Diego Rivera

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Career in Mexico

In 1920, urged by Alberto J. Pani, the Mexican ambassador to France, Rivera left France and traveled through Italy studying its art, including Renaissance frescoes. After José Vasconcelos became Minister of Education, Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 to become involved in the government sponsored Mexican mural program planned by Vasconcelos. (See also Mexican muralism.) The program included such Mexican artists as José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, and the French artist Jean Charlot. In January 1922, he painted–experimentally in encaustic–his first significant mural Creation in the Bolívar Auditorium of the National Preparatory School in Mexico City while guarding himself with a pistol against right-wing students.

In the autumn of 1922, Rivera participated in the founding of the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, and later that year he joined the Mexican Communist Party (including its Central Committee). His murals, subsequently painted only in fresco, are about Mexican society and reflected the country's 1910 Revolution. Rivera developed his own native style based on large, simplified figures and bold colors with an Aztec influence clearly present in murals at the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City begun in September 1922, intended to consist of 124 frescoes, and finished in 1928.

Rivera's art work, in a fashion similar to the steles of the Maya, tells stories. The mural En el Arsenal (In the Arsenal) shows on the right-hand side Tina Modotti holding an ammunition belt and facing Julio Antonio Mella, in a light hat, and Vittorio Vidali behind in a black hat. However, the En el Arsenal detail shown does not include the right-hand side described nor any of the three individuals mentioned; instead it shows the left-hand side with Frida Kahlo handing out munitions. Leon Trotsky lived with Rivera and Kahlo for several months while exiled in Mexico. Some of Rivera's most famous murals are featured at the National School of Agriculture (Chapingo Autonomous University of Agriculture) at Chapingo near Texcoco (1925–1927), in the Cortés Palace in Cuernavaca (1929–30), and the National Palace in Mexico City (1929–30, 1935).

Rivera painted murals in the main hall and corridor at the Chapingo Autonomous University of Agriculture (UACh). He also painted a fresco mural titled Tierra Fecundada (Fertile Land in English) in the university's chapel between 1923 and 1927. Fertile Land depicts the revolutionary struggles of Mexico's peasant (farmers) and working classes (industry) in part through the depiction of hammer and sickle joined by a star in the soffit of the chapel. In the mural, a "propagandist" points to another hammer and sickle. The mural features a woman with an ear of corn in each hand, which art critic Antonio Rodriguez describes as evocative of the Aztec goddess of maize in his book Canto a la Tierra: Los murales de Diego Rivera en la Capilla de Chapingo.

The corpses of revolutionary heroes Emiliano Zapata and Otilio Montaño are shown in graves, their bodies fertilizing the maize field above. A sunflower in the center of the scene "glorifies those who died for an ideal and are reborn, transfigured, into the fertile cornfield of the nation", writes Rodrigues. The mural also depicts Rivera's wife Guadalupe Marin as a fertile nude goddess and their daughter Guadalupe Rivera y Marín as a cherub. The mural was slightly damaged in an earthquake, but has since been repaired and touched up, remaining in pristine form.

Later years

In the autumn of 1927, Rivera went to Moscow, Soviet Union, having accepted a government invitation to take part in the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution. The following year, while still in the Soviet Union, he met American Alfred H. Barr Jr., who would soon become Rivera's friend and patron. Barr was the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Although commissioned to paint a mural for the Red Army Club in Moscow, in 1928 Rivera was ordered by authorities to leave the country because, he suspected, of "resentment on the part of certain Soviet artists". He returned to Mexico. In 1929, after the assassination of president-elect Álvaro Obregón the previous year, the government suppressed the Mexican Communist Party. That year Rivera was expelled from the party because of his suspected Trotskyite sympathies. In addition, observers noted that his 1928 mural In the Arsenal includes the figures of communists Tina Modotti, Cuban Julio Antonio Mella, and Italian Vittorio Vidali. After Mella was murdered in January 1929, allegedly by Stalinist assassin Vidali, Rivera was accused of having had advance knowledge of a planned attack.

After divorcing his second wife, Guadalupe (Lupe) Marín, Rivera married the much younger Frida Kahlo in August 1929. They had met when she was a student, and she was 22 years old when they married; Rivera was 42. Also in 1929, American journalist Ernestine Evans's book The Frescoes of Diego Rivera, was published in New York City; it was the first English-language book on the artist. In December, Rivera accepted a commission from the American ambassador to Mexico to paint murals in the Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca, where the US had a consulate.

In September 1930, Rivera accepted a commission by architect Timothy L. Pflueger for two works related to his design projects in San Francisco. Rivera and Kahlo went to the city in November. Rivera painted a mural for the City Club of the San Francisco Stock Exchange for US$2,500. He also completed a fresco for the California School of Fine Art, a work that was later relocated to what is now the Diego Rivera Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute. During that period, Rivera and Kahlo worked and lived at the studio of Ralph Stackpole, who had recommended Rivera to Pflueger. Rivera met Helen Wills, a notable American tennis player, who modeled for his City Club mural.

In November 1931, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City mounted a retrospective exhibition of Rivera's work; Kahlo attended with him. Between 1932 and 1933, Rivera completed a major commission: twenty-seven fresco panels, entitled Detroit Industry, on the walls of an inner court at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Part of the cost was paid by Edsel Ford, scion of the entrepreneur.

During the McCarthyism of the 1950s, a large sign was placed in the courtyard defending the artistic merit of the murals while attacking his politics as "detestable".

His mural Man at the Crossroads, originally a three-paneled work, begun as a commission for John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1933 for the Rockefeller Center in New York City, was later destroyed. Because it included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and Marxist pro-worker content, Rockefeller's son, the press, and some of the public protested, but the decision to destroy it was made by the management company. Anti-Communism ran high in some American circles, although many others in this period of the Great Depression had been drawn to the movement as offering hope to labor.

When Rivera refused to remove Lenin from the painting, he was ordered to leave the US. One of Rivera's assistants managed to take a few photographs of the work so Diego was able to later recreate it. American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote six "irony-laden" poems about the mural. The New Yorker magazine published E. B. White's light poem, "I paint what I see: A ballad of artistic integrity", also in response to the controversy with number of sponsors taking offense to it. As a result of the negative publicity, officials in Chicago cancelled their commission for Rivera to paint a mural for the Chicago World's Fair. Rivera released a press statement, saying that he would use the remaining money from his commission at Rockefeller Center to repaint the same mural, over and over, wherever he was asked, until the money ran out. He had been paid in full although the mural was reportedly destroyed. There have been rumors that the mural was covered over rather than removed and destroyed, but this has not been confirmed. In December 1933, Rivera returned to Mexico. He repainted Man at the Crossroads in 1934 in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, calling this version Man, Controller of the Universe.

On June 5, 1940, invited again by Pflueger, Rivera returned for the last time to the United States to paint a ten-panel mural for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. His work, Pan American Unity, was completed on November 29, 1940. Rivera painted in front of attendees at the Exposition, which had already opened. He received US$1,000 per month and US$1,000 for travel expenses. The mural includes representations of two of Pflueger's architectural works, and portraits of Kahlo, woodcarver Dudley C. Carter, and actress Paulette Goddard. She is shown holding Rivera's hand as they plant a white tree together. Rivera's assistants on the mural included Thelma Johnson Streat, a pioneer African-American artist, dancer, and textile designer. The mural and its archives are now held by City College of San Francisco.

In 1946-47, Rivera painted A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park, a fresco that featured a fully elaborated figure of La Calavera Catrina. This character, which was created by José Guadalupe Posada, originally consisted of a print depicting the head and shoulders of a skeletal woman in a big hat. Rivera endowed his Catrina figure with indigenous features and thus transformed her into a nationalist icon. Catrina is the most common image associated with the Day of the Dead.

Selected exhibitions

1986: Diego Rivera: A Retrospective, organized by the Centro Nacional de Exposiciones, Founders Society Detroit Institute of Arts, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Secretaría de Educación Pública and Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores de México. It was exhibited at Detroit Institute of Arts, (February 10–April 27, 1986); Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA (June 2–August 10, 1986); Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (September 29, 1986 – January 4, 1987); Stäatliche Kunsthalle, Berlin (July 23–September 15, 1987); Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, London (October 29, 1987 – January 10, 1988). The catalog was edited by Cynthia Newman Helms ISBN 978-0-895-58118-1

2004: The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera, co-organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (exhibited April 4–July 25, 2004) and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City (exhibited September 22, 2004 – January 16, 2005) ASIN B005HFK0NA

2009: Diego Rivera: The Cubist Portraits, 1913–1917, The Meadows Museum, Dallas, Texas, June 21–September 20, 2009

2011: Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, November 13, 2011 – May 14, 2012; Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art audio; catalog by Leah Dickerman and Anna Indych-López, ISBN 978-0-870-70817-6

2013: Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics, and Painting, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, February 14 – May 12, 2013

2013: Diego Rivera in San Antonio, San Antonio Museum of Art, December 15, 2013 – December 1, 2014

2015: Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, March 15–July 12, 2015

2015: Mexico in New Orleans: A Tale of Two Americas, LSU Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, May 5–September 6, 2015

2016: Picasso and Rivera: Conversations Across Time, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) with Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City; exhibited LACMA (December 4, 2016 – May 7, 2017) and Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (June 14–September 17, 2017). Catalog edited by Michael Govan and Diana Magaloni ISBN 978-3-791-35555-9

2019–2022: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection exhibited at the following:

July 6 – September 11, 2022 Philbrook Museum of Art

February 19, 2022 – June 5, 2022 Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

October 23, 2021 – February 6, 2022 Norton Museum of Art

October 25, 2020 – January 25, 2021 Denver Art Museum

February 13, 2020 – September 7, 2020 Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec

October 12, 2019 – February 2, 2020 North Carolina Museum of Art

May 24 – September 2, 2019 Frist Art Museum

2020: Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945, Whitney Museum of American Art, February 17, 2020 – January 31, 2021

2021: In Dialogue: Diego Rivera, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, April 9, 2021 – February 17, 2022

2022: Diego Rivera's America, co-organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (exhibited July 16, 2022 – January 3, 2023) and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas (exhibited March 11–July 31, 2023); catalog by James Oles ISBN 978-0-520-34440-2

2024: Pan American Unity: A Mural by Diego Rivera, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June 28, 2021 – January 21, 2024

2025: Rivera's Paris, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, Arkansas, February 7 – May 18, 2025

2026: Frida and Diego: The Last Dream, Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 18 – September 12, 2026

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera

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