Diego Rivera

Mexican painter

• Born: December 8, 1886
• Birthplace: Guanajuato, Mexico
• Died: November 25, 1957
• Place of death: Mexico City, Mexico

Rivera was a painter who at first transcended his native Mexico and its rich and diverse artistic heritage to embrace broader modern European movements. Eventually in his work, he fused the Mexican and European forms to become one of his country’s greatest muralists and a giant in the world of art.

Early Life

Diego Rivera (dee-AY-goh rih-VIH-rah) was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, the birthplace of Mexican independence from Spain in 1810. His father, Diego, was a schoolteacher of Spanish-Portuguese-Jewish background, and his mother was of mixed Spanish-Indian descent. A few years after he was born, Rivera’s family moved to Mexico City, where he grew up. Because of his already marked artistic leanings at an early age, in 1896, his parents entered him in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts before he was ten years old. There he studied under the likes of Santiago Rebull, José Salomé Peña, Felix Parra, and the great José María de Velasco until 1902, when Rebull, the rector of the academy, died, to be replaced by Antonio Fabres. The young Rivera soon rebelled against the deadening regime of realism imposed by Fabres and left the academy.

Thereafter, Rivera studied and associated with the great José Guadalupe Posada and others. At this time, he also was stirred by the monumental native Mexican architecture. His first exhibition, held in Veracruz in 1907, so impressed the local governor and others, such as the legendary artist and patron Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo), who recommended Rivera, that he won a scholarship to further his studies at the prestigious San Fernando Academy in Spain under Eduardo Chicarro, a member of the Spanish realist school.

Life’s Work

In Spain, Rivera came under not only the influence of his teachers in Chicarro’s studio but also, perhaps more important, the work of El Greco and Francisco de Goya. Rivera’s first stay in Europe lasted two years, until 1909. During this time, he often left Spain to wander through Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and the British Isles.

When he returned home, it was just in time to experience and be caught up in the Mexican Revolution, which began in earnest in 1910. Rivera’s youthful, aesthetic rebelliousness was wholly compatible with the political and social struggles developing in Mexico. Although not yet really of the people, more and more his sympathies were with them. He and other prominent Mexican artists easily came to equate aesthetic freedom with political freedom and vice versa.

When he returned to Europe in 1912, this time to stay until 1921, he was already experiencing profound changes in his worldview and his art. This second European episode and the events he witnessed during it generally set his new aesthetic-political outlook. As before, he traveled extensively and associated with artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso. He also felt comfortable among the Russian artists, communist and noncommunist, in exile in Western Europe. His art began to reflect the work of his fellow painters, and, in Paris, he sometimes exhibited his canvases with theirs. Rivera also felt the impact of World War I and the Russian Revolution, some of which he saw firsthand.

Gradually, Rivera drifted toward cubism, to which he became completely dedicated until at least 1917. Major works such as his Majorcan Landscape made a significant contribution to the movement and firmly established him as a cubist of the first degree. Through Matisse, he also experimented with Fauvism. His Mexican background especially helped him appreciate the Fauvists’ use of color. In fact, more and more during this period his native Mexico and its influence grew in evidence in Rivera’s work.

In 1920, Rivera met the young David Alfaro Siqueiros in Paris, and, sharing a growing belief in the need for a people’s art to reflect revolutionary struggle and a belief that art was political, they began to work toward a national popular art movement for their beloved Mexico. In this, they were eventually joined and supported by many, including the third founder of the modern Mexican mural tradition and Mexican Renaissance, the great José Clemente Orozco, and the then Mexican president, Álvaro Obregón. Thus, Rivera returned home to start work.

Rivera’s first products of this new mural movement appeared on the walls of the National Preparatory School (University of Mexico) in 1922 and thereafter in the new ministry of education building in Mexico City. Mexico and its progress were almost always his subjects. In this work, the Mexican muralists gradually recovered and fused the frescoing techniques of ancient Mexico (Orozco) and the Italian Renaissance (Rivera). In 1926-1927, Rivera completed his first masterpiece, a fresco cycle in the National Agricultural School in Chapingo.

Like Picasso, Orozco, Siqueiros, and numerous other artists during the interwar period, Rivera was a communist, at least spiritually and emotionally if not doctrinally. He was not, however, a Stalinist. While he went to Moscow in 1927-1928 and seems to have been impressed by what he saw, his disappointment with the Soviet Union grew thereafter. In 1936, Rivera interceded with President Lázaro Cárdenas to permit the communist dissident Leon Trotsky to come to Mexico to end his wanderings. After 1928, Rivera returned to the Soviet Union only once more, in 1956, shortly before his death, for an operation.

On his return from Moscow, Rivera briefly served as the director of the San Carlos Academy in 1929. A year later, he married Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who also on occasion served him as a model. In 1932, Rivera completed a second masterpiece, a mural depicting the industrial progress of the United States, in the patio of the Institute of Fine Arts in Detroit. Thereafter, numerous commissions in the United States followed. The most controversial of these was in the lobby of the RCA Building in were chosen in 1933. Before it was completed, it had to be obliterated because it contained a portrayal of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Rivera reexecuted the controversial mural a year later as part of a series of masterpieces in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. Other important works by Rivera include The Bandit Augustin Lorenzo , done in the lobby of the Hotel Reforma in 1938 and Vision of Alameda Central in 1948 in the Del Prado Hotel, both in Mexico City.

Near the end of his life, Rivera led a movement to ban all nuclear testing, and he became a Roman Catholic. He died on November 25, 1957, in Mexico City, survived by his then wife, Emma Hurtado, and two daughters from a previous marriage to a former model, Lupe Marin. His death brought to a close a major era in Mexican cultural history.

Significance

Already early in his life under the influence of his native Mexico and its rich artistic heritage, and, more important, of Europe, Diego Rivera became a major painter. He was a significant cubist and a Fauvist. Under the influence of revolutionary events in Mexico and Europe and as a direct result of his collaboration with Orozco and Siqueiros, however, he changed the face of modern art.

With his work, Rivera helped to create the modern mural movement and also put art into the political arena on the side of the popular struggle for freedom and equality. Although he was foremost a Mexican nationalist, a Mexican national artist, and a founder of the Mexican Renaissance and had a profound influence on younger Mexican artists such as Siqueiros, the painter-architect Juan O’Gorman, and many others, this influence reached far beyond Mexico back to Europe and into the United States, to the New DealWorks Progress Administration of the 1930’s, for example. Rivera was a true founder of the people’s art movement.

Bibliography

Carrillo Azpéitia, Rafael. Mural Painting of Mexico: The Pre-Hispanic Epoch, the Viceroyalty, and the Great Artists of Our Century. Mexico City: Panorama Editorial, 1981. A good, brief, and popular study from Mexico, containing a chapter on Rivera. Straightforward treatment.

Edwards, Emily. Painted Walls of Mexico: From Prehistoric Times Until Today. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Almost half of this standard volume is on Rivera and the other modern Mexican muralists. Profusely illustrated.

Fernandez, Justino. A Guide to Mexican Art: From Its Beginnings to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Puts Rivera and his work in a broad perspective and provides a good analysis of the work.

Lee, Anthony W. Painting and the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Describes the murals that Rivera created in San Francisco in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Rivera was a major influence on local leftist artists, who created murals in the Coit Tower and other San Francisco locations, and these works also are examined.

Marnham, Patrick. Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera. New York: Knopf, 1998. The first biography of Rivera published since 1963, when Bertram Wolfe’s book appeared, see below. Marnham provides a comprehensive, well-researched biography of the larger-than-life Rivera.

Reed, Alma. The Mexican Muralists. New York: Crown, 1960. A good general work with a chapter on Rivera by the biographer of Orozco. Profusely illustrated.

Rivera, Diego. My Art, My Life: An Autobiography. New York: Citadel Press, 1960. An excellent partial autobiography of a complex artist. It is essential to a full understanding of Rivera.

Rodriguez, Antonio. A History of Mexican Mural Painting. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969. Another and more important standard work with five chapters on Rivera and his art. Profusely illustrated.

Smith, Bradley. Mexico: A History in Art. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. A standard with a significant chapter on Rivera and the other modern muralists. Profusely illustrated.

Wolfe, Bertram. The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein & Day, 1963. Still probably the best biography of Rivera, certainly the best in English. Sympathetic, understanding, and understandable.