Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera was born on December 8, 1886, in Guanajuato, a silver-mining city in central Mexico, one of twin boys; his brother Carlos died in infancy ^[1]. His father worked as a teacher and later as a health inspector, and the family moved to Mexico City when Diego was still a child. By his own account he drew compulsively from the age of three, covering walls and furniture until his parents gave him a room lined with canvas and chalkboards to spare the rest of the house ^[2].

At ten he entered evening classes at the Academia de San Carlos, Mexico's national academy of fine arts, and soon enrolled full time. There he studied under academic painters including Santiago Rebull and the landscape master José María Velasco, whose precise treatment of the Valley of Mexico left a visible mark on Rivera's early canvases ^[1]. He also came to know the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, whose satirical broadsheets of skeletons and street life offered a model of popular art aimed at ordinary Mexicans rather than salons ^[3].

Rivera's student work won him notice and, in 1907, a travel grant funded by the governor of Veracruz. At twenty he sailed for Spain, beginning a European apprenticeship that would last, with one interruption, for fourteen years ^[2].

Spain came first. Rivera studied in Madrid in the studio of Eduardo Chicharro and copied old masters at the Prado, absorbing El Greco, Goya, and Velázquez ^[1]. By 1909 he had moved to Paris, then the center of the international avant-garde, and settled in Montparnasse among a circle of emigre painters that included Amedeo Modigliani and Piet Mondrian ^[2].

Between roughly 1913 and 1917 Rivera worked as a committed Cubist, producing well over a hundred paintings in the idiom. Canvases such as Zapatista Landscape (The Guerrilla) of 1915 combined the fractured planes of Parisian Cubism with Mexican subject matter: a rifle, a serape, a sombrero set against the volcanoes of the Valley of Mexico ^[4]. Critics have often read that painting as an early sign of the national themes that would dominate his mature work.

Rivera eventually broke with Cubism after quarrels within the movement and a renewed interest in Cézanne and in classical figure drawing. A trip to Italy in 1920 and 1921 proved decisive: he spent months studying Giotto, Uccello, and the fresco cycles of the early Renaissance, filling notebooks with sketches of wall paintings designed to teach and persuade a broad public ^[1]. He returned to Mexico in 1921 convinced that easel painting was a private luxury and that the future of art lay on public walls ^[3].

Rivera came home to a country remaking itself after the Mexican Revolution. José Vasconcelos, the new minister of public education, was commissioning artists to paint government buildings as part of a national literacy and culture campaign, and Rivera became the program's most prolific figure ^[3]. His first mural, Creation, painted in encaustic at the National Preparatory School in 1922 and 1923, still leaned on European allegory, but he quickly developed a plainer, more legible style rooted in Mexican faces, crafts, and labor.

From 1923 to 1928 he painted more than one hundred fresco panels at the Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City, a vast cycle depicting miners, weavers, farmers, festivals, and revolutionary songs ^[1]. During the same period he began frescoes at the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo, where the chapel cycle on the theme of the liberated earth is often counted among his finest achievements ^[4]. In 1922 he helped found the revolutionary painters' union with Siqueiros and others, and he joined the Mexican Communist Party, a commitment that shaped both his subject matter and his public battles for the rest of his life ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Diego Rivera in the late 1920s would have received a ready answer in Mexico: he was the most visible artist of the revolution, a huge man famous for his appetite, his storytelling, and his scaffolds. In 1929 he began work at the National Palace in Mexico City on an epic staircase mural of Mexican history from the pre-Hispanic world through conquest, independence, and revolution, a project he expanded in stages into the 1950s ^[1].

Rivera's fame crossed the border despite his politics. In 1930 he traveled to California, where he painted murals at the San Francisco Stock Exchange Luncheon Club and the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute ^[5]. In 1931 the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a retrospective, only the second one-artist show in the museum's history after Henri Matisse, and it broke the museum's attendance records ^[5].

His largest American project came in Detroit. Commissioned by Edsel Ford and the Detroit Institute of Arts, Rivera spent 1932 and 1933 painting Detroit Industry, twenty-seven fresco panels celebrating the workers and machinery of the Ford River Rouge plant. Rivera considered the cycle his most successful work, and in 2014 the murals were designated a National Historic Landmark ^[6].

New York ended differently. In 1933 Rivera began Man at the Crossroads in the lobby of Rockefeller Center, but when he included a portrait of Lenin and refused to remove it, the Rockefellers halted the work, paid him off, and had the unfinished fresco destroyed in February 1934 ^[2]. The episode became one of the most famous censorship disputes in American art. Rivera answered by repainting the composition in Mexico City's Palace of Fine Arts under the title Man, Controller of the Universe, adding pointed portraits of his patrons' world ^[4]. Any account of Diego Rivera achievements has to reckon with this pattern: enormous public commissions, and equally public collisions over what those walls were allowed to say.

Rivera's private life was as turbulent as his public one. In Paris he lived for a decade with the Russian painter Angelina Beloff, with whom he had a son, Diego, who died in infancy; he also had a daughter, Marika, with the painter Marevna Vorobieva-Stebelska ^[2]. Back in Mexico he married Guadalupe Marín in 1922, and the couple had two daughters, Lupe and Ruth, before divorcing.

In 1929 he married Frida Kahlo, a painter twenty years his junior who had first approached him for an opinion on her work. Their marriage became one of the most scrutinized partnerships in modern art: politically allied, mutually admiring, and repeatedly damaged by infidelities on both sides, including Rivera's affair with Kahlo's sister Cristina ^[7]. They divorced in 1939 and remarried in San Francisco a year later, staying together until Kahlo's death in July 1954.

Politics ran through the household. Rivera was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929, and in 1937 he and Kahlo helped persuade the Mexican government to grant asylum to the exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who lived for a time in Kahlo's family home in Coyoacán ^[2]. Rivera later broke with Trotsky and spent years petitioning for readmission to the party, which finally accepted him back in 1954. In 1955 he married his art dealer, Emma Hurtado, his fourth wife ^[1].

The 1940s and 1950s brought steady work and a turn toward summing up. In 1947 and 1948 Rivera painted Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central for the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City, a fifteen-meter panorama in which figures from four centuries of Mexican history stroll through the capital's oldest park, with a child Diego holding hands with a skeletal Catrina borrowed from Posada ^[4]. The mural caused an immediate scandal over an inscribed phrase declaring that God does not exist, which Rivera eventually agreed to paint over in 1956.

During these decades he also pursued a personal monument. Beginning in 1942 he designed and built Anahuacalli, a pyramid-like museum of volcanic stone in southern Mexico City, to house his collection of nearly fifty thousand pre-Hispanic objects; he donated the building and collection to the Mexican people ^[8]. The project reflected a lifelong conviction that ancient Mexican art belonged beside anything produced in Europe.

His health declined after Kahlo's death in 1954. Rivera was treated for cancer, traveled to the Soviet Union for medical care in 1955 and 1956, and suffered from heart trouble on his return. He died of heart failure in his San Ángel studio in Mexico City on November 25, 1957, two weeks before his seventy-first birthday ^[1]. Against his stated wish to have his ashes mingled with Kahlo's, he was buried in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons in the capital's Dolores cemetery ^[2].

Any Diego Rivera biography ends where his work remains: on the walls. The National Palace stairway, the Education Ministry courtyards, the Chapingo chapel, and Detroit Industry are still in place and still visited by large publics, which was precisely the point of painting them there ^[6]. Rivera argued that art belonged to workers and farmers rather than collectors, and the mural form he perfected carried Mexican history into daily civic life.

His influence traveled widely. The New Deal mural programs in the United States drew on the Mexican example, and artists from the WPA generation through the Chicano mural movements of the 1960s and 1970s cited Rivera directly ^[5]. In 1986, on the centenary of his birth, the Detroit Institute of Arts and Mexican institutions mounted major retrospectives, and Mexico opened the Museo Mural Diego Rivera to preserve the relocated Alameda fresco after the 1985 earthquake damaged the Hotel del Prado ^[4].

Among basic Diego Rivera facts, one is easy to miss: he was a scholar as much as a showman. His collecting, his writing on pre-Hispanic art, and his insistence on fresco technique revived a craft that had nearly vanished. The Anahuacalli museum and the Frida Kahlo Museum, both administered through a trust he established, keep his double legacy public, exactly as he intended ^[8].