This Diego Rivera painting was panned by critics at a Cubist exhibition.

Those artist-types get really incensed about the craft. Before galavanting off to Europe to muddle in modernist malarkey, Diego Rivera spent seven years at the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico. Though he was schooled in traditional fine arts and practiced oil painting as all good Western artists do, Rivera would eventually become politically radical and paint frescoes dedicated to the labor movement in North America.

Rivera painted the Portrait of Ramón Gómez de la Serna in 1915, during the Cubist years. Ramón Gómez de la Serna was a Spanish literary figure, with whom Rivera was friends. By de la Serna’s own account, he was allowed to move around, write, and go for walks while Rivera painted the portrait. De la Serna is best known for inventing the literary genre greguería while he lived in Paris. A greguería is essentially a humorous and metaphoric surrealist sentence. So kind of a decontextualized one-liner. I encourage any reader to surreptitiously insert a greguería into a casual conversation with friends and see if any of them are up-to-speed on their Spanish avant-garde writers.

The painting Portrait of Ramón Gómez de la Serna was displayed as part of Madrid’s first radically modernist exhibition, organized by de la Serna himself (named “The Integral Painters” or “Los Pintores Integros”). The exhibition caused quite a stir! Spanish art critics panned the exhibition faster than contemporary film critics panned Michael Bay’s Transformers sequels. Portrait of Ramón Gómez de la Serna was displayed in the window of the exhibition gallery, but the public found it so disturbing that the police ordered the gallery to remove it. Personally, I would consider that a compliment.

Despite a rocky start to his artistic career, Diego Rivera would go on to have lucrative public art commissions and a high-profile romance with Frida Kahlo. Huzzah!