Diego Rivera Overview

It took a direct immersion in the politics of the Mexican Revolution to give Diego Rivera's art the cause and the audience it needed. Commissioned by the new government to execute huge public murals, Rivera created a new socialist iconography from... [more]

It took a direct immersion in the politics of the Mexican Revolution to give Diego Rivera's art the cause and the audience it needed. Commissioned by the new government to execute huge public murals, Rivera created a new socialist iconography from a mixture of Renaissance, academic, Cubist, and indigenous Mexican influences. The young Rivera won a scholarship to the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, and later, a stipend to study abroad. In Europe he brilliantly imitated artists from El Greco to Picasso. He also dabbled in Marxism, but was conflicted in his support for the Revolution of Villa and Zapata because it was toppling the very dictatorship that had sponsored his education. A summons from the Revolution's cultural impresario brought Rivera back onto Mexican soil in 1921. Once there, Rivera plunged into an intensive study of pre-Columbian and indigenous folk art. The marriage of these rich traditions with everything he had absorbed in Europe had an immediate effect: "My style was born like a child, in an instant, with the difference that this birth took place after 35 agonizing years of pregnancy." Rivera's monumental murals at the Secretariat of Education and the Palacio Nacional present a socialist vision of Mexican history from the arrival of the conquistadores to the proletarian/agrarian uprisings of the twentieth century. Everywhere, he emphasized the role of the indigenous peoples and folk cultures, depicting them as a continuum of Mexican identity. Rivera's relationship to communism was complicated. He joined the party in 1922 but wrestled with official dogma and, during the Stalinist years, provided Trotsky asylum in Mexico. His acceptance of commissions in the U.S. was also a source of friction. In the 1930s he created murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City that reflected his fascination with technology and industry, and his view that machines could be the tools that would liberate humanity from hunger and oppression. In his personal life, he was an unrepentant womanizer, deeply wounding his partners with repeated betrayals. Second wife Frida Kahlo represented some of this torment in her own art. She and Rivera were the major figures in Mexican art into the 1950s. [show less]