What’s in a name?

 

I have been asked to write an article about the production of my publishing magnum opus, The Dictionary of Art (1996, 34 volumes) for Oxford University Press, the current publisher of the dictionary to mark its 30^th anniversary.

 

This exercise has provoked many memories. During the long and laborious task of assembling in a rational and clear order the entire history of art around the globe, editors sought ways to make the task seem lighter.

 

One stratagem was to hold parties. I recall a fancy-dress party for which we all dressed up in costumes that reflected our speciality or role. For example, one young desk editor had herself encased in aluminium foil to convert herself into a pair of scissors (cutting over-length text). One year the Scots among us (joined by those who had studied in Scotland) cooked a Burns day lunch of haggis and mashed swede, accompanied by a wee dram and recitals of the poet’s works, including a bawdy piece entitled One inch shall please a lady, for which we Sassenachs were given a glossary so that we should not miss the point. The poem was recited by a young woman who has since become a historian of Renaissance Italian gardens.

 

Editors sought amusement in the texts they edited, noting strange/amusing names they came across in texts: one of my favourites was a Croatian contributor, Urban Couch. Another was Professor Richard Brilliant, an excellent name for a career in art history, a discipline in which reputation counts for much. The names were displayed on a wall in our office at 112 Strand, but, unfortunately, we failed to keep a. record of them all.

 

Some 200 miles to the north, in the offices of our typesetter, Pindar Limited, colleagues who spent a decade keying our text, kept an eye open for amusing facts. The result was a dictionary of death, classified into chapters according to the way people died. Alberto Greco (1915-1965) an Argentinian died in Barcelona in curious circumstances: "He committed suicide with barbiturates in a room bursting with sanitary appliances." A search in what is no known as Groveart Online (OUP has kindly given me a temporary license while I write my article) suggests that suicide was not an uncommon way for artists to end their lives (and careers, of course). One of the more dramatic was the deat of Dezsó Czigány (1883-1937), a Hungarian painter. In a psychotic fit he first murdered his parents and then killed himself in 1937. The Mughal ruler Humayuun died when he tumbled down the stairs to his library in 1556. The unfortunate Léopold-Emile Reutlinger (b Callao, Peru, 17 March 1863; d Paris, 16 March 1937) caught a typesetter’s eye, not for the way he died, but for the event that ended his career: he “stopped working in 1930 when he lost an eye in an accident with a champagne cork.” Our typesetting colleagues proudly presented us with a copy of their work when their task was finished*.

 

Perhaps the most redolent name in The Dictionary of Art was, you guessed it, a Mexican one: Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez. Quite how he fitted it into his passport, I do not know.  María and Concepción suggest that the parents of this godless Commmunist/Trotskyist painter were devout Catholics. Nepomuceno is the Spanish rendition of St. John of Nepomuk, executed by King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia for refusing to divulge the queen’s confessions. The monarch appears not to have been a particularly good King Wenceslaus, but his name apparently lives on in a video game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The derivation of Estanislao means to be or to remain famous, a challenge which Diego certainly met. The name also referred to Saint Stanislav of Cracow, martyred for opposing the cruelty of king Bołeslaw the Cruel of Poland. Fortunately, historians of Mexican art know the great muralist simply as Diego, so nobody needs to remember his full name to identify him.

Diego Rivera's house in San Ángel. The large glass windows on the second floor light his studio.

There are, of course, many connections to Diego in Mexico City, and not just his murals. One of Diego’s friends was Juan O’Gorman, an architect and painter perhaps most famous for his enormous mosaic decoration of the library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. O’Gorman was a modernist in the style of Le Corbusier. In 1930-1932 he built separate (but connected by a footbridge) houses, in San Ángel, a southern suburb of Mexico City, for Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and a house for himself and his parents. The Rivera and Kahlo homes included studio spaces: Rivera died in his studio in 1957. Visitors can see the tiny bed (he was a short man) in which he died.

Frida Kahlo's house in San Ángel. The exterior stairs of the O'Gorman house are in the foreground.

Kahlo's house showing the bridge that connected Diego's house with hers.

 

Another connection to Rivera and Kahlo is the Dolores Olmedo Museum in Xochimilco, another southern neighbourhood. Olmedo was a muse (and probable lover) of Rivera. She made her home in the hacienda de la Noria, a colonial building that incorporated the late 16^th-century chapel of San Juan Evangelista Tzomolco. Olmedo’s former home houses the largest collection of paintings of Rivera and Kahlo, and of Rivera’s first wife, the Russian painter Angelina Beloff. However, the museum has been closed since 2020. Proposals to relocate the collection to the Parque Aztlán in Chapultepec Park proved extremely controversial and the museum is still closed, although it may reopen in 2026.

The Dolores Olmedo Museum

The Dolores Olmedo Museum

 

*Note: Gleeson, B. et al: The Pindar Book of Death: a compilation of curious and unusual ways in which artists have met their end (Scarborough: Pindar Ltd, limited edition, 1992-1995).