8
PARTISAN REVIEW
Stalinists. These cuts and gashes give even greater life to the frescoes. You
have before you, not simply a "painting," an object of passive esthetic con–
templation, but a living part of the class struggle. And it is at the same
time a masterpiece!
Only the historical youth of a country which has not yet emerged
from the stage of struggle for national independence, has allowed Rivera's
revolutionary brush to be used on the walls of the public buildings of
Mexico. In the United States it was more difficult. Just as the monks in the
Middle Ages, through ignorance, it is true, erased antique literary produc–
tions from parchments to cover them with their scholastic ravings, just so
Rockefeller's lackeys, but this time maliciously, covered the frescoes of the
talented Mexican with their decorative banalities. This recent palimpsest
will conclusively show future generations the fate of art degraded in a de–
caying bourgeois society.
The situation is no better, however, in the country of the October
revolution. Incredible as it seemed at first sight, there was no place for the
art of Diego Rivera, either in Moscow, or in Leningrad, or in any other sec–
tion of the U.S.S.R. where the bureaucracy born of the revolution was erect–
ing grandiose palaces and monuments to itself. And how could the Kremlin
clique tolerate in its kingdom an artist who paints neither icons representing
the "leader" nor life-size portraits of Voroshilov's horse? The closing of
the Soviet doors to Rivera will brand forever with an ineffaceable shame the
totalitarian dictatorship.
Will it go on much longer- this stifling, this trampling under foot and
muddying of everything on which the future of humanity depends? Reliable
indications say no. The shameful and pitiable collapse of the cowardly and
reactionary politics of the Popular Fronts in Spain and France, on the one
hand, and the judicial frame-ups of Moscow, on the other, portend the
approach of a major turning point not only in the political sphere, but also
in the broader sphere of revolutionary ideology. Even the unfortunate
"friends"-but evidently not the intellectual and moral shallows of
Tbe
New Republic
and
Natiol1-are
beginning to tire of the yoke and whip.
Art, culture, politics need a new perspective. Without it humanity will not
develop. But never before has the prospect been as menacing and cata–
strophic as now. That is the reason why panic is the dominant state of mind
of the bewildered intelligentsia. Those who oppose an irresponsible skepti–
cism to the yoke of Moscow do not weigh heavy in the balance of history.
Skepticism is only another form, and not the best, of demoralization. Behind
the act, so popular now, of impartially keeping aloof from the Stalinist
bureaucracy as well as its revolutionary adversaries, is hidden nine times
out of ten a wretched prostration before the difficulties and dangers of
history. Nevertheless, verbal subterfuges and petty maneuvers will be of no
use. No one will be granted either pardon or respite. In the face of the era
