Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gladys

The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:09 am

THE BEGINNING AND END OF A MILITARY CAREER

I WAS ELEVEN when I entered the School of Fine Arts. The year before, I had done very little drawing. Between my first and second loves, I concentrated all my energies in making sketches of fortifications and plans of battle. I also drew up campaigns of military conquest and programs of government. I put myself in command of five thousand Russian troops, which I fabricated by gluing drawings of soldiers on cardboard in such a way that the little figures stood erect. I was not only the commander of this Russian army but of all Russia, the Tsar, his generals and ministers, and even the revolutionaries. I helped other boys I played with make similar armies of allies and enemies.

Carlos Macias, my cousin, now an engineer with the General Electric Company, was France, my ally. Manuel Macias, today a successful lawyer whose clients include all the old-regime Mexican families, was England. Auria Manon, the rich landlord's son, was Spain. Juan Macias was Germany. And Porfirio Aguirre, world-famous archeologist and authority on American culture, was Mexico.

When my father discovered the charts and programs I had drawn up, he seemed much impressed but said nothing. One evening, however, he came home apparently excited, and holding up a pile of my documents in his hands, he demanded to know where I had copied them from. I flew into a rage, and for the first and only time in my life, I insulted my father. Instead of becoming enraged, however, my father merely smiled.

Calming down, I asked him, "Why do you think I'm such a fool that I have to copy from anybody?"

My tone convinced him that the documents were original, and he told me to come with him. As I walked beside him into the street, I thought he was taking me to the dormitory of some school. I assumed that he disapproved of my preoccupation with military affairs, for which I had neglected my studies. But I was mistaken. The place he led me to was no school but an impressive, large building before which a soldier in full uniform was standing. In the room we entered were several fierce-looking, gray-haired men sitting behind a large table.

My father introduced me to them. "This is Diego de Rivera, my son. He is the author of the military and political documents you have examined, gentlemen."

The oldest of the men stood up. My father then said to me, "You have the honor to stand before General Don Pedro Hinojoso, Minister of War of the Republic of Mexico. All the other gentlemen are also heroes of Mexico, veterans of the wars of liberation against invaders and traitors."

One by one, each of the old men formally introduced himself. I felt the same thrill of pride I had felt when I had been invited to join the veteran fighters of Guanajuato. Having had military instruction in school where I had been appointed a group leader, I made the correct military response and stood at attention.

General Hinojoso said, "Can you give your word of honor, as the son of a veteran fighter and comrade-in-arms, that these documents originated with you?"

"My general," I replied, "I give you my word of honor that all these drawings and writings are completely mine."

Hearing this, all the men rose and General Hinojoso left his seat, came to where I was standing and embraced me.

"My son," he said, "I greet you as the youngest soldier of the Mexican Army'."

I was ashamed to feel a certain liquid forming in my eyes, but I saw the same thing happening in the eyes of the general, my father, and the others. I don't know whether it was I who suddenly became mature that night or whether all men, even generals, are really boys behind their adult masks.

Then my documents were spread out upon the table, and the generals began examining them and asking me questions. How much was actual enthusiasm, on their part and how much was the product of the cognac I saw on the table I cannot say, but they began to shower me with praise.

However, one very severe-looking man said, "My boy, you obviously have a native genius for strategy. But even more important is a knowledge of the organization of an army. Do you know anything about that?"

There was a large blackboard standing against the wall. In response, I walked over to it. "General," I said, "do me the honor of asking me whatever questions you wish on that subject. I will answer as well as I can."

Questions rained on me, my father joining in the examination. When the grilling was over, I could see that all doubts had disappeared.

Then General Hinojoso banged on the table. "Damn it, Diego," he shouted, "you're a born soldier. But that, my boy, places a great responsibility upon you. I hope, before you get too old and useless, you'll realize what a military fighter can do, not only for the liberty of Mexico but also for the liberty of all the people of the world. Damn it, boy, you were born in my home town, and now you must consider yourself one of my friends. You must know what being revolutionary means. After all, your father and your grandfather were revolutionaries. Don't fail, boy! A man may have the talent to make war, but he has the right to use it only for the freedom of mankind."

Then the old soldier coughed, stood up, gave the military salute, and left the room.

All next day I ran around to assure myself of the army commisssion I felt entitled to. Hinojoso, himself, gave me a paper requesting Congress to pass a law permitting the War Minister to make the necessary exceptions in order to induct me. I also obtained the President's endorsement of the petition. Before the day was over, I had secured passage of a law that would have enabled me to enter the Military Academy at the age of thirteen instead of eighteen. I was then only ten years old, but in the three years before I might enter the Academy, General Hinojoso offered to give me any help I asked for.

He said, however, that I was at liberty to prepare myself for my military career in any way I wished. If I desired, he would send me abroad, or I could study at home. I could even stay with him in his home.

"I have no sons or family," he said, when I came to his house to tell him about the passing of the law, "and I know your father would not object if you became my son as well as his. You have everything you need here to become a real technician in your chosen profession."

With grave solemnity, he conducted me to a library of thousands of books on bookshelves covering all the four walls.

I was a little disappointed to see only books; I had expected to be led into an arsenal.

After a while, the minister closed the door behind me and I was left standing alone in the middle of the vast library.

Looking around, I saw the model of a battleship in a corner of the room. I studied it carefully, marveling at its craftsmanship. I had never seen a model as finely detailed, with guns, hull, rigging, keel worked out with such perfection that my imagination could board it without trouble and sail off to all corners of the world. I stood transfixed until the general returned. It took all my strength of mind not to tell him that, rather than become a soldier, I now much preferred to be a sailor.

My response had been an esthetic one; the art of the ship-model builder had suddenly and completely blotted out my military interests. When my father came in later to discuss the curriculum of the military preparatory school he proposed to send me to, I was so repelled by the idea of the regimented life I would lead there that I literally ran out of the room and into the open air.

It was then, I think, I knew that whatever false roads I took afterwards, art was my destiny and would find me everywhere I went.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:10 am

AT THE SAN CARLOS SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS

SOON AFTERWARDS, I enrolled in the San Carlos School of Fine Arts. The classes were held at night; by day I continued to go to elementary school. For the next two years, I led this burdensome existence. What sustained me was the discovery of the pre-Conquest art of Mexico, for which I conceived a passion that was to influence my entire artistic life.

When I was thirteen, I received an art scholarship enabling me to attend San Carlos by day. I was, at first, a model student, industrious and obedient. Determined to learn all that tradition could teach me, I accepted whatever the teachers prescribed. My hard work earned me the highest grades and every possible prize.

My older classmates became jealous of me and lost no opportunity of embarrassing me. For my part, I sought to be accepted as one of them despite the handicap of my extreme youth. One of my proudest achievements toward this end, when I was fourteen, was winning a competition for making up the dirtiest possible original expression. My prize-winning obscenity was: "Copulate with your mother and gargle with her menstrual juice."

From then on I was nicknamed Chilebola, which means "extra hot chile." To live up to this imposing title, I adopted a tough swagger and would fight anybody at the drop of a hat.

Physically I was still a fat, oversized little boy, but I possessed a tremendous store of energy, almost all of which I put into learning how to paint.

Yet I was not happy artistically. The further I progressed in the academic European forms, the less I liked them and the more I was drawn to the old Mexican art. I particularly detested having to copy engraved replicas and plaster casts.

Reaching the breaking point, I revolted noisily by organizing a strike with other discontented students. The immediate object of our protest was a priest accused of sexual corruption. Actually, we were demonstrating against the Mexican dictator, Porfirio Diaz, who was now openly flouting the anticlerical provisions written into the Constitution by Juarez. Of all living men, Diaz was most to blame for the stultification of life and art in Mexico. And it is to him that Mexico, today, owes its wedding-cake palace architecture and insipid public statuary.

The student demonstration turned into a riot. As its leader, I was summoned before the authorities and expelled.

Thus ended my formal training in art. Aside from a period of eight months in later years, when I was invited back to the San Carlos as its director, I would have no further connection with any academy.

I was sixteen at the time I left the art school, the age when most students are first admitted.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:10 am

THREE EARLY MASTERS

AMONG THE TEACHERS at the San Carlos, three stand out in my memory. The first was Felix Parra, a conventional painter himself but possessed with a passionate love for our pre-Conquest Indian art. He communicated this enthusiasm to me with such success that it has lived on in me, through many changes of taste and fortune, to this day.

The second was Jose M. Velasco, whom I regarded as the world's greatest painter of landscapes. From Velasco, I learned the laws of perspective, and it was he, rather than Parra, whom I followed when I studied on my own. I traveled up and down the country, painting Indians, forests, houses, streets, and churches, all more or less in the manner of this master.

The third was Rebull, a man in his seventies, who had been a pupil of Ingres. One day, when a class of about fifty students was painting a model, he singled me out. He found fault with my drawing, but he said, "Just the same, what you're doing interests me. First thing tomorrow morning, come to my studio." The other students flocked around to see what had interested old Rebull enough to extract an invitation to his studio, to which he had admitted no student for twenty years. They could see nothing and ascribed his enthusiasm to a senile whim.

But the next day the old man told me what he had discovered in my work was an interest in life and movement. Such an interest, he said, is the mark of a genuine artist. "These objects we call paintings," he went on, "are attempts to transcribe to a plane surface essential movements of life. A picture should contain the possibility of perpetual motion." Rebull made me more aware than I had yet been of the laws of proportion and harmony, within which movement proceeds, and which are to be discerned in the masterpieces of all ages.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:10 am

POSADA

ABOUT THIS TIME, I met and came under the influence of the great folk artist Jose Guadalupe Posada, the most important of my teachers. Posada was not connected with any academy nor was his work to be found in any fashionable home. He was an engraver with a shop in the Calle de Moneda. A small, fat man, he etched illustrations for the songs, jokes, and tales which wandering minstrels brought to the folk of Mexico. In his lifetime, he did more than 15,000 of these etchings, all printed on sheets of colored tissue paper and sold from door to door.

Posada had no place in the official circles of Mexican art, and he was unconcerned about immortality, though he has achieved it where more respected artists of his time have failed and are now forgotten. He knew as much about form and movement as any man I have ever met. It was he who revealed to me the inherent beauty in the Mexican people, their struggle and aspirations. And it was he who taught me the supreme lesson of all art -- that nothing can be expressed except through the force of feeling, that the soul of every masterpiece is powerful emotion.

Of course the import of this teaching was lost upon me then, and for many years afterwards. Finding myself in art was to be a long and painful process. Looking back upon my work today, I think the best I have done grew out of things deeply felt, the worst from a pride in mere talent.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:10 am

PRE-CONQUEST ART

MEANWHILE I PAINTED, and although I now took some pride in my work, I was also often depressed by a generalized sense of inferiority. It was a racial feeling, not unlike that felt by many artists in the United States. And like many of them, it finally would bring me to Europe. But in my (Mexican) case its roots were not specifically the same.

Before the coming of the Spaniards, the Mexican Indian artists had shown great force and genius. Like all first-rate art, their work had been intensely local: related to the soil, the landscape, the forms, animals, deities, and colors of their own world. Above all, it had been emotion-centered. It was moulded by their hopes, fears, joys, superstitions, and sufferings.

Under the tyranny of the Spaniards, the half-breed descendants of these great Indian creators turned away from the native sources that had given Mexican art its power. Feeling inferior to their conquerors and oppressors, they sought to raise themselves to equality by imitating the accepted models of classical European art.

It was the response of men reacting to a tradition of defeat -- and this tradition was within me, too, buried in my subconscious. Yet I was continuously aware of the greatness of pre-Conquest art. Within and without, I fought against inhibiting academic conventions, trusting my emotions to guide me in painting canvases I am still not ashamed to have done. Among these are my "Pisafoo," "Tuni," "White Sensitive," and "White Sensuous" -- works whose purity of feeling gives them a value which transcends their rather wicked subject matter.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:10 am

AN EXPERIMENT IN CANNIBALISM

In 1904, wishing to extend my knowledge of human anatomy, a basic requisite for my painting, I took a course in that subject in the Medical School in Mexico City. At that time, I read of an experiment which greatly interested me.

A French fur dealer in a Paris suburb tried to improve the pelts of animals by the use of a peculiar diet. He fed his animals, which happened to be cats, the meat of cats. On that diet, the cats grew bigger, and their fur became firmer and glossier. Soon he was able to outsell his competitors, and he profited additionally from the fact that he was using the flesh of the animals he skinned.

His competitors, however, had their revenge. They took advantage of the circumstance that his premises were adjacent to a lunatic asylum. One night, several of them unlocked his cages and let loose his oversize cats, now numbering thousands. When the cats swarmed out, a panic ensued in the asylum. Not only the inmates but their keepers and doctors "saw cats" wherever they turned. The police had a hard time restoring order, and to prevent a recurrence of such an incident, an ordinance was passed outlawing "caticulture."

At first the story of the enterprising furrier merely amused me, but I couldn't get it out of my mind. I discussed the experiment with my fellow students in the anatomy class, and we decided to repeat it and see if we got the same results. We did -- and this encouraged us to extend the experiment and see if it involved a general principle for other animals, specifically human beings, by ourselves living on a diet of human meat.

Those of us who undertook the experiment pooled our money to purchase cadavers from the city morgue, choosing the bodies of persons who had died of violence -- who had been freshly killed and were not diseased or senile. We lived on this cannibal diet for two months, and everyone's health improved.

During the time of our experiment, I discovered that I liked to eat the legs and breasts of women, for as in other animals, these parts are delicacies. I also savored young women's breaded ribs. Best of all, however, I relished women's brains in vinaigrette.

I have never returned to the eating of human flesh, not out of a squeamishness, but because of the hostility with which society looks upon the practice. Yet is this hostility entirely rational? We know it is not. Cannibalism does not necessarily involve murder. And human flesh is probably the most assimilable food available to man. Psychologically, its consumption might do much to liberate him from deep-rooted complexes -- complexes which can explode with the first accidental spark.

I believe that when man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has now, the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:11 am

MY FIRST GRANT

In 1902, at the age of sixteen, I was receiving thirty pesos a month as a scholarship from Teodoro A. Dehesa, Governor of the State of Veracruz.

It was my father who got me this stipend. He had first tried to secure a grant from the Governor of Guanajuato, a dull man who had no interest in art and who promptly refused. But Dehesa was of a different sort. Cultured and liberal-thinking, he was the leader of what might be called the progressive wing of the Diaz government. He survived in Diaz's reactionary administration only because he had once dramatically earned the dictator's lasting gratitude. When the latter was a revolutionary himself and only an insignificant army colonel, he had been sentenced to death, and Dehesa had saved him from the firing squad. Dehesa's qualities were well known throughout Mexico, and my father had for some time resolved to speak to him about me when his affairs took him to Veracruz.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:11 am

MURILLO ATL

IN THE SAME YEAR that the scholarship went into effect, the great Mexican painter Murillo Atl returned to Mexico from Spain. An eye disease had halted his painting career, and he had brought back no canvases. What he had brought instead was a fanatical enthusiasm for neo-impressionist art. He was mostly under the influence of the Italian-Swiss neo-impressionist Giovanni Segantini, but he was hardly less excited by the neo-impressionists of Paris. Atl had a great feeling for color and a passionate love for landscape, which he communicated with a missionary zeal.

Like me, Atl was politically an anarchist, a product of the discontented middle class. Our common political and artistic interests brought us very close. Through hard life experience, I later came to reject anarchism for the more realistic politics of social-democratic action and still later, of communism. Atl's violent individualism took him to the extreme right and ultimately into the role of fascist agent.

But in 1904, Murillo Atl was the dominant influence among aspiring young artists discontented with academicism. Unable to paint, he devoted his tremendous energy and his prestige to turning his disciples upon the path of neo- impressionism. Both Joaquin Clausell, the great landscape painter, and myself owe a great deal to Atl in this respect.

Atl fired me with the desire to go to Europe. My greatest enthusiasm in contemporary European art was then Cezanne, with whose work I had become familiar through reproductions. However, before I went on to France, I decided to stop in Spain, believing that it would provide a necessary plastic transition between Mexico and modern Europe.

In 1905, I expressed this desire to Governor Dehesa. He told me that, if I had a one-man exhibition and succeeded in selling my paintings in Mexico, he would provide traveling and living expenses for four years' study abroad. I would receive three hundred francs a month, a sum that proved barely enough to exist on but then seemed like a tremendous fortune to me. I worked for a year preparing for my show, doing landscapes mainly. One of the best of these, "Citlaltepetl," which I painted in Jalapa, is now part of the Antebi collection in Mexico. I favored pastels, because with them I could most easily achieve divisions of color. But I also painted with solid oil colors which 1 mixed myself with the help of Francisco de la Torre and Alberto Garduno, using Mexican copal gum as the base. Atl also gave his assistance.

When I had enough paintings, Atl organized my exhibit, I not being then, or ever since, capable of handling such practical affairs. Atl invited critics, writers, and newspapermen and, of course, potential buyers, sometimes using devious means to induce them to attend. The show went so well that everything, to the last sketch, was sold. I joyously reported this to Governor Dehesa, and he granted me the promised subsidy.

The needy Atl organized shows for many young painters as a means of supporting himself. He told the artists after the exhibition was over, "Boys, for you the honor and the glory, for me the base material profit."

But in my case Atl not only gave me every cent we collected but contributed money of his own. He also presented me with a letter of introduction to the Spanish painter Eduardo Chicharro, with whom he had made friends while living in Madrid. Chicharro, then a medal winner with an international reputation, enjoyed the patronage of the richest families in Madrid. This kindness of Atl I very much appreciated. Cezanne had just died, and with that idol gone, I decided to study longer in Spain than I had first planned. Chicharro had an open workshop, and he was interested in color. To me, this compensated for his academic manner, with which I was already acquainted.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:11 am

PASSAGE OF ANGER

A FEW MONTHS before leaving for Spain, while painting in the shadow of Mount Orizaba, the great volcano of Veracruz, I witnessed the earliest of the many terrible clashes that were to occur between the people and the despot Diaz.

It happened like this. Along the foothills of Orizaba were textile mills where Mexican peasants toiled for long hours under inhuman conditions. Petty regulations were enforced by the millowners to keep the workers at the level of beasts of burden. Infractions of the rules resulted in brutal beatings by the foremen. Wages were paid not in cash but in tokens redeemable in the company store. Since these wages were not enough even to keep an Indian peasant alive, the workers were continually in debt.

In the winter of 1906, the millowners increased the number of hated regulations while cutting the miserable wages. Without plan or organization, the outraged workers walked out of the mills.

With the naive trustfulness of Mexican peasants, they decided to appeal to the ""Father of His People" for help. A delegation of pajama-clad and sandal-shod workers trudged to Dial's palace. Diaz promised to take care of his '"children," and there was no hint of what was to follow in his reception of the delegation.

The way he took care of them was to send troops who shot down men, women and children gathered in streets. To this day, I can see the still bodies of the victims lying lifeless in the widening pools of their blood.

As the strike went on, the terrible soldiers returned. I put aside my brushes and joined the millworkers. Once the sabre of one of Diaz's mounted policemen struck me on the back of my skull, near the nape of the neck. I was thrown into prison with other strikers, and the stale prison bread was the most wonderful food I have ever tasted.

After my release, I found myself so paralyzed by helpless anger and frustration that I was unable to paint anything.

I boarded the ship that was to take me to Spain, still in the grip of horror. I could not sleep. Often 1 would stand at the bow alone, singing and yelling. My fellow passengers must have thought me a madman. How could I explain the scenes of carnage which I could not make myself forget?

And yet my chants and cries on shipboard remained more the wild shouting of a Nietzschean than the steely anger of a true revolutionary. Though my social and political ideas had grown more elaborate, they had also become less direct, clear, and biologically truthful than when, at six, I had spoken from the pulpit in the Church of San Diego. But I can truthfully say that the final crystallization of my political ideas began at this time.
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Re: Diego Rivera: My Art, My Life. An Autobiography With Gla

Postby admin » Mon Jun 15, 2015 1:11 am

MY SPANISH FRIENDS

I ARRIVED IN SPAIN on the 6th of January, 1907. 1 was twenty years old, over six feet tall, and weighed three hundred pounds. But I was a dynamo of energy. As soon as I located Chicharro's studio, 1 set up my easel and started to paint. For days on end, I painted from early dawn till past midnight.

For diversion, I wandered through Madrid's wonderful Prado Museum and other galleries where the masterpieces hung.

My contact with Spanish art, however, affected me in a most unfortunate way. The inner qualities of my early works in Mexico were gradually strangled by the vulgar Spanish ability to paint. Certainly the flattest and most banal of my paintings are those I did in Spain in 1907 and 1908.

The Spanish masters to whom I was most drawn were Goya, Velazquez, and El Greco. I also found new delights in the Dutch, Flemish, and Italian masters and in the Castilian, Catalonian, and Aragonese primitives. And of such ever- living masters as Brueghel, Lucas Cranach, Hieronymus Bosch, and Patinir, I became a reverent disciple.

I performed some study exercises in the room of the Goya portraits at the Prado, copying not individual paintings, but making composites, in order to achieve a fuller comprehension of the style of this master. Three of these Goya exercises now hang in well-known Goya collections, two in the United States, and one in Paris. I shall not, however, disclose the identity of these forgeries; let the experts have fun.

I performed a similar exercise with El Greco. The result was so inferior to the Goyas that I never did another. Nevertheless, it too hangs in a collection of genuine "El Grecos" and still awaits detection.

These frauds were not my doing actually. While in Madrid, I met Luis de la Rocha, an amiable and obscure young painter, who acted as a sort of guide and secretary to me in his country. When he saw me about to destroy the composites, he asked me to give them to him. Rocha frankly told me what he meant to do. "Diego, I'm your friend. I'm glad to have been able to give you my time, and I've tried to help you all I could during your stay in Spain. We're both poor boys, but I'm much poorer than you. As you know, my father has learned how to turn new paintings into old ones and market them abroad. Since you're going to destroy these, let me and my family have them. We need the money."

So I gave him the paintings to recompense him for his services; also to give myself the enjoyment of seeing the experts hoaxed. But I never expected my youthful exercises to succeed on the scale they did.

In Spain, I also made friends with the great Spanish writer Marquis Ramon del Valle Inclan, and with Ramon Gomez de la Serna, who was winning recognition as an important writer of the new generation.

The younger Ramon was the most productive writer I have ever known. At the age of nineteen, Serna had already written a pile of books that reached a height of thirty inches. Some day a discerning critic should make his way through the forests of this strange literary genius. Serna's work carried on or anticipated every modern and ultramodern literary tendency of our time.

The elder Ramon had a mind as comprehensive as that of any of the giants of the Spanish Golden Age. His books show marvelous political sense, as well as a wide-ranging imagination, and an individual and flavorous style.

Valle Inclan lacked his left arm. In a cafe brawl, an inferior literateur had broken it with a cane, so injuring it that it had to be amputated. Valle Inclan romanticized the loss in dozens of fantastic stories. His imagination took off on any theme. From a visit to Mexico, he built an Odyssey of adventure replete with numerous sultry amours. He would draw me into his narratives as eyewitness or as a new object for his inventions. For all his fantasizing, he had the sensitivity to capture the essential quality of life in my unhappy, comic, and beautiful country, and his El Tirano Banderas remains one of the most moving books about Mexico.

Through Serna, I met the most curious man in all of Spain at that time, the homeless anarchist philosopher Don Silverio Lancza. This madman dreamed of a Utopia where total equality prevailed and all men were aristocrats and artists. I hope his writings, with their beautiful violence of language, will someday be "rediscovered."

Also through Serna, I met one of the most fascinating personalities and one of the finest painters of Spain in the early twentieth century. Dario de Regoyas' paintings of the Spanish countryside and Spanish life show a perception as profound as anything by Goya. He was a marvelous colorist and one of the most outstanding of the neo- impressionists.

The only good mural painter in Spain, Areta, was also a good comrade of mine. All of these friends and I moved in the same circles.
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