Barbara Ehrenreich on Cancer

From The Annie Appleseed Project

(At the end of 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich, noted feminist author, published a long article in Harper's Magazine. It was sharply critical of the 'breast cancer movement', suggesting that effort was placed into mammography and pink ribbons that could be better used elsewhere.

Ehrenreich was diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoing conventional therapy even while suggesting that she did not believe it was very effective. Here is the Talk Barbara Ehrenreich gave at Breast Cancer Action in San Francisco.)

Actually cancer was not my first run-in with a breast-related disease. About 20 years ago, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons announced that small-breastedness is itself a disease: "There is a substantial and enlarging body of medical information and opinion to the effect that these deformities [small breasts] are really a disease." They even gave this disease a name—micromastia.

I was myself a sufferer from micromastia. It wasn’t easy. Oh, I managed to hobble around, raise my kids and get my work done, but I knew how ill I really was. Then just 3 years ago, a doctor told me that I didn’t have to worry about breast cancer too much, because my breasts were small. Now there’s a doctor who doesn’t have to worry about brain cancer too much…

Here’s another relevant personal fact: In the 70s I was an activist in what we then called the women’s health movement. We campaigned for safe contraceptives, against unnecessary surgery, for the option of unmedicated childbirth, for the right to choose abortion.

In the area of breast cancer, we battled against the practice of proceeding directly from biopsy to mastectomy, without even letting the patient wake up to make the decision herself. We wanted women to have the information and the right to make their own health care decision. We even took on the psychiatrists, with their peculiar theory that ambitious or outspoken women were suffering from “penis envy.”

Anybody here ever envied a penis? Wanted to be one?

Anyway, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer 2 years ago, I did what any veteran of the Women’s Health Movement would do: I started researching, looking especially for support and information from other women who had the disease. I ordered a half dozen book, mostly women’s accounts of their breast cancer experiences. I waded out into the net and found scores of breast cancer websites, which I nervously devoured. I was looking for tips, ways to survive the treatments, questions to ask the doctors, and of course emotional support—sisterhood. I was sure that I would find the Women’s Health Movement alive and well and able to help me.

I found a lot. But what I found shocked me. Yes, I found useful tips and information, but I found something else—that a whole culture (I don’t know what else to call it) has grown up around breast cancer. And it certainly did not contain the sisterhood I was searching for.

How to define breast cancer culture?

It’s very pink and femme and frilly – all about pink ribbons, pink rhinestone pins, pink t-shirts and of course a lot about cosmetics. The American Cancer Society offers a program called “Look Good…Feel Better” which gives out free cosmetics to women undergoing breast cancer treatment. The Libby Ross Foundation gives breast cancer patients a free tote bag containing Estee Lauder body crème, a pink satin pillowcase, a set of Japanese cosmetics, and 2 rhinestone bracelets. And no one, so far as I could determine, was complaining about the strange idea that you can fight a potentially fatal disease with eyeliner and blush.

I found that the culture of breast cancer is highly commercialized. First, in the sense that many apparently grassroots fundraising efforts are in fact sponsored by large corporations eager to court middle-aged females. Among them: Revlon, Avon, Ford, Tiffany, Pier 1, Estee Lauder, Ralph Lauren, Lee Denim, Saks Fifth Avenue, JC Penney, Boston Market, Wilson athletic gear. Where were they, I wondered, when the Women’s Health Movement was fighting for abortion rights and against involuntary sterilization?

More amazing to me though, was the number of breast cancer-related items you can buy today: You can dress entirely in a breast cancer-theme: pink-beribboned sweatshirts, denim shirts, pajamas, lingerie, aprons, loungewear, shoelaces and socks; accessorize with pink rhinestone broaches, angel pins, scarves, caps, earrings and bracelets.

You can decorate your home with breast cancer candles, coffee mugs, pendants, stained glass pink ribbon candle holders, wind chimes and nightlights. You can pay your bills with special “Breastchecks” or a separate line of “Checks for a Cure.”

To me, the most disturbing product, though, was the breast cancer teddy bears. I have identified four distinct lines, or species, of these creatures, including “Carol,” the Remembrance Bear; “Hope,” the Breast Cancer Research Bear; the “Susan Bear,” named for Nancy Brinker’s deceased sister Susan; and the new Nick and Nora Wish Upon a Star Bear, available, along with the Susan Bear, at the Komen Foundation website’s “marketplace.”

Now I don’t own a teddy bear—haven’t had much use for one in 50 years. Why would anyone assume that, faced with the most serious medical challenge of my life, I would need one now? And that wasn’t all: The Libby Ross tote bag that I just mentioned also contained a package of crayons—something else I haven’t needed in many a decade. I began to get the feeling that this breast cancer culture is not only about being pretty and femme—it’s also about regressing back to being a little girl—a very good little girl in fact.

There is, I would point out, nothing similar for me. At least men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer are not given gifts of matchbox cars.

But the worst of it, for me, was the perkiness and relentless cheerfulness of the breast cancer culture. The “Breast Friends” site, for example, features a series of inspirational quotes: “Don’t Cry over Anything that Can’t Cry Over You,” “I Can’t Stop the Birds of Sorrow from Circling my Head, But I Can Stop Them from Building a Nest in My Hair,” and much more of that ilk.

You don’t find a lot of complaining in breast cancer culture. Sure, people acknowledge that breast cancer is a terrible experience in many ways—you’ll lose a breast or 2, you’ll go through chemo and lose your hair and your immune response, you might get lymphedema and lose the use of your arms.

But guess what? You would turn out a better person for it—more feminine, more spiritual, more evolved. You would be something better than a mere cancer-free person; you would be a “survivor.” Some quotes:

As “Mary” reports, on the “Bosom Buds” message board:

"I really believe I am a much more sensitive and thoughtful person now… I enjoy life so much more now and am much happier now."

Cindy Cherry, quoted in the Washington Post, goes further:

"If I had to do it over, would I want breast cancer? Absolutely."

And I’ve heard even worse on the health channel: gushing descriptions of breast cancer as a form of spiritual upward mobility. Something that a woman should be happy to experience.

Is there any other disease that has been so warmly embraced by its victims? (And yes, I use the word “victim”—that’s another part of the perkiness—the failure to acknowledge that some of us are in fact victims of a hideous disease.) No one thinks TB, AIDS, or heart disease is supposed to be a “growth opportunity” and make you into a better person. No one is thankful for colon cancer, diabetes or gonorrhea. Why, I began to wonder, is a disease that primarily attacks women supposed to be something they should be grateful for?

So when I went looking for the Women’s Health Movement to sustain me in my breast cancer ordeal I found something very different. In the 70s we used to get angry and militant about women’s health issues: we barged into medical meetings, picketed hospitals, showed up uninvited at Congressional hearings. In the case of breast cancer, all that fighting spirit had been transformed into…pink cotton candy.

As for my own mood a year ago, when I was undergoing treatment. It wasn’t sweet or spiritual or “feminine” in the old fashioned sense. I was angry, as angry as I have ever been in my life. I wondered if it was possible to express this anger in the breast cancer culture I’d been exploring. So I wrote a letter and posted it on the message board run by the Komen Foundation, the largest of the breast cancer foundations. What I said was:

I was diagnosed 6 months ago and have been through a mastectomy and chemotherapy. I don’t think of myself as a “survivor” because too many women have gone thru the same “treatments” only to have their cancers recur a few years later.

What I am is angry. Angry about “treatments” which are in fact toxic and debilitating. Angry about all the emphasis on “early detection” when there is no way of knowing how early any detection is. Some small tumors are very fast-growing and some big ones are very slow. But no one seems to be making the distinction.

Angry about insurance companies: I’m not battling cancer, I’m battling Aetna, which is still refusing to pay for the biopsy…And what about all people without insurance? (Bush wants to cut help for them in his next budget, and I don’t hear anyone from the breast cancer groups screaming.)

Angry about all the sappy pink ribbons, breast cancer teddy bears and other cute accessories when the fact is WOMEN ARE DYING.

And finally, angry that with all the money pouring into research, no one knows what the cause of breast cancer is. If I want to protect my daughter, we need to know the CAUSE.

Anyone else out there sick of the breast cancer hype?”

That’s what I wrote; that’s what I was feeling at the time.

The responses I got were alarming. “Suzy” wrote to say “I really dislike saying you have a bad attitude towards all of this, but you do, and it's not going to help you in the least.” Several women offered to pray for me to achieve a better state of mind.

“Kitty,” however, thought I’d gone around the bend:

You need to run, not walk, to some counseling…Please, get yourself some help and I ask everyone on this site to pray for you so you can enjoy life to the fullest.

It was at this point that I realized that there is nothing feminist—and not much even sisterly—about the culture that has grown up around breast cancer. Because one of the first principles of second wave feminism was that you honor women’s experience and respect their feelings. You don’t tell a woman who’s been raped or assaulted or subject to medical maltreatment to “cheer up” and stop whining. We thought there was something powerful and constructive about anger—I still think there is—because it was anger, more than anything, that made us into tireless activists for women’s health.

But here I was—expressing my heartfelt feelings—and being told by other women who had been through similar experiences to shut up and put on a happy face. To be a “Stepford patient.” I began to suspect that the purpose of the breast cancer culture—with it’s teddy bears, and crayons and cosmetics and pinkness—is to get us to regress to a child-like state, to suspend critical judgment, and get us to accept whatever the medical profession wants to do to us.

Now of course there are—or have been—rationales for all the aspects of breast cancer culture I found so offensive:

Being cheerful is supposed to save year life. Everything depends on your attitude, I was told again and again by the books and websites I consulted. Anger and sorrow will kills you; being upbeat will save you. Having an upbeat culture of breast cancer survivors—with their public displays of energy and athleticism—is justified again and again as a way of getting women to come forward and have their mammograms. If women neglect their annual screenings, it must be because they are afraid that a diagnosis amounts to a death sentence. I was told by doctors and breast cancer establishment figures that beaming survivors, proudly running races and climbing mountains, are the best possible advertisement for routine screening mammograms, early detection, and the ensuing round of treatments. Trouble is: neither of these rationales holds up under close examination.

The idea that attitude can save your life was based on studies purporting to show that women who participate in breast cancer self-help groups are both happier and live longer than those who don’t. More recent studies show that women in support groups may be happier, but they don’t live any longer than the sourpusses and social isolates who don’t go to groups.

I’m all for support groups—it’s just that they don’t count as form of treatment! And I’m all for being happy, but it won’t save your life.

As for the need to have a highly visible, cheerful, breast cancer culture in order to get women to get “squished”—the Oct 20 issue of the Lancet carried a study of past studies of the effectiveness of screening mammography—a study showing that all the past studies were flawed and that mass mammography screening does nothing to lower a country’s breast cancer mortality rate.

We haven’t heard the last word on this, and the breast cancer establishment is scrambling to find some new evidence that mammograms are worth it. But for now: fact is, they don’t seem to do much, as some doctors have suspected for a long time. Ten years ago, the famous British surgeon Michael Baum called routine screening mammography “one of the greatest deceptions perpetrated on the women of the western world.”

In other words, the establishment breast cancer culture—represented by the races for the cure, the pink ribbons and teddy bears—rests on a paradigm that has been disproved and discredited.

We don’t need to be cheerful. And we may not need to get those mammograms every year—which means we don’t need all this breast cancer “awareness’ that the corporations and the foundations are always encouraging.

So what does it hurt to have this massive breast cancer culture? You could say: whatever gets you through the night…

But there are at least 2 major problems with it:

First, the breast cancer culture has encouraged a dangerous complacency about current medical approaches to breast-cancer treatment. Implicit in all the pink ribbons and the drumbeat for regular mammograms was the promise that your cancer could be cured—if only you bring it to the doctors' attention early enough. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with the so-called treatments—the burden is on you to get your tumor detected “early.”

But as I wrote to the Komen message board: not all small tumors are "early" and more easily treated. In fact, there is no single disease “breast cancer”—probably a multitude of diseases of various degrees of virulence. But right now, they’re all being treated as a single disease.

Worse, current treatments—surgery, chemotherapy and radiation—carry no guarantee of long-term survival and are notoriously debilitating and disfiguring themselves. Every year, more than 40,000 American women die of breast cancer, large numbers of whom had duly submitted to screening mammograms and to the nightmarish treatments that ensued.

Even mammograms are something to worry about: Only one carcinogen has been definitely established as a cause of breast cancer, and that is ionizing radiation of the kind emitted by mammography machines.

A second big problem with the pink ribbon culture: While they want a cure—we ALL do—they say almost nothing about the need to find the CAUSE of breast cancer, which is very likely environmental. This omission makes sense: breast cancer would hardly be the darling of corporate charities if its complexion changed from pink to green.

But by ignoring or underemphasizing the issue of environmental causes, the pink-ribbon crowd function as willing dupes of what could be called the Cancer Industrial Complex: by which I mean the multinational corporate enterprise which with the one hand doles out carcinogens and disease and, with the other, offers expensive, semi-toxic, pharmaceutical treatments. Breast Cancer Awareness month, for example, is sponsored by AstraZeneca (the manufacturer of Tamoxifen) which until 1999 was also the fourth largest producer of pesticides in the United States, including at least one known carcinogen.

So the more I immersed myself in the pink ribbon culture – during those awful months of chemo last year—the more disgusted I got. But I had one lifeline, one source of hope and genuine sisterhood: My cousin happened to send me three back issues of the Breast Cancer Action newsletter. I read them cover to cover, absorbing information, thrilled to find other women who had confronted the disease and managed to keep their wits about them and their dignity intact.

I am deeply grateful that Breast Cancer Action was there for me when I needed it most. It is one of the few voices of clarity and consistently feminist determination within the vast sea of pink ribbons out there, and I’m here to ask you—implore you, in fact—to help it not only survive but grow.

I know it can, because when I published my thoughts on the pink ribbon culture—in Harpers last October—I was deluged with letters from women saying: Thank god, somebody feels the same way I do! Here’s a project I’d like to see BCA have the resources to launch: a website for women don’t want teddy bears and ribbons, who want ACTION! I’d like to see an interactive website to connect these women to each other, because this is what I needed a year ago—not to mention probably for the rest of my life. I’d call it “bad girls of breast cancer”—like the BCA t-shirt. This is MY dream for BCA and I hope you’ll help make it possible.

Because we don’t need to be infantilized when we’re dealing with a potentially fatal disease, we don’t need to be patronized with cosmetics and jewelry, and told to keep smiling, no matter what.

We don’t need more “awareness” of breast cancer—we’re VERY aware, thank you very much. We need treatments that work, and above all, we need to know the cause of this killer, so we can stop it before it attacks another generation.

And we certainly don’t need a breast cancer culture that, by downplaying the possible environmental causes of cancer, serves as an accomplice in global poisoning—normalizing cancer, prettying it up, even presenting it, perversely, as a positive and enviable experience.

What we need is a truly sisterly response to this ghastly disease—one that is both loving and militant, courageous and caring, willing to confront the Cancer Industrial Complex and, when necessary, the entire $16 billion a year breast cancer industry, including the medical profession.

Are you with me? Will you be with me if my cancer returns?

Good!—then this is the time to stand with BCA and give them what you can—your time, your talent, your money!


Dear Dr. Phil:
Are Indigenous People in an "Abusive Relationship" with Canada?

By Kahentinetha Horn
From MNN
2006

They say "love is blind". When friends and relatives think your relationship is in trouble they start dropping you hints and sending you clippings from the newspaper. An alert Maliseet reporter sent this one our way. "Doesn't this sound like Canada?", she asked. Let's take a look.

After all, according the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, we are "partners in confederation". Marriage is a partnership? So let's see how this partnership stacks up. Canada did not ask for our hand in marriage. So it must be common law! We were never given an opportunity to accept or reject their colonial advances. They came, they saw and they moved right in. To use the legal terminology, Britain assumed "sovereignty over us and our lands". We had one hell of a dowry, didn't we?

Marriages often begin with a honeymoon. When was ours? Marriage often creeps up on people and then they find themselves trapped. People used to think marriages lasted forever. Now they say you should get out if it's abusive.

How can you tell if you're in an abusive relationship? Let's look at the list so we can decide for ourselves. Is this marriage worth saving?

1. Does your spouse stop you from talking to or prevent you from seeing family or friends? Geez! Remember the law that said we couldn't leave the reserve and we had to get passes from the Indian agent if we wanted to visit anyone? Does the way they listen in on our phone conversations today count? We can tell that a lot of our phones and our emails are bugged. Where do people talk in this constitutional marriage partnership? Is it in Parliament? We don't have elected representatives there. In fact, we don't want elected representatives in a "foreign" government. Are they sure we're married?

2. Does your spouse embarrass you with bad names and put-downs? Omygawd! Wasn't the Indian Act called the "act de sauvages" in French? Omygawd! Remember how the Indian Act defined a person as anyone but an "Indian" right up to 1952? Didn't Indian Affairs call us "children" and "wards of the state"? They pretended we were not capable of conducting our own affairs. Didn't Canadian textbooks and the media present us as childlike, primitive, dirty drunken demons whose ancestors were naked, war-painted braves and princesses, kemosabes, big chiefs, squaws, flesh eaters, torturers who attacked innocent pioneers, wasted resources, whooping wagon-circling warriors, who should have died out instead of becoming gutter drunks and gun toting drug and cigarette smugglers and peace disturbers who blocked roads and bridges and burned tires? In fact, doesn't the Canadian government have a special department of the JTF2 which bragged that "smear campaigns are our specialty"?

3. Does your spouse look at you or act in ways that scare you? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. It is rather scary to have all those guns pointed at us every time we try to talk to them.

4. Does your spouse treat you roughly, grab you, shove you, push you? Well, as a matter of fact it does. If we stare at them long enough, they'll jump us and beat us up. In fact, they have lots of torture toys, like the latest taser guns, pepper spray, M-16's, rubber bullets and helicopters that hover over our houses that disturb our sleep. If we don't do as we're told, they get court injunctions and beat us up. This happens all the time. We get stopped by the cops for potential driving infractions and disturbing the peace. The jails are full of Indigenous people. In fact, going to jail is part of growing up for the average Indigenous youth in Canada. Many are finally murdered there.

5. Does your spouse control what you do, who you see or talk to, or where you go? Do they stop you from seeing or talking to friends and family? As a matter of fact, Canada thinks it can decide who our friends and family are! Look at the Indian act! It was passed without our knowledge or consent. Canada and the US also stuck borders right in the middle of our territories. About four out of five times when I try to cross to visit friends and relatives, I am stopped, searched, detained, harassed and reported on. They never find anything and have to let me go. They're harder on our younger kids who often find themselves arrested. At Akwesasnes there are 19 different policing agencies patrolling the community.

6. Does your spouse prevent you from getting a job, take your money, make you ask for money or refuse to give you money? Yeah! Didn't it all begin with the great land grab! This spouse thinks it owns ALL of our land and resources, and even us! They always called us "our Indians". They think they "gave" us our reserve. They think "self-determination" isn't an inherent human right. Just the other day the new Great White Father, Jim Prentice, gave a talk about ,"How much self-determination should we give the Indians"!!! We guess he hasn't the UN human rights protocols that Canada has signed and pledged to uphold. They've tried to take away our essential humanity. They like to keep us on welfare so they can keep us under control. There are lots of jobs for their "house Indians' like band councilors to help them do this. You can be sure you're fired if you don't tow their line. They do everything they can to stop us from developing economic independence. They claim the right to expropriate our land to develop our resources in a way that only benefits them.

7. Does your spouse make all the decisions? You bet! We aren't allowed to make any decisions. In 1982 Canada's new Constitution Act claimed to affirm "existing Aboriginal and treaty rights". The Supreme Court of Canada interpreted this to mean that before 1982 it was legal for Canada to extinguish our rights if they showed a "clear and plain intent". What? After 1982 the Supreme Court declared that Canada can only infringe our rights if it has "valid justification". Valid to who?? Them, of course! That's how you rob people. Our involvement in decision making of any kind seems to be completely irrelevant in Canada's mind. Anytime we have tried to assert our rights, we've been attacked and Canada's courts have shot us down. A good marriage is supposed to be based on equal partnership. Canada should deal with us on the legal nation-to-nation basis. In this "partnership" Canada is the only one that gets to be a "nation". They have taken to calling us "first nations". Don't be fooled. It's double faced sweet talk. They think they still have us on a short leash.

8. Does your spouse prevent you from leaving after a fight? Hey, aren't they are on our land? Shouldn't they leave? Look at what's happening at Six Nations. We've seen it all before. They come and attack us. We defend ourselves. They shove us into their paddy wagons, ambulances and take us off to their hospitals, jails and sometimes the morgue. We are not free to go to our homes. We have to be on guard and protect each other all the time.

9. Does your spouse tell you you're a bad mother or threaten to take away your children? Well, Canada's official state policy qualifies as genocide. [read the UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide]. Our children were routinely taken from us to be raised in an alien culture. First, our children were killed. Then the survivors were snatched from their parents and sent to residential schools. We call them "death camps". There they were beaten, raped, abused, malnourished, exposed to diseases and subjected to medical experimentation. About half died. Then there were the "sixties scoop" and the "seventies sweep". Whole Generations of our kids were kidnapped and given to "nice white families". Some were nice. A lot were not.

10. Does your spouse Act like abuse is no big deal, it's your fault, or even deny he did it? The whole nasty business began with the pretence that Canada was going to "civilize" and "protect" us. They focused on what's wrong with us and our behavior. Instead of of setting up treatment for them, the abusers, Canada puts us in "healing circles" and all kinds of other therapies to try to "pacify" us as if we're the ones with the problem. They don't want to notice what they're doing to us. We've been studied to death to justify their views on us so they can continue to hold us in bondage. Canada has always denied that is has carried out genocide of 99% of our people. Imagine! It just got itself on the Human Rights Commission at the UN so it can supervise the external international agencies that are available to receive complaints from the Indigenous Peoples of the world! This is a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse.

11. Does your spouse destroy your property, use violence against you or threaten to hurt pets or things you care about? Look at the destruction from one end of Turtle Island to the other. When the colonists arrived this was a land of plenty. Our ancestors had a relationship with the environment based on mutual respect for mother earth and all of the natural world. We managed the environment so that everything was in balance. The fish in the Grand Banks were so thick you could pull them up with a bucket. The earth was full of nuts, big berries and all kinds of game. Turtle Island was a beautiful park. In a short time the European abusers ravaged almost all of the land. In 1720 the King of England passed a law saying "no more cutting of the white pine" [our Tree of Peace. Only one strand remains in Algonquin park.] They rolled across the land cutting down old growth trees and destroying the habitat of the animals. The dug up the earth to get minerals, poisoning the water and air, leaving toxic waste everywhere that will take thousands of years to repair. Today the Grand Banks are fished out. All kinds of natural food resources are depleted. In some places fish in the St. Lawrence River can qualify as toxic waste. Lake Erie is a cesspool. The prairies are turning into a desert. Southern BC is almost all clear cut. In the north the caribou have been decimated. The ice is melting and the polar bears are drowning. The land is scarred, poisoned and becoming increasingly unlivable. Anytime we try to protect it, we are faced with threats or violence. Look at what's happening at Six Nations right now.

12. Does your spouse intimidate you with guns, knives or other weapons? The latest! Take a look at item 4. Remember the weapons cache that was found just this spring at Kanehsatake. Remember the 77,000 rounds of ammunition shot at the 26 Indigenous people attending the Sun Dance at Gustafsen Lake. Remember the way the army was deployed around three of our territories during the Mohawk Oka Crisis of 1990?

13. Does your spouse force you into sexual acts that you don't enjoy? This is really "undercover". In Vancouver and other western cities there are streets where men go to pick up child prostitutes. These are our children. There are 500 native women missing. Their disappearances have not been investigated. What more can we say.

14. Does your spouse threaten to kill himself? Well, we finally found something on this list that Canada doesn't do. If it did, could you blame us if we just let it happen?

So what do you think, Dr. Phil? What kind of therapy do you suggest for this abusers? Shouldn't Canada sign up right away? If this is a marriage, we want a divorce!



Diego Rivera's Artistic Mastery

By Tim Tower
From World Socialist Web Site
1999

The exhibition, Diego Rivera, Art and Revolution, previously on display in Cleveland and Los Angeles, will show in Houston between September 19 and November 28, before concluding its tour in Mexico City. This major retrospective of the artist's work, the first in more than a decade, includes over 100 images assembled from major collections throughout the world. The works are divided into four parts representing the artist's entire career, but with special emphasis on pieces with which many viewers may not be familiar.

The first group includes academic drawings and paintings done in Mexico and some done after Rivera traveled to Europe on a government grant in 1907. It reveals the early indications of a great talent and includes a number of remarkable studies and transitional works in which he worked with the styles of different masters in the protracted process of establishing his own voice. The second group includes European work from before his return to Mexico in 1921. It shows Rivera in a period of powerful aesthetic growth, in which he combined a voracious appetite for studying the European masters with continuous experimentation in the new methods of the Parisian avant-garde. He devoted himself to mastering every style and technique while, at the same time, striving to express the historic scale of the social and cultural eruptions taking place.

The third selection consists of sketches and studies for the murals that dominated Rivera's work for the three decades beginning in Mexico in 1922 and for which he became world-famous. These pieces seem to play more the role of connective tissue than that of muscle or bone within the exhibition. They tie the easel works in the show to the more famous and familiar murals and also provide the necessary transition between the early and later easel works on display.

The fourth group, overlapping the third chronologically, includes portraits and other paintings from the mid-1920s until the time of his death. Here, along with pieces of extraordinary beauty and expressive strength, are some in which the effects of political, as well as personal, traumas and frustrations seem to have taken their toll on the aging giant.

Applied to Rivera's life and work, the title “Art and Revolution” is certainly justified. His life was bound up as much, or more, than that of any other artist with the great events that shaped the twentieth century. The work of this great artist and supporter of the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution and also, for a period of time, the Fourth International must surely hold a key to one of the great questions of cultural history—the relationship between the arts and social revolution. It seems, however, that the exhibit organizers were not prepared to probe this crucial point, or for whatever reason, were willing to allow it to remain unaddressed. They have posed the question, however, and at the same time have presented a fascinating and forceful body of work. This, after all, is not so little.

Diego Rivera was born in 1886 and died in 1957. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City between 1898 and 1906, where he won several awards and achieved initial public recognition. He then traveled to Europe on a small pension provided by the governor of Veracruz, beginning his studies in 1907 in the studio of Eduardo Chicharro in Madrid. For the next 14 years he traveled and worked in Europe, only returning to Mexico in 1910 to exhibit his paintings.

Rivera's work then reflected the raging aesthetic and political controversies of the émigré community of artists, writers and revolutionaries. Confidence in man's ability to remake the world dominated in this highly creative atmosphere. In 1917, the year of the October Revolution, Rivera broke with Picasso and cubism. Before returning to Mexico in 1921, he traveled through Italy studying the art of fresco painting.
Beginning in 1922 with his first mural, Creation, painted at the National Preparatory School, he pioneered the development of fresco painting into one of the leading forms of twentieth century art. In the same year, he co-founded the Union of Revolutionary Painters, Sculptors and Graphic Artists and joined the Mexican Communist Party.

In 1929 he came into conflict with the Party leadership. Stalin's theory of Socialist Realism imposed strict restrictions on both style and subject. On top of voicing certain disagreements with Stalin's political line, Rivera declined to alter a mural in line with party demands. The Party expelled him.

In 1933 he began work on a major fresco at Rockefeller Center in New York City. When he refused to remove a portrait of Vladimir Lenin from the wall, Rockefeller dismissed him and had the painting destroyed. Rivera responded by using his designs for a fresco in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. In regard to the conflict in New York, he said it was “the only correct painting to be made in the building [as] an exact and concrete expression of the situation of society under capitalism at the present time, and an indication of the road that man must follow in order to liquidate hunger, oppression, disorder and war.”
Around this time, Leon Trotsky, leader of the Russian Revolution and of the International Left Opposition and soon-to-be the founder of the Fourth International, was a man without a visa—hounded from one country to another by both Stalinism and imperialism. Rivera played a major role in securing Trotsky a visa and a place to live in Mexico.

In 1938 he collaborated with Trotsky and André Breton in preparing the Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, a document based on the deep connection between authentic art and the revolutionary movement of the working class. Here was the fruit of discussions between the leader of world socialism, the leader of surrealist literature and one of the foremost representatives of modern painting at a moment when fascism destroyed progressive tendencies in art as “degenerate” and the Stalinists denounced independent creative work as “fascist.”

“True art, which is not content to play variations on ready-made models,” it states, “but rather insists on expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time—true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution can sweep clean the path for a new culture.”

At his best, Rivera gave monumental form to these themes, combining in his art confidence in the capacities of the working class and mankind with radiant beauty and compassion. Trotsky's assassination, the outbreak of war and its aftermath would soon pose enormous political and cultural problems. Rivera's previous resistance to the Stalinist straight jacket of Socialist Realism proved to be inadequate as a political inoculation against the pressure to support Stalinism after the war. His disorientation took a toll on his later work.

Among early paintings opening the show is the self-portrait of a gifted, yet self-conscious, and somewhat tentative student. From this and its companion pieces one can see why his academic work secured a modest government pension and later a grant for study in Europe. The drawings are delicate and masterful; the oils evoke strong, consistent moods.

In the picture of a hospital garden entitled Promenade of the Melancholics, a shaded pathway between hedge rows in a wood leads from shadow into bright sunlight. Already in this early piece from 1904, the painter succeeds in evoking an unbroken mood of quiet warmth. His palette is richly suited to recreating the salubrious atmosphere of midday sun filtering through tall trees. It is a picture of beckoning optimism.

In Europe a few years later, the viewer will recognize that Rivera hardly required an internal revolution to master the somber warmth typical of contemporary Spanish painting. The soft light of a setting sun shimmers in four panes of glass set in dark wood frames and glows from aging stucco and masonry in the picture of a House in Vizcaya. Here Rivera displays his capacity to immerse himself in a scene with such pleasure that one feels invited, or drawn, to join him. Soft shadows and gently curving cobblestone streets impart a sense of tradition, resting like a comfortable saddle, on the landscape. No people, plants or animals appear. Yet Rivera draws vitality and warmth, even personality, from inanimate objects. This canvas from 1907 also gives a hint of the rhythmic compositions he would develop so forcefully later.

In a number of paintings, Rivera blurred the distinction between the study of a classic work and an original one. It is beyond the scope of this comment to compile a comprehensive list of his influences. We can say that such a list would have to include: Posada, El Greco, Velasquez, Goya, Titian, Tintoretto, Ingres, Monet, Cezanne, Renoir and Picasso. He incorporated a wide variety of style, technique and subject, copying schools of painting, until he mastered them, or reworking a traditional subject with a new and opposite technique.

The picture of Notre Dame de Paris from La Porte de la Tournelle , done in 1909, is an outstanding example. The sky and cathedral structure demonstrate a technical mastery of Monet's treatment of the sky and church facade. The intensity of bright sunlight is recreated by breaking it up into its component colors on the canvas. For this study, however, Rivera shifted the focus, pitching his easel on the opposite bank of the Seine, below the level of the street and the cathedral. In the foreground shadowy dock workers load huge kegs with a crane onto a barge. Thick figures and rich earth tones are reminiscent of the work of Jean Francois Millet, whose studies of peasants from the mid-nineteenth century hang nearby in the Louvre.

Rivera's candid combination of material from historically distant and seemingly incompatible schools of painting is often refreshing. In both a deep bow, and also a challenge, to El Greco, who painted the same scene some 300 years earlier, he selected a View of Toledo for a study in 1912. El Greco had used a combination of serpentine clouds and shadows combined with near surreal color to achieve a sense of the social and spiritual tension in this center of Catholic power during the time that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo was put on trial.

Rivera reversed the artistic process, bathing the landscape in bright pastels of warm sunlight and building the composition with angular geometric forms, unified by dominant diagonals. Rivera seemed to be reaching for the analytical approach of the cubists by working against the mannerism of El Greco. El Greco's town was almost swallowed by the terrain; whereas, Rivera's spires tower over the land and water; and his blocky buildings are encroaching everywhere. His painting is a little hollow, lacking internal cohesion. This weakness, however, was more than compensated by the success of some that were soon to follow.
In a major portrait the next year, Rivera elongated the figure of his friend Adolfo Best Mougard in a manner again reminiscent of El Greco. For Rivera, the method strengthens an image of sophisticated urbanity. Mougard appears on an elevated platform, in fact, the balcony of Rivera's studio, made of concrete and steel. Steam and smoke rise from locomotives and factories in the bustling metropolis behind him. A composition of powerful conflicting diagonals portrays the dynamism of Paris as the center of Europe. The Ferris wheel, which dominated the city's skyline at the time, dominates the background of the painting, appearing to spin around the end of Mougard's extended finger. Planes of color bend and wash the churning composition, while the clear distinction between foreground, middle and background reflects Rivera's lingering ambivalence toward the cubist repudiation of classical perspective.

In a spectacular display of vibrant color, rich texture and playful forms, Rivera captured a sense of exhilaration in the Majorcan Landscape of 1914. He was obviously thrilled by this Mediterranean paradise—each sensuous, lively aspect accentuated because of the war erupting in Europe. He painted a vision of Elysian fields, in a sense, expressing the inner needs of man, at the moment when Europe was plunging into a house of horrors.

The glistening beaches, which he applied with a palette knife, form a fragile protective frame for this teaming oasis of life, which seems to well up like a plethora of bacteria in a fragile droplet under a microscope. He loaded on paint with stiff brushes, imparting succulent, plastic qualities to rocks, earth and vegetation. Here a natural rhythm takes over the composition, like a walk on a summer day, repeating the simple forms of a Mediterranean cornucopia. The picture also resembles a bowl of luscious fruit, prepared to satisfy a simmering homesickness for the familiar warmth of sub-tropical Mexico.

Rivera followed in 1915 with Zapatista Landscape , which he called "probably the most faithful expression of the Mexican mood that I have ever achieved." In this tightly unified and compact composition of brilliant color and rich texture, Rivera gave expression to the creative forces of the Mexican Revolution at one of its most painful and bloody moments. His novel composition places a cubist portrait against a simplified background done in classical perspective.

Volcanic lava, the blood of the peasantry and a pregnant belly are woven together to create a portrait of the revolution. A rifle, leather belt, blanket, ammunition box and sombrero are silhouetted against old craters and mountains of Mexico. There is dignified humility, combined with a smoldering, volcanic eruption. The very land itself is being disrupted and reformed. Now at the height of his powers as a cubist, Rivera surgically separated line, texture, shape and color, to fuse them into a unified composition. The forms interpenetrate and revolve around each other as if held together and driven apart by great forces, like those operating inside the nucleus of an atom.

Female Nude from 1918-19 gives an example of the artist's fascination with Renoir, whom he credited with some of the most beautiful paintings ever done. In recognition of the enduring appeal of Rivera's work, we have to admit that many of his images defy verbal description. Suffice it to say that the rhythmic composition and intense color of this one have the magical ability to transport the viewer from a jostling crowd into a realm of sensual intimacy.

The Garbage Picker, a major painting done in tempera and oil on masonite in 1935, provides a beautiful example of the polished, sculptural quality Rivera achieved in many frescoes. Restricting his palette to a few tones, he focuses the knot of the composition on the straining profile of his anonymous subject.

In this context, one can hardly avoid reflecting on the hundreds of pre-Columbian artifacts which Rivera collected over many years. Frida Kahlo said he would spend hours admiring these objects. Striving for ever more universal means of expression, he was constantly reworking and combining artistic forms. His simple, sculptural forms are among the most moving in modern art.

The stunning Portrait of Lupe Marin, from 1938, although quite strong and sculptural itself, especially in the hands, which are thrust forward, creates a very different effect. Here the luminous colors of the sky, reflected in the folds of Lupe's flowing white dress, combine with complexities introduced by the reflection in a large mirror standing behind her right shoulder to convey a beautiful, complex and sophisticated personality.

The enigmatic Nocturnal Landscape, from 1947, is one of the most seductively beautiful in the show. A group of peasants lounges in a tree whose trunks weave a serpentine pattern through the darkness. A donkey stares out of deep night shadows. And an eerie artificial light illuminates the group. Expressions are hidden, effaced, as individual figures blend into the landscape. Rivera's brilliant palette creates a quiet, melancholy tone for the scene of modest spectators at what was likely the filming of John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He loved films himself and, in this picture, reveals his sense of irony. That night's audience of peasants who worked the Sierra Madre would probably never be able to see its portrayal on film.

A decade later the subtlety is gone when Rivera, admittedly broken-hearted and very sick, traveled to the Soviet Union. The previous year he had been readmitted to the Communist Party following an expulsion of more than two decades. Labor's Day Parade in Moscow, done in 1956, is colorful, but lifeless.

For his entire conscious life Rivera remained an outspoken defender of the oppressed and sympathizer of revolutions throughout the world. Both artistic and political controversies swirled around him. He fought, often heroically, for his convictions. Under complex and difficult conditions, he may have paid a price for this; but he also gained enormously. He was profoundly dissatisfied with the reality around him and, while faithfully portraying it, attempted to lift the veil to reveal an ideal future.

Modern life is based upon the ever-deepening exploitation of the many by the few, where all means of deceit and superstition join forces to conceal what is essential. Hypocrisy follows violence, adding insult to injury on the collective conscience. Small wonder that crowds line up to view Rivera's work. His paintings are a bandage on the wound, providing true pleasure for those who really look.