Gramsci of Latin America'.)9

Just as Vasconcelos would erroneously criticiseRivera in the late 1920s for being 'anti-Spanish' (oranti-European actually), so Maritegui would simulta-neously praise Rivera in his private correspondence as'one of us' and publicly take Vasconcelos to task in Sieteensayos as follows (undoubtedly along lines that Riverawould have embraced):

Vaseoncelos, who tends to depreciate the native cultures ofAmerica, thinks that without a supreme law [underlyingtheir state formations] they were condemned to disappearbecause of their innate inferiority... [Yet] Inca culture... hasleft us a magnificent popular art... [and] social and politicalorganization all the more remarkable.10

But before we go any further, let me change coursefor a moment and indicate the route that the rest of thisarticle will take. First, I need to affirm that images alwayscome before words and are never simply reducible tothem. Second, I must emphasise that important art -such as that of Diego Rivera - creates theory, withoutever simply illustrating or mechanically reflectingtheory. (I realise, of course, this is not a popular view ata time when the 'right' quotation from Foucault orBaudrillard supposedly exhausts what we can sayabout an object. Yet anyone who has ever read Foucaulton Las Meninas knows how much more is still left to besaid, and how little this French author actually did say,about an artwork that ultimately attests to his own

Diego Rivera, 'Jos Guadalupe Rodriguez', drawing on thecover of Amauta, no 24, June 1929, Lima, Peru.(Rodriguez was a leftwing labour leader in Mexico who wasassassinated by counter revolutionary forces in the mid-1920s.)

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611 On Foucault's unabashedEurocentrism, see: EdwardSaid, 'Michel Foucault', InThese Times, September 5,1984, p 22, and on histheoretical writings seePeter Dews, 'Foucault'sTheory of Subjectivity',New Left Review, no 144,March/April 1984,pp 72-95.

12 David Craven, Diego Riveraas Epic Modernist, op cit,pp 34-35.

13 Linda Bank Downs, 'VivaZapata!', Art News, vol 98,no 6, June 1999, pp 100-101.As Downs notes, 'Riverahad first seen the image ofa revolutionary soldier ona postcard sent to him by afriend in Mexico'.Moreover, she points outthat the sarape, fromSaltillo in the North, couldsignify Pancho Villa, butthat the wide-brimmed felthat and the distinctivepose with the rifle actuallyderived from a famousphoto of Zapata, from theSouth, which Rivera hadseen. See also: RamnFavela, Diego Rivera: TheCubist Years, Phoenix ArtMuseum, 1984, pp 106-107.

highly limited, if also very intelligent and quite resourceful, epistemic purview.)11In short, I shall first focus in a concerted way on the art object - and its internalpictorial logic - before trying to extract theoretical projects from it, whether thoseof Maritegui or anyone else. Thus, the first half of this paper addresses some ofthe attributes that cause Diego Rivera's pictorial rendition of indigenista values tobe far more innovative and still timely, than do, say, the contemporary indigenistapaintings from Mexico of Fernando Leal or the subsequent work of FranciscoZuniga from Costa Rica - and even perhaps the contemporary images of JosSabogal from Peru. Then I will refocus in the latter part of this paper on thetheoretical conclusions that one can develop out of the prior and overdeterminedpaintings of Diego Rivera.

RIVERA'S ZAPATISTA LANDSCAPE ANDUNEVEN PICTORIAL DEVELOPMENTAmong the first major artworks to operate by means of a heightened sense oftemporal hybridity, thus being a 'collage' of different historical modes andhistoric moments (if not of various materials), was a splendid 1915 painting byDiego Rivera. This image epitomised a non-Eurocentric tendency withinEurope's symbolic cultural centre, namely, the Parisian artworld where Riverapainted it. Entitled Paisaje Zapatista: El Guerrillero, this large painting (144 x 123cm) now enjoys pride of place in the National Museum of Mexico. At first itappears to be a collage, since it features a virtuoso treatment of materials thattrick the spectator into thinking that these things have been physically appendedto the canvas, although they in fact have not. Here Rivera's 'pure' oil painting oncanvas trumps and ironically inverts the 'impure' logic of the actual cubistcollage, with its mixture of various media. Moreover, this irreverent paintingtriggered a major controversy in the Cubist enclave of Paris and apparentlycaused poet Pierre Reverdy and Max Jacob to deride Rivera in quite ethnocentricterms as a 'Courbet of the savannahs' - as if any place in Latin America couldsimply be described in ways normally reserved for sub-Saharan Africa colonieswithin the French empire.12

Labelled by mexican art historian Justino Fernandez as a paradigmaticexample of 'Anhuac Cubism' ('Anhuac' was the Aztec's name for the Valley ofMexico), this pictorial tour deforce also contains a hybrid element in the form ofthe trompe l'oeil depiction of the paper in the right foreground. The latter conjuresup recollections of Spanish colonial images of the Baroque period, such as thosedone by Francisco Zurbarn (whose work was often shipped to the New Worldin the 17th century). Moreover, this image also leaps forward in time to harboura reference to a famous photo of Zapata (whether by Hugo Brehme orVictor-Augustin Casasola) - which was then widely circulated by means ofmechanical reproduction over the international wire services.13

However, as it is more agrarian in feel than either pastoral or bucolic incharacter (to think of landscape paintings by European Cubists and Fauvists),this painting by Rivera - which we could label a type of agrarian Cubism inhomage to the distinctive political project of Zapata - elicits through itscrystalline setting a more topical allusion both geographically and historically to'la region ms transparente del aire', as author Alfonso Reyes would call the Valleyof Mexico in his 1915 novel entitled, appropriately, Vision de Anhuac. (LikeMexican novelist Martfn Luis Guzman, a one-time secretary of Pancho Villa,Alfonso Reyes was a friend of Rivera in this period. And, of course, Rivera

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714 Ramon Favela, ibid,p 104.

15 Dore Ashton,'Speculations onModernism', Museum ofFine Arts, Santa Fe, NewMexico, Public lecturegiven on April 15, 1994.

Diego Rivera, Zapatista Landscape: The Guerrilla, 1915.National Museum of Mexican Art

executed a well-known Cubist portrait of Guzman in 1915.)14 Among the notablyinnovative things about this hybid example of Anhuac Cubism by Rivera is itsdistinctive type of conjunctural modernism that reminds us so well of DoreAshton's astute observation that early modernism at its best possessed amultilateral trajectory that shifted about in dynamic fashion, moving both forwardto the past and back to the future simultaneously?3 What results visually andotherwise is not a melted-down mixture or monolithic mestizaje, but rather aglittering multi-ethnic mosaic of cross-cultural references and syncopatedfragments. They no more allow a mere return to roots, than they permit closureat any one moment in time, but at most only the montage of different temporalmodes. As such, Rivera's painting is an early, perhaps the earliest, example ofwhat is now known as 'postcolonial art' because of the way it hinges on a dartinginterplay, which is both multi-class-based and multi-ethnic in nature. Unlike theother and more binary tradition of anti-colonial art, the postcolonial work of Riverashowcases an unsettled interchange of the urban and the rural, of the centre andthe periphery, of the mass produced and the artisanal, of illusionary mass andmodernist flatness. The Rivera image thus embodies the ebb and flow of post-colonial art as it has only been recently defined in a major study: 'By the term

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816 Bill Ashcroft, GarethGriffiths, and Helen Tiffin,eds, The Post-ColonialStudies Reader, New York,1995, p 3.

"postcolonial" we do not imply an automatic, or seamless and unchangingprocess of resistance, but a series of [critical] linkages... and critiques of imperialrepresentation'.16

What emerges from this inaugural 'postcolonial' modernist painting by DiegoRivera (and Desmond Rochfort has rightly called him the first great'postcolonial' artist, not just anti-colonial painter) is a complex, and open-endedto-and-fro, with all sorts of lessons and concretising components in a variety ofdirections. This is a radically new image and one notably at odds with the morestatic and one-dimensional frieze of 'heroic' revolutionary cadres that one sees inthe contemporary 'anti-colonial' art of painters like Fernando Leal. Such is thecase with the latter's popular and very illustrative 1921 oil painting entitledZapatistas at Rest, (a favourite of Vasconcelos). In Rivera's alternative modernistpainting, historical narrativity emerges in mdias res as a delta-like expanse ofcompeting stories. Conversely, in Leal's realist image history is simply a

Fernando Leal, Zapatista at Rest, 1921. Private collection.

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917 Gladys March, DiegoRivera: My Art, My Life,New York, 1995, p 31.

18 Jos Carlos Maritegui,Editorial, Amauta, vol 1,no 1, September 1926, p 1.

highway going in one direction with unpaved andsoon superceded peasant paths denoting its singularstory-line, its allegiance to conventional concepts ofdevelopment.

Look, for example, at Fernando Leal'ssentiment-laden 1920 work Indian with a Red Sarape.Less an active engagement with historical change,than a passive snapshot of an essentialising imagethat purportedly encapsulates the 'timeless' andindigenous roots of Mexico, this painting by Leal isnot about critical hybridity nor is it about thealternative and transformative indigenismo ofRivera's work. In the latter work everything offersus competing visual choices and nothing centres thepainting (as does the main motif) or commands ourattention so exclusively (as does the marvelous redsarape in Leal's paradoxical painting). At one andthe same time, the Leal image would have usconcentrate on a return to 'purely' indigenous form- and yet it attempts to do so by means of atechnique, language, media, and conventions thatare overwhelmingly those of official Europe and itsimperial identity.

Nor is it by chance, for our purposes, thatRivera's collage, or impure hybrid, which is not justanti-European in texture, would nevertheless laterallow him to claim of Zapatista Landscape that it wasa postcolonial artwork. It had vanquished his'Mexican-American inferiority complex' and hisuncritical 'awe before historic Europe and itsculture'.17 In this work, which is both Western andnon-Western at once, we see white shadows, orspecters, that are as palpable as the fragments ofreality that they shadow. Similarly, in the first issueof Amauta (a word which comes from Quechua andmeans 'wiseman' or 'teacher,' Maritegui referred tothis journal of 'vanguard artists, socialists, and

revolutionaries', as an apparition or spectre that haunted the status quo in Peru.18A deftly calibrated balancing act of the declarative and the indirect, Rivera's

Zapatista Landscape is at once formally dense and compositionally dispersed. Thealmost camouflaged image of the figure in the painting forces the viewer tosearch for shifting pictorial traces, thus eliciting an analogy between Cubist cluesand a guerrilla's elusiveness - someone who is here one moment and gone thenext, like the vision of a spectre. Using brash but 'authentic' colours for the peasantpancho, or campesino sarape, this painting by Rivera both refers to the familiar andtransfigures it, so as to evade easy recognition and defer final identity. In thisregard, as in others, Rivera contradicts the fixed and essentialising contemporarydiscourses of Vasconcelos and Gamio, as well as of Fernando Leal. For the latterthree figures the indigenous is conclusively recognised and is only of the past,where it is simply a rustic prologue to the present. According to this hegemonicview in the 1920s, indigenismo was merely an identity already established thatawaited its illustrator, or perhaps its mortician, and certainly called for a pictorial

Fernando Leal, Indo-American with Red Sarape, 1920.Private collection.

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19 Gladys March, op cit, p 58.For more on 'alternativemodernism' in LatinAmerica, see: DavidCraven, Diego Rivera asEpic Modernist, op cit,pp 42-56.

archaeologist - not a bricoleur, or bricollagist, like Rivera.The pictorial logic of the visual language used by Rivera, though, entailed an

affirmation and expansion of oil painting's communicative resources, thennegation and contraction of the aesthetic claims on behalf of Western Europeanart. This happens, for example, through the abbreviated use of chiaroscuro, thecoy and inconsistent usage of overlapping planes, and the fleeting figurative

references that flirt with illustrativeforms, then leave them behind. Justhow the highly original internal logicof Rivera's paintings related to theunique external developments of theMexican Revolution was summed upwell enough by the painter himself:

It [Cubism] was a revolutionarymovement, questioning every-thingthat had previously been said and donein art. It held nothing sacred. As the oldworld would soon blow itself apart,never to be the same again, so Cubismbroke down forms as they had beenseen for centuries, and was creating outof fragments new forms, new objects,new patterns, and - ultimately - newworlds.19

Nor did Rivera fail to consolidate thecompelling image from 1915 that hepresented to contemporaries in themiddle of the Mexican Revolution. For,in the Secretara de Educcacin frescoesthat so attracted the attention of theeditorial staff at Amauta, as well as inlater mural cycles from 1940 and 1954,Rivera consolidated a conception ofaltern-ative indigenismo through atreatment of uneven historicaldevelopment that placed him at theforefront of all those who sought toarrive at a radical but still plausibleframework for social transformation.(Not surprisingly, these works in theMinistry of Education earned both theanimosity of Vasconcelos and theadmiration of Maritegui.)20

Furthermore, he did so throughoutthe rest of his career with therenovative possibilities of Cubism evermost at hand. In a certain sense, then,Rivera never really abandonedCubism. Instead, he simply pulledback from what Jos Ortega y Gasset

Diego Rivera, Day of the Dead (November 2),fresco, 1924, Ministry of Education

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20 For Vasconcelos' criticismsof Rivera as 'anti-Spanish',see Jos Vasconcelos,'Sobre Diego Rivera', inElisa Garcia Barragan, ed,Antologia Tributaria,Mexico City, 1986,pp 227-228.

21 For more on this, see:D Craven, Diego Rivera asEpic Modernist, op cit,pp 33-35.

22 For a classic overview ofRivera along these lines,see Justino Fernndez, ArteModerno y Contemporaneode Mexico, vol 11, El Arte delSiglo XX, 1952, MexicoCity, 1994, p 44.

termed the 'fury of plastic geometrism' that largely dissolved everything intoabstract structures. Since historical narrativity as part of his epic modernism wasalways symptomatic of his mature work, Cubism as a pictorial idiom andsyntactical strategy underpinned the structural logic of his presentation ofhistory, even as the otherwise dispersive logic of Cubism meant that manydifferent historical routes remained open. In this regard, Rivera always conjuredup a heterodox use of Cubism against the orthodox Cubists, which was thesource of his controversy with the Cubist circle in the teens.21

On the second and third levels of the Court of Labour in the Ministry, forexample, scenes of modern Western science, as in the personification forChemistry, are balanced with scenes from ancient pre-Colombian thought, as inthe figure for Geology. The spectator is thus denied a one-dimensional overviewof the history of science, which would have us simply march in single file frompurely non-Western superstition to the radiant enlightenment of 'pure' Westernscience. Rather, there is a more complex sense of modern science as the collective,but still incomplete, achievement throughout history of both non-European andEuropean cultures, neither to the exclusion of the other, as part of a broaderprocess of uneven historical development. Similarly, and to greater effect, Riverapainted in 1953 a striking mural for the Hospital de la Raza in Mexico City,entitled The History of Medicine in Mexico: The People Demand Better Health. Thiswork is a coda to an entire postcolonial visual tradition in his work.

In the latter mural, we see Rivera balancing the achievements of pre-Colombian medicinal culture and art forms with the accomplishments of modernscience and post-Renaissance art from the West, neither to the exclusion of theother and with a radically democratic political twist that demands unprece-dented popular access to both. The visual language is a commanding andcohesively hybrid embodiment of pre-Colombian figures, such as Tlazolteotl andIzcuitl, interwoven with Renaissance-Baroque conventions for evoking realistforms. All of it is within a gridded structural framework that takes AnhuacCubism to another plane entirely. Similarly, part of this fresco is a visualrepository of the ancient homeopathic practices and herbal cures of theprecolonial periods and the other is a showcase of modern surgical practicesfrom Western science. A very complex situation thus emerges in which thepresent has lessons to teach the past, but it is also one in which the past still haslessons to teach the present, along with the future. To be of the past, Rivera'smural shows, is not simply to be historically superceded in all respects. For thereare senses, in which the past is the past - but there are other senses in which thepast is not simply of the past, but also of the future.22

MARITEGUI AND 'INDIGENOUS' SOCIALISM IN PERUTo approach the problem of land reform in Rivera's murals, as in the Ministry ofEducation, is to approximate even more clearly the related and equallyheterodox political vision of Jos Carlos Maritegui, particularly as articulated inhis Siete ensayos and in Amauta. It is also to understand quite profoundly the gapthat separates both of these still germane figures from the more anachronisticthought of Vasconcelos and Gamio (however important the latter two thinkersundoubtedly were to the 1920s). But, at issue here is not only one's significanceto the 1920s, but also to the 1990s and beyond. Here, both Rivera and Mariteguicarry the day handsomely, and evidently in terms we can now rightly call'postcolonial' in the most insightful sense.

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12

Diego Rivera, The History of Medicine in Mexico, fresco, 1953, Hospital de la Raza, Mexico City

23 See notes 3 & 9.

24 Jos Carlos Maritegui,'Arte, Revolucin yDecadencia', Amauta, no 3,November 1926, pp 3-4.

Before discussing the presentation of Rivera's art by Amauta to the Peruvianpublic between 1926 and 1929,1 should perhaps introduce Jos Carlos Mariteguimore formally and outline his innovative, even brilliant, response to the issues ofindigenismo, class-based inequities, avant-garde art, and the relation of NativeAmerican economic formations to the contemporary problem of land reform. Inhis surprisingly short but remarkably accomplished life from 1894 to 1930,Maritegui began as a journalist, developed into a poet and a political activist,and emerged as one of the foremost political theorists from the Americas in thefirst half of the 20th century.23 Along the way, he managed to write one of themore astute critical assessments of avant-garde art from the left of the politicalspectrum, which allowed ample space for engaging with the diverse artisticpractices to which he was most allied - from Diego Rivera and Jos Sabogalthrough Dada and Surrealism.24 In addition, he was also originally a keysupporter of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria de las Americas (APRA), ananti-imperialist movement. Then, in fairly rapid succession, he founded firstAmauta in 1926 and the Socialist Party of Peru in 1928.

At a point when, in official circles, indigenismo merely meant that one fosteredan appreciation of pre-Colombian culture, Maritegui (like Rivera) gave a radicaltwist to this discussion through his insistence on the inseparable link betweenrace and class, or, more precisely, between the division of labour and ethniccultural traditions. Conversely, at a time when the Communist Party in Latin

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25 Jos Carlos Maritegui,'Dos concepciones de lavida', 1925, reprinted inThe Heroic and CreativeMeaning of Socialism:Selected Essays of Jos CarlosMaritegui, ed, MichaelPearlman, AtlanticHighlands: HumanitiesPress, 1996, p 349.

26 Rosa Luxemburg,'Einfhrung in dieNationalkonomie', 1925,in Gesammelte Schriften,vol 5, Dietz Verlang, Berlin,1975, p 658. See also:Michael Lowy, op cit, p 83.

27 Jos Carlos Maritegui,'Programa del PartidoSocialista Peruana', 1928,reprinted in The Heroic andCreative Meaning ofSocialism, op cit, p 92.

28 Jos Carlos Maritegui,'Aniversario y balance',Amauta, no 17, September1928, p 3.

America, under the leadership of the Comitern, held an orthodox Marxist view,at once economistic and covertly positivistic, of how socialism must take the samepath in every country, Maritegui took issue with this position and had thetemerity to find an antecedent in the writings of Marx. In doing so, Mariteguiattacked the modern 'superstition of [uncritical] respect for the idea of progress'in Europe - both on the right and the left.25

It was Maritegui's supposedly 'outrageous' precept that the Inca civilisationof pre-Conquest Peru, for all of its undeniable problems, still offered somehistorical lessons of striking significance to the socialist movement in LatinAmerica. In rejecting outright the Stalinist position that Peru first had to gothrough capitalist development under the tutelage of the West before it couldgain its national independence, Maritegui followed up the work of the CentralEuropean philosopher Rosa Luxemburg. She had earlier praised the economicformations of the Inca as examples of so-called 'primitive agrariancommunism'.26 Perhaps surprisingly, Maritegui's hybrid project in response touneven historical development meant that one could combine the popularcommunal configurations of the Incas (even though they occurred within anauthoritarian political system that must be rejected) with an insistence on themodern civil liberties insured by liberalism (even though they have oftenassumed prominence within the modern capitalism of which Maritegui wasdeeply critical). Accordingly, his political and economic montage of differentepochs in Peruvian history meant that he was able to avoid the evolutionistdogma of progress that was, oddly enough, common both to Vasconcelos and theComitern, with their primarily linear and quite punctual conceptions ofcontrolled development. More surprisingly, perhaps, he was able to reject inconsistent theoretical terms the backward-looking illusionism of return-to-rootsindigenismo, found in the likes of Leal's artworks. As Maritegui emphasised, hisview about reclaiming certain aspects of pre-colonial culture:

in no way signifies a romantic and anti-historical tendency toward thereconstruction or resurrection of Inca socialism, which corresponded to historicalconditions that have been completely superseded, and of which those habits ofcooperation and socialism among the peasants remain a factor.27

Perhaps Maritegui's most audacious and equally heretical proposal wasdeveloped at this irregular intersection when he emphasised that the democratic,communalist and proto-socialist afterlife of formations among indigenouspeople in the highlands of Peru would provide the fundamental starting pointfor social transformation in the present. Thus for him, Peruvian socialism wouldbe both national and international, both Western and non-Western, both futureoriented and backward-looking all at once. In Amauta in 1928, he put thispeculiarly amphibian and historically ambidextrous conception of socialism anddemocracy into motion. On the one hand, Maritegui maintained, 'Socialism iscertainly not an Indo-American theory... And socialism, although born in Europeas was capitalism, is neither specifically nor particularly European. It is aworldwide movement.'28

But, on the other hand, Maritegui insisted that:

Socialism is ultimately in the American tradition. Incan civilisation was the mostadvanced primitive communalist organisation that history has yet known. Wecertainly do not wish to claim that socialism in the Americas will copy thistradition. It must be a heroic new creation. Yet, we must also give life to an

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29 Ibid.

30 On the importance ofMaritegui (and Gramsci)for the Cuban andNicaraguan Revolutions,see Donald Hodges,'Promoting the NewMarxism', in IntellectualFoundations of theNicaraguan Revolution,University of Texas Press,Austin, 1986, pp 179-184.

31 Ibid.

32 'Diego Rivera: Biografasumaria', Amauta, no 4,December 1926, p 5.

Indoamerican socialism reflecting our own language. This mission is worthy of awhole new generation.29

For this reason and others, one can understand why recent historians of LatinAmerican thought would claim the following of Maritegui's legacy.30 Hisresourceful analysis demonstrated how the integration of the indigenouspopulation into this struggle for democratic rights, both economically andpolitically, will be essential to any process of development with equity in Peru -and indeed elsewhere in Latin America. More broadly, though, the theoreticalnovelty and historical acuity of Maritegui's work help us to understand why hiswritings would have been so highly valued by Che Guevara in the 1960s and bythe Sandinistas in the 1980s. (In fact, my first sustained encounter withMaritegui's ideas came from several visits to Nicaragua and Cuba during the1980s. In each place, his work triggered some important discussions about thenature of development and 'appropriate technology'.)31

RIVERA ACCORDING TO AMAUTAThe inaugural article about Diego Rivera was a one-page chronology by the artisthimself for issue number 4 in December 1926. This Biografla sumaria', we are toldby Maritegui himself, was compiled and edited by the artist himself ('han sidoordenados y redactados por el propio artista'). The page on which it appears (p 5) isaccompanied by two reproductions - an academic drawing of Rivera by an artistnamed Builen and a rapid caricature of Rivera by the Mexican satirist MiguelCovarrubias. The first shows the Mexican muralist soberly looking upward witha visionary, if troubled gaze, while the second features a lively as well asirreverent look at Rivera's comical visage.

From the standpoint of self-revelation, this annotated life by the artist ishighly instructive because of the way in which he quite soberly refers tolandmark moments in his own development. To quote Rivera's rather modestassessment, it was in 1921 while he was doing drawings in the Yucatan andPuebla that 'Aparece al fin la personalidad del pintof. Nonetheless, he is sharplycritical of the subsequent mural in 1922 for the National Preparatory School,which he considers unsuccessful. The reasons are telling: 'No logra una obraautonoma y las infiuencias de Italia son extremamente visibles' (He does not achievean autonomous work, and the Italian influences are extremely obvious). By hisown account, and here I think most scholars are in complete agreement with him,it was in the magisterial murals from 1923-26 in the Ministry of Education and inthe National Autonomous University of Chapingo where 'poco a poco se deprendede las influencias y extiende su personalidad'(little by little he leaves his influencesbehind and develops his own personality).32

Nor can there be any doubt but that Maritegui agreed with this judgement,since of the fifteen works by Rivera reproduced in Amauta, no less than ninewere from the Ministry of Education, which is a choice that also makes sense interms of the local ideological project of both Maritegui and of the journalAmauta, which, as noted above, means 'teacher'. Overall, this unusually largenumber of reproductions of works by Rivera in Amauta means that the Mexicanartist had the second largest number of works in this publication of all the artistswho were featured in its pages. Only the Peruvian indigenista painter JosSabogal, who designed the original cover of the journal and had more thanthirty-four illustrations in it, surpassed Rivera in terms of absolute numbers.Among the artists who had fewer works showcased were Matisse, Picasso, Georg

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33 Renato Poggioli, Teoriadell'arte d'avanguardia,1962, Harvard UniversityPress, 1968, Chapter One.

Grosz, Carlos Mrida, and Emilio Pettoruti.Perhaps not surprisingly, the Rivera murals from the Ministry of Education

were ones that addressed many of the same themes that were handled with suchacuity in Maritegui's Siete ensayos, namely: (1) class-based inequities as a motorof historical change, (2) indigenous traditions as a means of constructing a newtrans-regional social bond within disruptive circumstances, and (3) thefundamental role of militant teachers as 'organic intellectuals' not only forspreading literacy, but also for mobilising the popular classes - as, for example,was the case with Otilio Montano, the schoolteacher from Morelos who helpedZapata draft the 1911 Plan de Ayala.

Moreover, the way that Rivera's work is conceptually framed in Atnauta isdoubly revealing for reasons that are threefold. First, his work is seen as

exemplary of 'un movimiento' in thearts and beyond that qualifies asavant-garde. As Renato Poggioli hasnoted, avant-garde art is advancedby a movement, rather than by amere school in the conventionalsense. Such art goes beyond thelimits of artistic values per se inorder to create a more compre-hensive Weltanschauung, orworldview.33 Such a formulation ofthe role of modern art so as toencompass engage artists like Riverawas articulated both in Maritegui'sgeneral 1926 'Prsentation de Amauta'in Issue No 1 cited above and evenmore brilliantly in his justifiablyfamous essay in No 3 from the sameyear: 'Arte, Revolution y Decadencia'.Accordingly, the first piece onRivera, in No 4,1926, was presentedin conjunction with an essay by thePeruvian author and labour activistHaya de la Torre entitled,appropriately enough, 'NuestroFrente Intellectual', which wasillustrated by two of Rivera'sfrescoes from the Ministry ofEducation.

Second, Rivera's avant-garde artis presented here in organic relationto vanguard politics, specifically as abeachhead for working-class mobili-sation on the left of the politicalspectrum. Consistent with this view,the article and interview with Riveraby Esteban Pavletich, which isaccompanied by the aforementionedphoto of Rivera signed 'Para Amauta'by the artist himself, is entitled

Amauta, no 4, December 1926, 'Diego Rivera: Biografa sumaria', Lima, Peru

D I E G OB i o g r a f l a s u m a r i a

I8S6.Naci en U Ciudad de Ciuamjual.1891.Se estableci en la Ciudad de Mexico

con sus padres.1897.Empczo a asistii a las clases de dibujo

rtocturno en U Escuela Nacional de Bellas Arles.Rtcibi lecciones de Don Andres Ros.

1699-1901.-Recibi lecciones de Don Santiago Rebull, Don Jos Marfa Velascoy Don Flix Parra.

1902. Empezri a (rabajar libremente en el cam-no, disgustado de la orientacin de la escuela bajori catalan Fabrs.

1907.March i Lspafia d.oiwte t l choque en-1rt la tiaicin mexicana, los tjmptos de pntura in-t i i a y el ambiente y proijnccion moderna espaiiolade entonces, obrando sobre su timid educada en elreipcto a Europa lo desortentaron, hacindole producrcuadros dtestables muy inferiores a los hechos poril en Mexico antes de marchar Europa, f.n esC4>otrabaj en cl taller de Don EJuardo Chicturro.

1908--I910.Vjaja por Francia, Btgica, Holun-d i e Inglaterra; trabaja poco. Tctas anodinas, de esteperfodo y et anterior son las que pose la Escuela Na-cional de Bellas Artcs.

Octubre de 191.Vuelvea Mexico donde per-manece hasta junto de 191!. Asist al principiode 1*rcvolucin Mexicana en los E&tados de Murdos y deMexico, y al movimiento Zapatista. Nopinta njdj p-ro en su espfritu definen los valores que otiemarnsu vida dx. trabajo hasta hoy.

Jtilo de 1911. -Vuelve a Paris y empieza or-denadamente su trabajo.

191l.-!nflueiicias no-impicsionisias (Scutal.VH2 niiuencias greco-cezanianas. I913 Ititinciiciapiesssianas; amislad cou Pisarro.

1914.Aparecen dentra de sus cuatlrus cubistas(discipiilo de Pisarro) los indido* de su pcrsonalidadtir Mexicano.

Oirqo ttivtra, dibuio da Bullen.

1915.Sus comparieros cubists condenan su exo-tismo. 1916 Desarrollo de ese exotistno (coeficiente mexica- 'no).Paris.

1917.Empii a anunciarse en su pintura el lesut-tado de su trabajo sobre h t ruc lun de la obra de arte yapirtanse sus cuadros del tipo cubista.

1918.Nuevas influencias de Czanne y Renoir.Amistad con Elle Faure.

1920-21.Viaje por Italia. 350 ibujos segn losBiiantinos Primitvos Cristianos, pre-renacentistas y delnatra!.

Setiembre de 1921.Vuelve a Mexico. Oleos enVucatin y PucbU, dibujos al choque con la belleza de Mexi-co. Aparece al fin la personalidad del pintor.

1922.Dccoracin del Anfiteatro de la tscueta Na-ciona! Preparatoria. No logra hacer una obra autonomay Its influencias de Italia son extremadainente visibles.

1923-192. Murales en la Scrta rfa de ta Educa-tion Pdblica y Escuela Nacional de Agricultura de Cha-pingo.Esta obra comprende ciento sesenta y ocho fres-cos en donde poco a poco te desprende de las influenciasy exttende su personatidad, la que segn su intuiein y sujuico y de algunos criticos slempre tendi a la pinturaniura!.

(stos datos ban sido ordenados y dactadoj port l ptopio artista.)DUg Rivara, oot Covorrubioi,

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34 Estban Pavletich, 'DiegoRivera: el artista de unaclase', Amauta, no 5,January 1927, pp 8-9.

35 Ibid, p 7.

'Diego Rivera: el artista de una clase' (Diego Rivera, painter of a social class).Among the points made by the author are that Rivera is 'el pintor de una clase

universal' (painter of a universal class) and that 'Rivera, no es un creador... es elreceptor substantivo surgido del seno de una porcin social en el instante culminante desu historia' ('Rivera is not a creator... he is a receptor born amidst a specific socialclass at a historical crux in time). Moreover, Rivera is characterised as 'uncombatiente de vanguardia' (a fighter of the avant-garde), who is committed tonothing less than the conception and construction of the 'autentico Hombre Nuevo'(the authentic new man). Surprisingly enough, since it has so far gone unincludedin the Rivera literature, there is an interview with the artist in which he stakes outa theoretical position very much in keeping with that of Maritegui and Amauta.These remarks include comments on the potential resources of Cubism for artistsallied to a revolutionary movement, as well as on the role of an artist within arevolutionary movement and the ideological cohesiveness of a necessarilyhybrid revolutionary art.

Here I quote from Rivera's interview with Amauta's staff:

el pintor revolutionario no se ridiculo y excelso creador de obras maestras, sino uncombatiente de vanguardia... a veces puede ser un guerrillero... el artista sera revolu-cionario o no sera'... sirve para que la obra arte positiva, es decir revolucionario....En nuestro tiempo - como en todos los tiempos - es necesario que la pasiendominante coindda con la aspiration colectiva de las masas, (the revolutionarypainter is not a ridiculous and honourable of master works of art but a fighter ofthe avant-garde ...sometimes a guerilla fighter ...the artist will be revolutionary orwon't be ...it serves so that the work of art is positive, that is revolutionary...In ourtime - as in all times - the dominant passion must coincide with the collectiveaspiration of the masses).34

From here, Rivera goes on to praise modernism generally and Cubism morespecifically in terms of their potential, but not always their actuality (and hereagain Rivera is in accord with Maritegui's most famous line on this issue).35Nonetheless, Rivera also criticises certain things about modernist art - mostrevealingly, its 'tendencia a la regresin arqueolgica'. The art of Fernando Lealstands accused on this score, at least implicitly. Significantly, one of Rivera'smurals, with a critical or alternative indigenista logic, namely, his hybriddepiction of Xochipili in the stairway of the Ministry of Education, is used toprovide a visual coda in Issue No 4 for 'La Misin de Amauta', the concludingsection of Haya de la Torre's essay on the intellectual front embracing Rivera,Maritegui, and the authors of Amauta. This work takes us full circle to themontage of temporal modalities introduced at the beginning. For, Rivera's muralfeatures a work that combines Gauguin's pictorial innovations with awell-known Aztec sculpture, along with a use of space that is both Maya andCubist in almost equal measure - so that it made manifest what Carlos Fuentescalled at the outset un 'Nuevo Tiempo Mexicano' in which the past and the presentwere reassembled pictorially to striking new effect. Yet this synthesis happenedwithout ever leaving behind entirely some of the older and more insightfullessons to be taught by a deeply fragmented, yet still valuable, past.

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