Diego Rivera · Lablypedia

Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in, among other places, Mexico City, Chapingo, and Cuernavaca in Mexico, and San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City in the United States. In 1931, a retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, shortly before Rivera's commencement of his 27-mural series known as Detroit Industry Murals the next year.

Rivera had four wives and numerous children, including at least one illegitimate daughter. His first child and only son died at the age of two. His third wife was fellow Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, with whom he had a volatile relationship that continued until her death. His previous two marriages, ending in divorce, were respectively to a fellow artist and a novelist, and his final marriage was to his agent.

Due to his importance in the country's art history, the government of Mexico declared Rivera's works as monumentos históricos. Rivera held the record for highest price at auction for a work by a Latin American artist until November 2021, with his 1931 painting The Rivals. The painting was part of the record-setting collection of Peggy Rockefeller and David Rockefeller, and sold for $9.76 million USD at a 2018 Christie's auction.

Personal life

Rivera was born on December 8, 1886, in Guanajuato, Mexico, to María del Pilar Barrientos and Diego Rivera Acosta, a well-to-do couple. His twin brother Carlos died at the age of two.

His mother María del Pilar Barrientos was said to have converso ancestry (Spanish ancestors who were forced to convert from Judaism to Catholicism in the 15th and 16th centuries). Rivera wrote in 1935: "My Jewishness is the dominant element in my life", despite never being raised practicing any Jewish faith, Rivera felt that his Jewish ancestry informed his art and gave him "sympathy with the downtrodden masses". Diego was of Spanish, Amerindian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian, and Portuguese descent.

Rivera began drawing at the age of three, a year after his twin brother died. When he was caught drawing on the walls of the house, his parents installed chalkboards and canvas on the walls to encourage him.

Marriages and family

After moving to Paris, Rivera met Angelina Beloff, an artist from the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire. They married in 1911, and had a son, Diego (1916–1918), who died young. During that time, Rivera also had a relationship with painter Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska, who gave birth to a daughter named Marika Rivera in 1918 or 1919.

Rivera divorced Beloff and married Guadalupe Marín as his second wife in June 1922, after having returned to Mexico. They had two daughters, Ruth and Guadalupe.

He was still married when he met art student Frida Kahlo in Mexico City. They began a passionate affair and, after he divorced Marín, Rivera married Kahlo on August 21, 1929. He was 42 and she was 22. Their mutual infidelities and his violent temper resulted in divorce in 1939, but they remarried December 8, 1940, in San Francisco. A year after Kahlo's death, on July 29, 1955, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946. In his later years Rivera lived in the United States and Mexico. Rivera died on November 24, 1957, at the age of 70. He was buried at the Panteón de Dolores in Mexico City.

Personal beliefs

Rivera was an atheist. His mural Dreams of a Sunday in the Alameda depicted Ignacio Ramírez "El Nigromante" holding a sign that read, "God does not exist". This work caused a furor, but Rivera refused to remove the inscription. The painting was not shown for nine years – until Rivera agreed to remove the inscription. He said, "To affirm 'God does not exist', I do not have to hide behind Don Ignacio Ramírez; I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis."

Art education and circle

From the age of ten, Rivera studied art at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. He was sponsored to continue study in Europe by Teodoro A. Dehesa Méndez, the governor of the state of Veracruz. After arriving in Europe in 1907, Rivera first went to Madrid to study with Eduardo Chicharro.

From there he went to Paris, a destination for young European and American artists and writers, who settled in inexpensive flats in Montparnasse. His circle frequented La Ruche, where his Italian friend Amedeo Modigliani painted his portrait in 1914. His circle of close friends included Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaïm Soutine, Modigliani and his wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Léopold Zborowski, and Moise Kisling. Rivera's former lover Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) honored the circle in her painting Homage to Friends from Montparnasse (1962).

In those years, some prominent young painters were experimenting with an art form that would later be known as Cubism, a movement led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. From 1913 to 1917, Rivera enthusiastically embraced this new style. Around 1917, inspired by Paul Cézanne's paintings, Rivera shifted toward Post-Impressionism, using simple forms and large patches of vivid colors. His paintings began to attract attention, and he was able to display them at several exhibitions.

Rivera claimed in his autobiography that, while in Mexico in 1904, he engaged in cannibalism, pooling his money with others to "purchase cadavers from the city morgue" and particularly "relish[ing] women's brains in vinaigrette". This claim has been considered factually suspect or an elaborate lie. He wrote in his autobiography: "I believe that when man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has now, the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos."

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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. () 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.

Membership in AMORC

In 1926, Rivera became a member of AMORC, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, an occult organization founded by American occultist Harvey Spencer Lewis. In 1926, Rivera was among the founders of AMORC's Mexico City lodge, called Quetzalcoatl after the pre-Columbian deity. He painted an image of Quetzalcoatl for the local temple.

In 1954, Rivera tried to be readmitted into the Mexican Communist Party. He had been expelled in part because of his support of Trotsky, who had been exiled to Mexico and assassinated there in 1940. Rivera was required to justify his AMORC activities. At the time, the Mexican Communist Party excluded persons involved in Freemasonry, and regarded AMORC as suspiciously similar to Freemasonry. Rivera told his questioners that, by joining AMORC, he wanted to infiltrate a typical "Yankee" organization on behalf of Communism. However, he also claimed that AMORC was "essentially materialist, insofar as it only admits different states of energy and matter, and is based on ancient Egyptian occult knowledge from Amenhotep IV and Nefertiti".

Representation in other media

Diego Rivera has been portrayed in several films. He was played by Rubén Blades in Cradle Will Rock (1999), by Alfred Molina in Frida (2002), and (in a brief appearance) by José Montini in Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015).

Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Lacuna features Rivera, Kahlo, and Trotsky as major characters. An important scene of the Netflix television series Sense8 (season 1, episode 8: "Death Doesn't Let You Say Goodbye", broadcast in 2015) is played in the Anahuacalli Museum, called "Diego Rivera Museum" by the Lito character. He and his co-sensate, Nomi, discuss about Rivera sitting in front of what is supposed to be a sketch of Rivera's Man at the Crossroads mural for the Rockefeller Center, destroyed in 1933 by Rockefeller.

Autobiography

My Life, My Art: An Autobiography, by Diego Rivera, with Gladys March, was published posthumously in 1960. Beginning with a 1944 interview for a newspaper article, March "spent several months each year with Rivera, eventually filling 2,000 pages with his recollections and interpretations of his art and life", and compiled an autobiography, written in the first person.

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