Proletarian Unity © Estate of Diego Rivera.

biography

"Diego Rivera is the great hero-figure
in the history of 20th-century Latin
American culture." - Paul Page

Gallery | Prints | Smartphones Website
Diego Rivera: A Retrospective Book | Diego Rivera signed items, exhibition posters, signed prints @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items)

17.01.13: his life

The political situation in Mexico during the 1920s was favourable to the development of anational art. In the public eye, the primary role in the development ofthis new art was played by Diego Rivera (1886-1957), one of the greathero-figures in the history of twentieth-century Latin Americanculture. Rivera, born in the mining town of Guanajuato, was the sonof a school-teacher. At the time of his birth, Mexico was ruled by Porfirio Diaz, an efficient dictator acting in the interests of theMexican upper class. His policies included the 'scientific' use of land,brought together to form large-scale haciendas, and the encouragement of foreign investment.

Rivera's art education was thorough, and thoroughly conventional. His family had moved to Mexico City in 1892, and he studiedat the official Academia de San Carlos (established in 1781) for sevenyears. In 1906 he was awarded a government travelling scholarship,and went first to Spain, then to Paris, arriving there in 1908. Hegradually absorbed the Parisian avant-garde styles of the day, movingfrom Neo-Impressionism to Cubism. During this time he paid one visit to Mexico, in 1910, just before the outbreak of the savagerevolution which lasted for the next decade and devastated thecountry.

Diego Rivera signed items, exhibition posters, signed prints @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items)

By 1918 Rivera, still working in Paris, was well known in avant-garde circles. In common with a number of leading artists of the time(they included, for a brief period, Picasso) he had abandoned Cubismand was working in a consciously 'classical' style inspired by Cezanne.In 1920 he made a crucial trip to Italy, studying Giotto, Uccello, Pierodella Francesca, Mantegna and Michelangelo. This trip was undertaken at the urging of Alberto J. Pani, the Mexican ambassador toFrance. Through Pani Rivera was in touch with Jose Vasconcelos,then rector of the University of Mexico. Both men encouraged Rivera to come home and devote his artistic skills to his country. In1920, when Vasconcelos became Minister of Education in the newgovernment of Alvaro Obregon, which finally put an end to the civilwars, Rivera decided the moment had come.

Diego Rivera signed items, exhibition posters, signed prints @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items)
print
Diego Rivera - Self Portrait

On his return to Mexico in 1921, Rivera was immediately drawninto the government mural programme planned by Vasconcelos butenvisioned before the revolution by Dr Atl and others. His first murals, in the Anfiteatro Bolivar of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, were not as advanced as the work he had done during his Cubistperiod in Paris. The style was a version of what would later come to berecognized as Art Deco. Rivera's political ideas were at this pointmore radical than his artistic ones. In 1922 he was the leading figure mthe formation of a new Union of Technical Workers, Painters andSculptors whose manifesto borrowed the language of Russianrevolutionary Constructivists, proclaiming a collective repudiationof'so-called easel-painting and all the art of ultra-intellectual circles'in favour of art works which would be accessible, physically andintellectually, to the mass public.

Looking for an idiom in which to make good this promise, Rivera turned to the flora and fauna of Mexico itself (which he tended to seethrough the eyes of Gauguin and Le Douanier Rousseau), and to Pre-Columbian art. The first murals in his fully mature style, a fusion ofmany elements taken from the Cubists, from Gauguin, from Rousseau, from Pre-Columbian narrative reliefs and perhaps most ofall from fifteenth-century Italian fresco painting, were done for theeast patio of the Secretaria de Educacion Publica in Mexico City in1923. This gigantic series of compositions (117 fresco panels coveringalmost 1600 square metres of wall) was not finished until just overfour years later. Rivera worked on them for up to eighteen hours aday. This mental and physical effort rightly established him as theleader of the new Mexican school, which the Obregon regimeregarded as one of the chief means of creating a new identity for thecountry after so many years of turmoil.

Diego Rivera signed items, exhibition posters, signed prints @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items)

There were, however, ironic aspects to Rivera's position. One wasthat, while his political beliefs implied opposition to the UnitedStates, his reputation was greatly helped by North Americanenthusiasm and patronage. His finest series of murals, in the loggia of the Palacio de Cortes in Cuernavaca, was commissioned in 1929 bythe American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight D. Morrow. Rivera was to paint important murals in the United States itself- for the SanFrancisco Stock Exchange, for the Detroit Institute of Arcs and for theRockefeller Center in New York. The last of these was destroyedwhen only half completed, after Rivera refused to remove a likenessof Lenin. The resultant scandal raised his public profile even higher.His work had tremendous impact on the American painters of the time, most of all upon the Regionalists, such as Thomas Hart Benton(1889-1975), who certainly did not share Rivera's political views.

Rivera's own political career, conducted very much in public, wasstormy and sometimes had deleterious effects on his art. He regardedhimself as a natural Communist but was frequently on bad terms withboth the Mexican Communist Party and with the official Communists in the Soviet Union. He resigned from the party in 1925, was re-admitted in 1926, and then in the following year paid an official visit to Russia, from which he was ignomimously expelled at the request ofthe Soviet government. By 1932^ he was seriously at odds withorthodox Communism and was denounced as a 'renegade', thesituation worsened when, in 1937. he was instrumental in getting President Uzaro Cardenas to grant asylum to the exiled LeonTrotsky who for a while lived in Mexico as Rivera's guest. The twomen quarrelled before Trotsky's assassination in 1940, but Rivera, whonow desperately wanted to be re-admitted to the party, had greatdifficulty in obtaining forgiveness. This was granted only in 1954, after many genuflections to the official Communist line, and a number of artistic compromises.

Diego Rivera signed items, exhibition posters, signed prints @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items)

print
Diego Rivera - Friday of Sorrows

Rivera's stormy relationship with Communism is relevant to hisrelationship with the idea of Modernism. For much of his career hewas trying to make art which would achieve objectives closely relatedto those of Soviet Socialist Realism. Rivera was a greater artist thanany Stalin had at his disposal, and his work was less closely controlledthan that of his Russian contemporaries. To say this, however, doesnot really address the main issue - that of Rivera's own aims. Thesewere to speak directly to the Mexican people, and in order to achievethem he had to abandon much that was typical of modern art, at leastin formal terms, such as fragmentation of imagery and the disguise ofappearances. Above all, he had to subject himself to the demands ofnarrative - something which the early Modernists had been mostconcerned to reject.

Diego Rivera signed items, exhibition posters, signed prints @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items)

Rivera found ingenious ways of telling stonestaking hints from Mexican popular engravers, such as Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), whom the Muralists turned into a revered ancestor figure, andalso from the illustrated newspapers of the time, with their ingenious interlocking lay-outs. These borrowings cannot disguise the fact that his aims remained fundamentallv opposed to basic Modernist concepts. It is easier to relate what he did in Mexico to the work of Piero della Francesca and Masaccio rather than to that of Picasso andMatisse. There is even a resemblance to Annibale Carracci, whose narrative systems for the mythologies in the Farnese Gallery in Romebear a certain correspondence to Rivera's solutions.

Diego Rivera signed items, exhibition posters, signed prints @ ebay.com (direct link to signed items)

Recommended Reading: Diego Rivera, The Complete Murals