Diego Rivera, a protagonist of the cultural renewal favoured by the Mexican Revolution, bridged art and politics to become one of the most influential artists of the early twentieth century. In Retrato de Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1915), Rivera immediately reveals his subject’s craft: the famous writer holds a pen. His face is shown both frontally and in profile, breaking the fixed perspective. From Madrid, Rivera continued his experiments with Cubism, which he had begun in Paris before the war. He attended the Café Pombo’s tertulia, a hotbed of new ideas founded by Gómez de la Serna. In this painting, Rivera depicts El rastro, a book Gómez de la Serna dedicated to Madrid’s famous flea market, which was filled with objects the writer brought to Rivera’s studio, such as the doll and the sword included in the scene. Rivera portrayed Gómez de la Serna as an “anarchist who incites crime” – hence the woman decapitated by the sword – because he was “famous for his opposition to all conventional principles.” While the weapon in the foreground relates to the writer’s accumulation of objects, it could also suggest culture as a weapon or tool for spreading revolutionary ideas.
—Florencia Malbran
