Source: WTL photograph© at the Special Exhibition of "Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism 1910 - 1950," at the Philadelphia Art Museum, December 13, 2016.
Image: "Portrait of Martín Luis Guzmán" (1915) by Diego Rivera (1886-1957)
Comments: This is a quintessentially Cubist painting. Notice the technique of overlaying "slices" or "planes" of visual reality (i.e., objects such as the serape in Mexican colors at the bottom to the matador's hat at the top) with only the equipal (the wicker chair on the left) as seeming anchor in "reality". Martín Luis Guzmán sat for this portrait in Rivera's studio in Paris. Given the topic represented in this painting, is appears that events in his native Mexico, even during his Cubist phase, were not absent from Rivera's interests, if not his concerns. Rivera and Guzmán had both been in Madrid, where they attended bull fights. The matador's hat (montera in Spanish) is not necessarily prime evidence that these two Mexicans were fans of Spain--love of Spain is not a particularly strong feature of the Mexican national character; note, for example, the Mexican popular repudiation of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche--but rather that these two Mexicans were aficionados of bull fighting, which is as major a "sport" in Mexico as it was/is in Spain.
For information in this textbook on Guzmán (1887-1976), see: => "Notes on the Humanities of the Mexican Revolution".
For information on Rivera's time in Europa and his "Cubist period," see: => Diego Rivera (4) and => Diego Rivera (5)
Humanities Question: After reading the textbook's paragraph on Martín Luis Guzmán (see the link above), tell how you think Diego Rivera has captured the spirit of the novelist.