Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

Mexican painter, draughtsman, and muralist Diego Rivera was born December 8, 1886 in Guanajuato, Mexico. He is known as one of the “The Big Three” (Los Tres Grandes), along with David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, who were in favor of a single nationalist language that, in theory at least, would accept no influences from abroad. He gained international recognition for his vast public mural programs, addressing themes of socialism and the indigenous heritage of Mexico. 

Rivera showed artistic talent from an early age; he began drawing at age two, and his family moved to Mexico City in 1892 where his artistic training continued. He began art courses at age nine, enrolled at the Academia de San Carlos (San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts) at age eleven, and earned a scholarship at age fifteen and a government pension by age eighteen. Rivera had his first exhibition in 1907, from which he was awarded a travel grant to Europe, and he went to Spain in 1907 and Paris in 1909. He returned to Mexico in 1910 for an exhibition of his work at the Academia as part of the Mexican Centennial of Independence celebrations, but returned to Paris the following year after the Mexican Revolution began. He remained in Paris until 1919, where he was exposed to the avant-garde cubism that influenced his later career. 

Although Rivera was familiar with the European avant-garde first-hand, he did not aspire to belong to it. Rather he developed his own figurative language promoting revolutionary ideals and the country’s ancient history. José Vasconcelos, the first Secretary of Public Education, developed a cultural program that brought to life the muralist movement in which Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros participated. The initiative consolidated a generation of artists who translated the representation of the working class (campesinos) and their traditions into a new public language. They aimed to extol the triumph of the Revolution by means of national and socialist perspectives, which some present-day historians deem to have fascist leanings. Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 and painted a large number of murals throughout Mexico—at the Secretariat of Public Education between 1923 and 1928, the administration building and chapel of the Escuela Nacional de Agricultura (now the Universidad Autónoma) at Chapingo in 1927, the main stairway of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City in 1929, and the palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca in 1929 and 1930. In 1929, Rivera married fellow artist Frida Kahlo. 

Between 1930 and 1934, Rivera painted five murals in the United States. The most important exhibition by Rivera in the US was in 1931 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, only the second monographic show in the museum’s history. Also, Rivera produced murals for influential patrons in the country; the first one was for the Pacific Stock Exchange Luncheon Club in California in 1930. He later created the series of murals on display today at the Detroit Institute of Arts. His most famous fresco in the United States—controversial because of his inclusion of socialist leader Vladimir Lenin—was created for John D. Rockefeller. This mural was destroyed, however, and Rivera reused the composition in a mural for the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City a year later. In 1935 he completed his murals on the stairs of the Palacio Nacional and the following year he painted a series of four panels for the Hotel Reforma in Mexico City. In 1940 he painted a huge mural for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. From 1937 to 1942, Rivera devoted himself mostly to easel painting and portraiture. He hosted the exiled Leon Trotsky at his and Frida Kahlo's home in Coyoacán, the Casa Azul (Blue House), from 1937 to 1939. 

In his last years, Rivera created a number of murals in Mexico City for public and private buildings, notably those at the Palacio Nacional (1945–51), the Alameda Park (1947–8), and the Hotel del Prado. He designed his last mural in 1953 for the façade of the Teatro de los Insurgentes, Mexico City. After Frida Kahlo's death in 1954, he married his dealer, Emma Hurtado, in 1955. Rivera created an iconographic language with which he forged a popular, monumental image of indigenous and mestizo Mexicans whose future was headed toward progress and greatness. At the time, these images encouraged a consciousness of race and national pride, but originated a range of social and cultural stereotypes that still persists today. Rivera died on November 24, 1957 in Mexico City.

ASSOCIATED CONTENT CHUNKS 

VIDEO ASSETS  

set operator as OR

apply to objects where constituent_id equals 1844

apply to constituents where id equals 1844