Portrait of Ramón Gómez de la Serna

Diego Rivera painted "Retrato de Ramón Gómez de la Serna" in Madrid, where both the poet and the artist were central figures to the cultural avant-garde blossoming there in the first decade of the twentieth century. In Madrid, Rivera participated in the Saturday gatherings led by Gómez de la Serna at Café Pombo, a sort of intellectual refuge in times of war. While the work partakes cubism, the movement Rivera was exploring in those years, it is by no means an orthodox cubist painting thanks to its bright complementary colors, sgraffito, rough surface rendered with sand, and textured planes rich in material. In 1915, immediately after the work was completed, it was exhibited in the front window of the venue where Muestra de arte nuevo was held. The work caused such a scandal that it was removed by the police. The scene in the writer’s studio explores a plurality of simultaneous temporalities where different actions performed by Gómez de la Serna are layered on top of one another. Clad in a suit and checkered tie, Gómez de la Serna is holding his emblematic pipe to his mouth with his left hand. The pen in his right hand suggests he is about to write. He is surrounded by distinguishable elements: a triangular inkwell, mostly likely in Talavera ceramic; a Browning pistol from his collection of weapons, whether ancient or unusable; papers; and copies of his books Through a window in the upper righthand corner, we see a black plane with chimneys drawn in white, likely a reference to the writer’s nocturnality. Next to the figure is a long sword with hair on its wooden hilt and, on the other end, a mannequin head. Regarding this work, Gómez de la Serna wrote, “The portrait Diego made of me is a true portrait, though it is not one with which to compete in a beauty contest. With this portrait, I feel secure and unburdened. Cubist painting loves space above all else; it has not bottled me up, but left me free and at ease.”