Diego Rivera Was a Painter

Diego Rivera was a painter and a politician who possessed the capacity to stir controversy in both fields. Born in Guanajuato, Rivera studied briefly at the Academy of San Carlos and then went to Spain to study painting with the academy master, Chicharro. After fifteen years in Europe, most of which were spent in Paris, he returned to Mexico in 1921 when the military revolution was successfully terminated and became an important figure in the painters' syndicate, the mural movement and the general renaissance in Mexican art which was taking place at the time. He also achieved fame in the United States by taking his mural paintings to cities such as New York, Detroit and San Francisco. He began a mural in the Rockefeller Central in New York but it was destroyed because it included a portrait of Lenin but he painted an identical mural in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City (Werner 1283). In addition to his involvement in politics and his work as a painter, Rivera was also a respected amateur archaeologist, and built a museum in Pedregal to house his collection of pre-Hispanic sculpture (Stewart 29).

In recognition of Rivera as a "figure of enormous stature in Mexican art," the National Institute of Fine Arts presented in 1949 an exhibition celebrating "fifty years of his artistic work." On that occasion, Carlos Chavez, then general director of the Institute, said: "Diego Rivera is one of the greatest painters of all Mexican history, and one of the few authentically great of the present epoch throughout the world. This is the first major retrospective exhibition of his works to be shown in his own country. The Mexican public needs to see his work -- fifty years of it -- all together in order to know and appreciate his stature." Thesis: This paper investigates into what made Diego Rivera not only one of the most prominent Mexican painters of the twentieth century, but also a man whose life has been worthy of novels and movies alike. This paper strives to present a short biography of Rivera which will illuminate the most important moments in his formation as a painter, politician, and ultimately a man.

The real name of the artist known as Diego Rivera is said to have been Diego Maria de la Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta Rodriguez. Similarly to his name, his life was monumental, creative and unusual, and has been the subject of thousands of pages over the decades. Diego Rivera was born in the city of Guanajuato in 1886. His father was an educator who established rural schools, and his mother was also a teacher who later in life decided to go into obstetrics. When Diego was 7 years old, they all moved to Mexico City where he would study painting at the Academy of San Carlos.

Rivera's father deeply influenced his career. Realizing that his son needed help in his profession, Rivera senior, now a school inspector helped Diego win a scholarship to study abroad. He arrived in Spain in January 1907 where he would reside for approximately fifteen years. However, from Spain he was able to travel all over Europe. He visited France, Belgium, Holland and England. Rivera was in France in 1909 where he was introduced to the work of the Fauves and Cezanne but he would later declare that the artist who had made the biggest impression on his as a young man was in fact Henri Rousseau, "the only one of the moderns whose works stirred each and every fiber of my being" (Lucie-Smith 201). His career as a muralist began in 1921, shortly after his return to Mexico. However, in 1910 Rivera made a trip home where he held a successful exhibition. The wife of the President of Mexico, Porfirio Diaz, bought six of the forty paintings on display, and a number more were purchased by the Academy of Fine Arts. Rivera had also made many friends while living in Paris, among the Parisian avant garde, and had even shared a studio with Modigliani who painted "striking portraits of him." (Idem)

The volume of Rivera's work is truly impressive. Aside from a brief interruption which lasted for about eight years -- from 1935 to 1943 -- when he focused on easel painting, engraving and drawing, Rivera devoted his entire life to mural painting, from his return to Mexico in 1821 until his death in 1957 with his work covering several thousand square feet of walls. Following the New York fiasco, Diego Rivera returned home but found it difficult to secure commissions for his work. In fact, between 1935 and 1943 he received no government commission. The only one he did get was a mural in 1936 for the new Hotel Reforma in Mexico City from this old patron, Alberto Pani. Nevertheless, things did not go smoothly in this case either because there was a major disagreement between Rivera and his commissioner which resulted in his work being altered without his consent. As Mexican laws were much stricter in this sense than American ones, Rivera was able to bring a suit for damages and even win it (Lucie-Smith 200).

Rivera's most prominent works can be found in Mexico, in the Ministry of Public Education, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Palacio Nacional (which serves as the seat of Mexican government), the Ministry of Health, the National Institute of Cardiology, the Hospital de la Raza and the list could go on. One of his most important murals, Sueno de una tarde de domingo en la Alameda (1947 which Rivera had painted in Hotel del Prado, had to be moved in 1985 after the hotel had to be demolished following the Mexico City earthquake of that same year (Werner 1282). Rivera also created a mosaic in glass for the facade of the Insurgentes Theater (Ibid.) as well as murals for the School of Architecture in the town of Chapingo and in the Palacio de Cortes in Cernavaca, Fernando Cortes' former residence.

Rivera's involvement in politics also started shortly after his return to Mexico, more precisely in 1922 when he joined the Mexican Communist Party. His relationship with the Party was always volatile and he was eventually expelled due to his work for the Mexican state painting murals in government buildings. Rivera was a close friend of Leon Trotsky who had taken refuge in Mexico following his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Another reason from his expulsion from the Communist Party was the fact that he painted murals in the United States. However, Rivera rejoined the Party in 1954 and died a party member only three years later.

One of the most controversial aspects of Diego Rivera's life was his complicated and often problematic relationship with women. While living in Paris, his two most notable relationships were with Angelina Beloff and Marievna Vorobiev-Stebleska, both of Russian origins and looking to become artists. Beloff and Rivera had a son in 1917 who died one year later, and Vorobiev-Stebleska and Rivera had a daughter whom Rivera did not want to recognize. It was also during this time that Rivera worked on the orbit of Cubism (Lucie-Smith 197) which he abandoned in 1919 when he decided to embark on a journey to Italy with David Alfaro Siqueiros who had arrived from Mexico on a scholarship provided by Alberto Pani, the Mexican Ambassador to France. The two young artists spent around two years in France and Italy studying the frescoes of the great Italian masters, and discussing the future of Mexican art. It was in this context that the two made the decision to go back to Mexico. Homecoming would be an emotional experience for the young artist: "On my arrival in Mexico," Rivera would later write in his autobiography, "I was struck by the inexpressible beauty of that rich and severe, wretched and exuberant land" (Rivera as quoted in Lucie-Smith 198).

On his return to Mexico, Rivera fell in love with Guadalupe Marin, married and had two daughters with her but this relationship did not last long either because in 1929 Rivera married Frida Kahlo who would represent the most important woman in his life. Their relationship was tumultuous and certainly volatile but it lasted until Frida's death in 1954. However, even after her death, Rivera married Emma Hurtado who was Rivera's legal wife until his death in 1957. There is one important note to be made on the topic of his death, namely that his ashes were not placed together with those of Frida Kahlo according to his wishes, but rather in the Rotonda de Hombres Ilustres, the place where Mexico's national heroes are interred (Wener 1284).

Mexican themes were always central to his artistic creation, even during his cubist phase in Europe with paintings such as the portraits of Martin Luis Guzmon and Roan Gomez de la Serna and his Paisaje Zapatista (Zapatista Landscape), all painted in 1915 before his return to Mexico. It was during this period that Rivera was involved in his most intense search for his identity as an artist. Moreover, it was also during his final years in Europe that he developed his ideas about muralismo (mural art) as public art which would focus on the Mexican people (Brenner 280). He saw himself as a revolutionary who believed that all art was political propaganda thus he chose painting as his most important tool of expression because he thought that it was the easiest and most effective method of reaching the Mexican people -- this also accounts for the fact that the dominant theme of his murals was the social and political history of his country. His murals depict ideal occupations of Mexican peasants: dances, rituals, harvests, a fair-day, sugar-making, mining, smelting, weaving, dyeing, pottery manufacture and receiving the promised lands (Ibid 282).

Similarly to "the masses," women are depicted as faceless in his paintings. Generally speaking, they appear only as mothers with children or prostitutes. However, they are stripped not only of their individual characteristics but also their class identities as for Rivera they represent little more than models for his nudes, or idealized images of Mother Earth. From this point-of-view, his narrow view of history was what gained his the praise of Mexican statesmen. Rivera's philosophy was in many ways closer to the bourgeois faction who had triumphed in the Mexican Revolution than to Marxism, and his paintings fully expressed this ideology. Between 1929-1930 and 1934-34 Rivera painted his 'History of Mexico' in the National Palace in Mexico City. At this time the mechanics of Mexican government still resembled that of the prerevolutionary era with its bureaucrats and economy based on land monopoly. There was also a decrease in the redistribution of the power to the people as well as the industrialization of capitalism. Rivera's murals represented a place where the new Mexican citizen was momentarily suspended from the day-to-day aspects of life, where he could witness the birth of a new society whose paradoxes would either be resolved or integrated into the newly-established order through an esthetic ceremony based on powerful imagery.

His work did not receive much praise from critics at home but attracted increasing attention abroad. In 1927, when the murals at the Ministry of Education had been finished, Rivera was invited to go to Russia for the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Revolution. There he signed a contract with the Minister for Culture to paint a mural for the Red Army Club in Moscow. However, Rivera had a moment of acute discomfort when he met Stalin. He writes in his autobiography: "the Central Committee ... my fellow guests smirking with satisfaction, drooling with superiority ... they might have been entering paradise. ... Suddenly a peanut shaped head, surmounted by a military haircut, decked out with a magnificent pair of long moustaches, rose above them ... one hand slipped into his overcoat and the other folded behind him a la Napoleon. ... Comrade Stalin posed before the saints and worshippers." (Rivera as quoted in Lucie-Smith 200). Russian Communists did not appreciate his conduct while in Russia, thus his project for the Red Army Club was soon at a standstill, and in May 1928 Rivera was ordered home by the Latin American Secretariat, the first step in his expulsion from the Mexican Communist Party in 1929.