Jan van de Pavert, Diego Rivera in de Sovjet Unie (1988)

There is a small building near the waterside in landscape park De Wetering in Zeewolde. It looks as it was purpose-built to provide a support for the mural that fills the whole of its rear wall. And yet architecture was the earlier interest of Jan van de Pavert, the artist who made Diego Rivera in de Sovjet Unie (1998). In his early years, he used to make drawings and models, in plaster or paraffin, of houses or parts of houses, e.g. the doors of an existing 17th-century church, but also, and more frequently, houses of his own invention, inspired by the Modernist style of the twenties. For the exhibition ‘Sonsbeek 93’ (1993), for example, he made a small concrete house that is now on view in Leeuwarden. He also designed Voorgevel (Façade, 1994), an object with a sleeping place for a homeless person.

Aquarelle and frescos
With the purpose of seeing the various spaces of his designs in a wider context, Van de Pavert made an animated video in which the viewer is taken on a tour of an imaginary building. In a later video, his virtual architecture contained ‘murals’. They started off as watercolours in which the artist imitated the dry surface of fresco painting. They were then photographed and digitised so that they could be included in the virtual space as murals. In his paintings, he mixed Russian Constructivism, the Communist propaganda style and the style of the Mexican Muralists, in particular Diego Rivera (1886–1957). In Zeewolde, he executed some of these paintings as actual frescoes.

He refers so literally to Communist Soviet art, with propaganda figures carrying folded flags all over the wall. The influence of the confirmed Communist Rivera is also abundantly clear. Van de Pavert represents these ideals in his mural, but even more than that, he refers to the history of art, to a period when art was very visibly connected with politics and leftist idealism, similar to the way he had earlier investigated the utopias of Modernism.

Originally, there was no fence in front of the painting. The fence had to be erected after several instances of vandalism, to protect the work while still keeping it on public view.

Annick Kleizen

1 Sponsored by the Anjerfonds.
2 ‘There is one more footnote to make on those representational watercolours and paintings: among the multitude of figures, there is also a portrait of Willi Münzenberg (he is the man in the dark suit beside that Bauhaus-like dummy). * He was a kind of agent for the Soviet Union and worked for several Communist organisations. * As a matter of fact, it is highly probably that Diego Rivera travelled to Odessa in the late twenties, even though Rivera never mentions it. […] The trip was almost certainly organised by Münzenberg.’ Jan van de Pavert in: ‘Een kleine vertelling’, Huis, Tape, Muur, Centraal Museum Utrecht 1998, pp. 72-73.

Jan van de Pavert, Diego Rivera in de Sovjet Unie (Diego Rivera in the Soviet Union)
1960, Zeist
Diego Rivera in de Sovjet Unie (Diego Rivera in the Soviet Union, 1988)
Concrete, fresco mural
Location: Zeewolde, De Verbeelding Route, near the pavilion of De Verbeelding
De Verbeelding Collection

Website Jan van de Pavert