RIVERA, DIEGO

The artist Diego Rivera (December 13, 1886– November 24, 1957) is best known for the murals he completed in Mexico and in the United States during the 1920s and early 1930s. Rivera, along with the Mexican artists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, was immensely popular among North American intellectuals and artists during the 1930s. His murals in large part provided the inspiration for the public art projects sponsored by New Deal agencies during the 1930s. Rivera served as a model of a socially committed artist whose work reflected the struggles of everyday people.

Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, and raised in Mexico City, Rivera started drawing at an early age. At age ten, he enrolled in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts, where he completed his studies in 1905. Upon graduation, Rivera spent several years in Spain and in Paris, where he encountered many of the modern masters, including Pablo Picasso. Influenced by Picasso, Rivera painted hundreds of cubist works between 1913 and 1917. Returning to Mexico in 1921, Rivera began work on several government-commissioned murals, including one at the Ministry of Education that encompassed three floors and spanned 17,000 square feet. Having been exposed to Marxism while in Europe, Rivera belonged to the Mexican Communist Party from 1922 to 1929, when he was expelled for his relationship with the Mexican government.

In 1930, Rivera traveled to the United States, where he prepared for major exhibitions of his work in San Francisco and in New York City. Rivera also painted murals at the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the California School of Fine Arts, and at the Detroit Institute of Arts. In the Detroit mural, Rivera explored the power of modern industrial technology and capitalism. In 1933, Rivera received a commission to paint a mural in the new Rockefeller Center in New York City. He was dismissed from the project when he insisted upon including the figure of Vladimir Lenin in the mural. He completed one more mural at the New Workers School before returning to Mexico in December 1933.

Rivera completed only one mural during the rest of the 1930s; instead, he focused on smaller works, such as landscapes. He was instrumental in arranging with the Mexican government Leon Trotsky's asylum. In 1937, Trotsky and his wife arrived in Mexico and stayed as guests of Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo in Kahlo's family home in Coyoacán. For political and personal reasons, Trotsky and Rivera ended their affiliation in 1939. In 1940, Rivera returned to San Francisco to work in the Art-in-Action pavilion at the Golden Gate International Exposition, where visitors watched him as he painted the mural "Pan American Unity."

RIVERA, DIEGO

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