When was the photograph taken?
Having identified all the figures in the photograph (including the dog, also an important detail) and behind the camera lens, by crossing the information on their respective whereabouts at the time we can narrow down the date of the encounter. It is important to note Eva Gouel’s absence, which raises a question. Picasso returned from Avignon with Derain’s dog Sentinelle on November 19, 1914. He then remained in Paris until February 1917, when he travelled to Italy with Cocteau to design the sets and costumes for Diaghilev’s ballet Parade.
Whereas Picasso’s dates are fairly straightforward, the chronology of Diego Rivera’s activities and movements is harder to trace—particularly in the period from 1914 to 1918—and inconsistent across his various biographies. The recollections of his companions Angelina and Marevna,[1] written long after the facts, are not precise in terms of dates, and at times misleading. Ramón Favela’s Diego Rivera, The Cubist Years[2] seems to be the most accurate and reliable source.
In July 1914, sensing the approach of war, Rivera and Angelina left on a leisure and work trip to the Balearic Islands, accompanied by the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. From there they traveled on to Madrid, where they showed their work in an avant-garde art exhibition from March 5 to 15, 1915. Organized by Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a Spanish avant-garde writer, the show brought together Cubist and Futurist painters under the title Los pintores íntegros, which could be translated as "The Complete Painters." This exhibition, a ground-breaking event in a country where the visual arts were still predominantly classical, caused quite a scandal, both in the press and among the public who gathered on the street in front of the exhibition show window. After the exhibition, Rivera went back to Paris, leaving Angelina in Madrid. She probably returned shortly thereafter.
In the summer of 1915, Rivera painted the piece shown in the photograph above: Zapatista Landscape (the cause of the dispute with Picasso), which was purchased by the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg in November, as proven in an invoice dated November 3.[3] Therefore, the gathering immortalized in the photograph could have happened anytime between April and July 1915. However, the way the three figures are fully dressed in dark clothes, particularly Angelina, suggests that it did not happen during a very hot, sunny period.
It was in August 1915 that Rivera went to visit Picasso in his studio with his friend Martín Luis Guzmán only to discover the painting the artist was working on, using the technique for depicting foliage that Rivera had invented for his own piece.[4] This led to hard feelings between the two, which were not likely to have lasted long.
[1] Marevna (Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska) was a Russian painter who arrived in Paris in 1912 at the age of 20. Her relationship with Rivera began when Angelina was in the hospital giving birth. Marevna also had a child with him –a girl– in 1919. Marevna published three autobiographies, each with its own variations. The most detailed is Life in Two Worlds, London, Abelard-Schuman, 1962.
[2] Ramón Favela, Diego Rivera, The Cubist Years, Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum, 1984, pp. 89-122.
[3] Diana Magaloni and Michael Govan, Picasso – Rivera: Conversation across Time, New York, Delmonico Books – Prestel, 2016, p. 160.
[4] Idem
[5] English translation of a quote from the French Wikipedia entry, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Zinoview, accessed on 29/4/2020.
[6] https://prozhito.org/notes?date=%221915-01-01%22&diaries=%5B1227%5D, accessed on 29/4/2020.
[7] See the Wikipedia entry quoted above or the text published (in French) on the occasion of an exhibition held in 2017 on Zinoviev’s activities and sketches of the war: https://www.centenaire.org/fr/espace-scientifique/arts/la-grande-guerre-dalexandre-zinoview-lartiste-russe-qui-fut-aussi-espion, accessed on 29/4/2020.
[8] John Richardson, A Life of Picasso - Volume II : 1907-1917, London, Jonathan Cape, 1996, p. 412: “Rivera guarded this formula jealously: it was virtually his only contribution to cubism.”
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Summary