Next up on the essays shelf:
The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Here, from 1931, is a piece by James Thurber, called ‘The Frescoer’, about Diego Rivera, in town for an exhibition of his famous frescoes. Thurber visits Rivera at his studio, and hangs out, watching him work (or, not work).
As always, Thurber is able to capture a man and a moment in the minimum of words, the whole point of the “Talk of the Town” pieces (which has been lost in the current-day, where the style of “Talk of the Town” is now more strictly journalistic, more “serious” in nature, and they just feel like short articles, rather than a sketch done in miniature. Some of the magic has been lost in the “Talk of the Town”). How do you “boil someone down”? How do you describe Diego Rivera in 1000 words or less?
This was in Rivera’s New York heyday, the radicalization of the American Left burgeoning in the upheaval of the Great Depression (as well as in the wake of the Russian Revolution). We aren’t yet at the Spanish Civil War, which would really change things forever, but we are moving in that direction. Rivera was a hero to many. His murals/frescoes were controversial (to say the least). You can look up some of the controversies that swirled around him. In 1931, at the time of Thurber’s piece, he is in New York City, preparing for an exhibition of his frescoes (at the Museum of Modern Art, I believe). He works in a giant room, and Thurber looks on the frescoes which show the violent history of Mexico. He describes Rivera’s process, as well as the manpower it takes to actually move these giant frescoes to MoMA or other galleries.
If I am not mistaken, the fresco described by Thurber below is this one.
Here is an excerpt.
The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Rivera seldom has a photograph or a sketch or anything to go by, painting even steam shovels, disc harrows, etc., from memory. “Some of them wouldn’t work,” a follower of his told us, “but machinery in a painting doesn’t have to work.” Occasionally, however, the painter makes a miniature sketch of a fresco he is about to begin: sometimes, even, he uses one exactly the size of the projected fresco, pinning it to a wall where he can look at it. We saw one of these, an idea he got from a visit to No. 1 Wall Street. Rivera was much impressed by the great money vaults down there. This sketch, a completed fresco now, we suppose, showed the vaults, with all their gold, at the bottom of the drawing. On the street level, just above, were hundreds of unemployed, lying asleep, or worrying. Above them towered the skyscrapers of the financial region.
The exhibition, planned for a month, may last two. Thirty-five thousand people saw the Matisse show and more are expected for Rivera’s. When it’s over, the frescoes will be sold. It’ll cost plenty to move them, if you live far.
When he is working at night, Diego sometimes varies his milk diet with a spot of coffee. He doesn’t smoke, because ashes might get into the plaster, and besides you can’t smoke and keep both hands busy with paints and brushes. Enthusiasts usually stayed until four o’clock in the cold room, watching their idol. After they left he sometimes slept for fifteen minutes, sitting in a chair, then got up and went to work again. We met a lady who, a year or so ago, sat with Rivera on a scaffold in Mexico City for nineteen hours. At the end of that time, night having given way to morning and morning to afternoon, she got up and started down the ladder. Rivera looked surprised and injured, and remarked sadly: “I have begun to bore you.”
