AGRARIAN LEADER ZAPATA
DIEGO RIVERA, 1931
Okay, look at that horse first. Big, white, gorgeous. And it's not even Mexican. Rivera basically lifts it from an Italian battle painting from the 1400s, by a guy named Uccello. A rich nobleman's horse. And look who he hands it to. That guy in sandals. That's Zapata. He led peasants in the Mexican Revolution, fighting to take land back from the wealthy estates and return it to the people working it. Tierra y libertad. Land and liberty. And look at how Rivera paints him. Not the badass with the bullet belts and giant sombrero from the photographs. Nah. Quiet. On foot. And what's he holding? A machete. The thing you cut sugarcane with. Everybody behind him has grabbed whatever was around. A sickle. A bow. Some hoes. It's an army of garden tools. Now look down by his feet. That's the loser. A wealthy hacienda owner, face-down in his fancy riding boots, one gloved hand flopped against Zapata's bare foot. That white horse was his. Zapata took it off him. Rivera took it off Uccello. Same move, twice. Now, this thing is fresco. Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel. About the least portable art form imaginable. Rivera makes one with no wall. A huge slab built to travel. So he packs it up, and wheels the revolution directly into the Museum of Modern Art. At this point MoMA is barely two years old, and a museum co-founded by Abby Rockefeller gives an outspoken Communist its galleries. Rivera uses the fanciest medium imaginable to turn a peasant revolutionary into a saint. The place is mobbed. Two years later, the Rockefellers give him a wall at Rockefeller Center. He paints Lenin into it. They smash it off with hammers. But not this one. Same Communist. Same revolution. Still hanging. They smashed the loud one. They kept the dangerous one.