High-Low Diego
Sir:
TIME hits a new low [April 4] with so much space devoted to Diego Rivera. Even his leering likeness on your cover is more nauseous to my stomach (uncultured though it may be) than any amount of overripe duck! . . .
MARGUERITE BALLARD New Orleans, La.
Sir:
Congratulations on your Rivera article, on every phase of it, from cover to last paragraph . . .
You not only lured me, but you kept me reading, looking at the pictures, understanding them and their author, and appreciating what he means . . .
BILL ABLER New York City
Sir:
Your article on our muralist and human-flesh-fancier Diego Rivera is light, bright and gaudy. As entertainment--Trotsky, Paulette Goddard and canard faisande--it is superb. As a serious study on a very good painter who is never as great as you estimate him, it is lame, superficial, obvious, and in some aspects, totally false.
Rivera is, at his best, a pocket-size Homer, at his worst a billboard-calendarist wooing the tourist trade. And for all the movement and technical preciseness and colour, Diego Rivera has never been, certainly is not, Mexico's or the Hemisphere's greatest living artist . . .
Never, never mistake a good stylist like
Diego Rivera with an artist of worldwide range like Mexico's Orozco [TIME, Feb. 24, 1947]. In him is the truth, the life, the significance and magic spell of his land.
CARLOS FUENTES Mexico, D.F.
Sir:
TIME'S three-dimensional portrait of Diego Rivera [April 4] reveals the man with archeological clarity.
It is reassuring to know that warm, red blood courses hungrily through the petrified veins of that Aztec god.
FRED M. MINOTTI Baltimore, Md.
Sir:
Enclosed please find the cover ... I just can't read the magazine with that hideous picture staring at me, nor can I put it aside for it is sure to glare at me . . .
ALICE M. PICKERING Black Earth, Wis.
Sir:
. . . To me it looks like a picture of the devil . . .
LEOPOLDO VALDES Evanston, 111.
At the Crossroads
Sir:
You say that Diego Rivera's picture for Rockefeller Center's RCA Building, The Crossroads, with Lenin uniting the workers, was "reduced to plaster dust." If that is the case, then it has been beautifully reassembled . . . for it can be seen in the Palace of Fine Arts, Mexico City ... A sizable amount of "dust" to be moved about, or did Rivera paint the same mural again for our neighbors to the South?
WILLIAM ALRICK Seattle, Wash.
Sir:
. . . According to my understanding, Mr. Rockefeller's objection was to the inclusion of an easily recognizable portrait of himself in the group to the left, which Rivera described as "socialite degenerates." I refer, of course, to the man with the glasses peering from behind the four card players . . .
GEORGE E. HOUSSER Vancouver, B.C.
Wrong Child
Sir:
TIME, in a review of my Watch the North Wind Rise [March 28], states that I wrote of Christ:
The outrageous Child who stole the ax of
power,
Debauched his virgin mother And vowed in rage he would be God the
Father . . .
TIME unkindly attributes a blasphemous howler to historically-minded and not at all eccentric me . . .
My poem is concerned with the variously-named demigod or "spirit of the year"--e.g., Zeus, son of Rhea . . . who in early European religious theory was at first wholly subject to his all-powerful variously-named Virgin Mother. As Europe, "Broad-face" (her full-moon title), she named this
Continent. About the third millennium B.C. he rebelled against her, seizing her sacred hammer or ax or sickle, and is credited in some versions of the myth with having seduced her ; afterwards he set himself up as an authoritarian, patriarchal Thunder-god and kept her in subjection. His tragi-comic destiny (as appears in the poem) is to grow senile and be demoted to a mere God of Revels, a greasy Santa Claus.
The well-loved figure of Christ, securely fixed in the immemorial Stabat Mater tradition of the West, will never take that road; but is likely to assume increasing prominence, while the outrageous child continues to rampage in the East with stolen hammer & sickle.
ROBERT GRAVES Majorca, Spain
Mercy, Justice & Ridicule
Sir:
To Joseph Goldstein and others who consider The Merchant of Venice anti-Semitic [TIME, April 4], I would suggest they . . . reread the play with the open-mindedness they ask of others. Viewed from the 20th Century, the Christians make a pretty poor showing, on the whole. It is they who suffer from delusions of grandeur and indulge freely in insults and jibes; it is they who . . . mouth words like mercy and justice, only to evade an honest bargain by means of a cheap legal trick . . .
ALISON WALKER Boston, Mass.
Sir:
Influenced by certain demands of one Joseph Goldstein ... I seek the suppression of Alice in Wonderland because it ridicules the plight of the poor Mock Turtle, a practically defenseless minority . . .
TOM GUSHING Asheville, N.C.
Hollywood O.K.
Sir:
I was sorry to read in the April 4th issue that Jack Warner disliked Treasure of the Sierra Madre and held up its release. This is not true. On the contrary, everything I have done at Warner Bros, in over 25 years has had his complete cooperation. He purchased the story and assigned it to my production schedule. It is also unfair to leave the inference that John Huston parted company with Warners because of Treasure of the Sierra Madre. After that he directed Key Largo . . .
HENRY BLANKE Hollywood, Calif.
Sir:
Your statement that Johnny Belinda was produced over the protests of Mr. Jack Warner is completely erroneous. Mr. Warner encouraged me in making Johnny Belinda, as well as every other picture I have produced for Warner Bros. For your information, no material for production here is purchased, prepared or actually produced without his okay and enthusiastic support . . .
JERRY WALD Hollywood, Calif. i e
Sir:
... I just can't believe that the new Selznick-Jennifer Jones picture is as bad as you say it is [TIME, April 4] ...
FLORENCE STACY Providence, R.I.
Sir:
YOU EVEN SPELLED "JENNIE" WRONG.
BOB GILLHAM Selznick Releasing Organization New York City
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