Diego Rivera
Francisco de la Mora and Jose Luis Pescador
Self Made Hero £16.99

THERE is no simple way to characterise Diego’s Rivera’s politics for, like Mexico’s revolution itself, these reflected complex and contradictory struggles.

Officially at least, in the context of the nascent post-revolutionary state, his most celebrated murals advanced a unifying, ethnically informed nationalism that gave new value to the oppressed, indigenous/mestizo masses on behalf of a victorious (mostly criollo) elite.

Revolutionary nationalism, as it became known, was a generous patron, and the “social realism” of the large, public murals of Mexico’s most influential 20th-century artist are how he is remembered.

Influenced originally by his father’s liberalism — which in Mexico spelt anarchism — Rivera himself, however, was an avowed communist whose fixation on Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution and the possibilities offered by the Soviet Union never faded.

Yet his art divided Soviet critics, helping to explain why Rivera left the USSR after visiting it feeling sad and resentful.

Trotsky, his guest, regarded his friend as a political dilettante prone to blunders, while writing of him that “in the field of painting, the October revolution has found her greatest interpreter.”

Their eventual disagreement was not helped by Rivera’s support for Juan Andreu Almazan, the wealthy fascist aspirant for the ruling party’s presidential nomination in 1940.

The most important contribution of Diego Rivera, a graphic biographical novel by Francisco de la Mora and Jose Luis Pescador, is that it draws attention to the most consistent thread running through the artist’s outlook, which helped him achieve universal recognition — the search for a way to reverse the bourgeois separation of art and life.

This explains why Rivera rejected cubism then applied his creativity to constructing a new consciousness among campesinos and workers. His greatest works are orations invoking their potential to lead humanity into a material world abundant with potential.

While Rivera expressed this through the local guise of Mexican modernism, that does not detract from his global influence, just one example of which can be found in the Marx Memorial Library in London.

De la Mora tells a skilful linear narrative tracing the exploits of this larger-than-life figure prone to ill-advised outbursts and energetic bursts of work, sex and debate fuelled by tequila.

Pescador carries this forward through animated, accessible images — a fitting and exciting way to tell a story that complements a long Mexican tradition of popular illustration.

At a deeper level, however, this book is a welcome reminder of the epic role art can still play in the service of revolutionary ideas.