Business Is Business

Diego Rivera was in hot water again last week. His mural in Mexico City's Del Prado Hotel (TIME, Oct. 6) had suddenly become a national scandal. Someone had informed the Archbishop that the mural contained a portrait of Don Ignacio Ramirez (an anticlerical follower of Juarez) holding a placard with the words Dios no existe ("God does not exist"--see cut). Sadly, the Archbishop canceled a date to bless the just-completed hotel and went off to bless some jai alai courts instead.

When a reporter got to Rivera's house, the garrulous, 61-year-old revolutionary was ready & waiting, with both guns loaded. "I respectfully propose," he offered grandly, "that the Archbishop bless the hotel in order that, with divine help, it may realize the greatest profits possible, and that he damn my [mural] so that I may go tranquilly to hell. Then everyone will be happy."

No Enemy. Having made this proposition, Rivera burbled happily on: "I am an atheist, that's true, and I think any individual suffering from religion is sick. But . . . I'm not an enemy of Catholics any more than I am an enemy of those suffering from tuberculosis, myopia, paralysis."

That did it. Rivera was condemned by practically everyone in town--except the Communists, who prepared to forgive him his Trotskyite sins and welcome him back with open arms. Roman Catholic committees demanded that the Del Prado mural be changed, or got rid of, as Rivera's Reforma Hotel and Rockefeller Center murals had been.

No King. One newspaper announced that Rivera had agreed to rub out the offending phrase and substitute another reading Negocio es negocio ("Business is business"). The painter hastily denied it. Hotel Director Luis Osio y Torres Rivas fumed that Rivera had promised, "on the word of a king," to put something different on Ramirez' placard, and then reneged on the grounds that he was, after all, "no king."

Under the law, the hotel could not touch the mural. It was government property, in charge of the President's committee on mural painting, which happened to consist of Rivera himself, and two sympathetic colleagues: Orozco and Siqueiros. But there was no law, the hotel decided, against veiling the mural with a vast white cloth.

The cloth was swept aside one night last week by more than a hundred young students, who raided the hotel dining room and scratched out Rivera's little blasphemy with table knives. Rivera was dining, meanwhile, two blocks down the street. After a leisurely meal he marched over to the hotel, climbed up on a chair and painted the offending words right back in again.

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