Hobby

Cross-featured, huge, is Mexico's genial Diego Rivera (TIME, May 6). Expression of proletariat life is his art; conversation his hobby. Last week through his art and his hobby Artist Rivera became the centre of a political controversy.

Commissioned by the Obregon socialist-labor government to decorate buildings in a way peons could comprehend, he painted many frescoes devoted to a panorama of Mexican life. One of the charges against him is "desecration of public buildings" by use of "figures which, while not lacking in artistic perfection, nevertheless prove a shock to the conservative tastes of certain classes."