Diego Rivera

As a result of his political involvement and friendship with André Breton, Diego Rivera created several surrealistic works, beginning with The Lady in White (Mandragora Arachnilestrofera) (1939; San Diego Museum of Art). Several years later, he created this whimsical watercolor which is also in a surrealist vein. It relates to other works, particularly the more monumental and complex Temptation of Saint Anthony (1947; Museo de Arte Moderno). In these radish pictures, he focused on a Mexican popular tradition. The works refer directly to an annual celebration held in Oaxaca City on December 23, in which participants compete to create sculptural dioramas using strange anthropomorphic radishes. Night of the Radishes continues the form and feeling of Symbolic Landscape (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and The Hands of Dr. Moore (San Diego Museum of Art), both of 1940. Rivera would have appreciated the Oaxaca festival for its folkloric origins but as an artist well versed in surrealist theory, Rivera would also have appreciated the "automatic" or objet trouvé aspect of the radish forms. Whether painting from a still life arrangement or from his imagination, Rivera creates a humorously phallic and scatological composition. Here, the pink, fleshy extruded radishes float against a black background; their grimacing faces, along with the equestrian reference lend a quixotic character. This watercolor seems to be related to the central image in The Temptation of Saint Anthony. There we see the same equestrian radish, nestled in an earthy subterranean landscape, in the company of several other rooty friends, among them a buxom female and a creature that recalls the bizarre heloderma suspectum and the axolotl, creatures to which Breton referred in his "Souvenirs du Mexique" (1939).