In the New York Galleries

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That the history of art can be repeated in the life cycle of an individual is demonstrated at the Diego Rivera exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Rivera is among the most influenced of contemporary painters and since the Museum has followed its policy of generously presenting early, experimental phases the spectator may examine the painter's progression from Ingres to Uccello and the intermediary halts at such wayside shrines as Greco, Goya, the Douanier, Zuloaga, Picasso and Cézanne, during those years in which he tarried too long in the ateliers of Europe. The canvases in the manner of the Spaniards and the à la Rousseau Jungle reveal that honest imitation which is the highest form of flattery, but with The Architect, an abstraction of 1914, and the 1918 Portrait of Elie Faure, canvases which, while distinctly indebted to Picasso and Cézanne, are stated with independence, the artist comes into his own. Beginning with 1924 are the authentic canvases in which the painter concerns himself with the organization of form into such plastic simplifications as The Tortillera Maker, The Grinder and Bathers. To the year 1928 belong the impressions of the Russian Revolution, including the impressive May-day Sketch-book, a series of forty-five watercolors. From the same year and those following date the encaustic studies of children, in which, as Mr. Abbott remarks in the foreword of the catalogue, the painter works “with a directness and simplicity which lends to the children's portraits a gentle awkwardness completely convincing.” Of Rivera's ability in this difficult genre it seems safe to predict that, just as the rare Shavian love scenes will be remembered long after the tracts are forgotten, so these ingratiating, frightened little Mexicanos will survive much of the more pretentious work in which symbolism uneasily stalks.