Diego Rivera, was as much a politically controversial womanizer as he is Mexico’s most famous muralist. Many credit him with the reintroduction of fresco painting into modern day art and architecture. But people probably more readily recognize his paintings on canvas, the ones of markets and the indigineous life of Mexico.

Diego Rivera was born December 8, 1886, in the silver mining town of Guanajuato in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico, to Diego and Maria Barrientos Rivera. The family moved to Mexico City a few years later in 1892. Diego showed his artistic side at a very early age and he studied in the evenings at the Academy of San Carlos starting at the age of ten. He showed his political side when he was later expelled when he was sixteen for participating in a school protest and then continued to study on his own for the next five years.

In 1907 he received a scholarship from Governor Teodoro Dehesa of the state of Veracruz and went to Europe to study in Barcelona, Spain. After two years of study, his travels took him to France, Belgium, The Netherlands, and England. He went back to Mexico in 1910 for a very short time during La Revolucion before returning to Europe to live for the next ten years. While in Paris he saw the works of Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir, Rousseau, Matisse, and The Fauves as well as befriending the Cubists. Many of his paintings from this time were in the Cubist style.

It was also during his long stay in Europe when he began to form his ideas about public art and the necessity of the general public having access to works of art.

Diego Rivera returns to Mexico to become part of the new Mexican Renaissance.

He began his career in Mexico in 1921, when Jose Vasconcelos, the Minister of Public Education in Mexico City, offered Rivera an indoor wall at the National Preparatory School, which was part of the University of Mexico. But before he began Creation, the mural he was painting when he met the young student Frida Kahlo, he took a trip to the Yucatan where he toured the Maya archaeological sites of Uxmal and Chichen-Itza and made studies of the ruins and the local people.

In the 1920’s he painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo, and Cuernavaca. He also went to Russia in 1928 to paint a mural for the ten year anniversary of The Revolution. In 1929 he married Frida Kahlo and in the 1930’s he set his sights on Gringolandia, the United States.

His first trip took him to San Francisco, with Frida in tow. Diego loved the US. Frida did not.

One of his first murals in the US was the Alegoría de California/Allegory of California, in the Pacific Stock Exchange Tower in San Francisco. Being chosen to create this mural was very controversial at the time because Rivera was Mexican and it seemed that because of his politics he was an odd choice to work on a mural that would be on display in ‘the citadel of capitalism’.

The other mural he came to San Francisco to paint was La elaboración de un fresco/The Making of a Fresco, is in what is now called The San Francisco Art Institute.

Both La elaboración de un fresco/The Making of a Fresco and Alegoría de California/Allegory of California were dated 1931.

But the controversy of his San Francisco Stock Exchange mural was nothing compared to his most controversial mural that was begun inside the lobby of the RCA building in The Rockefeller Center in New York City in 1933. The work was called Man at the Crossroads and it’s main theme depicted a May Day Rally. The rally was not the source of contoversy though, it was the use of Lenin as the leader of the rally that infuriated the patrons. Diego refused to make any changes and the mural was destroyed.

The rest of the 1930s took him to and from Mexico to San Francisco and Detroit. He returned to San Francisco in 1940 to execute the Pan American Unity Mural for the Golden Gate International Exposition that now lives out at the San Francisco City College.

Diego Rivera and Politics

Rivera was a Communist and probably became politically invovled when he was living in Europe. Diego had been a supporter of Leon Trotsky, whom Stalin had exiled from the Soviet Union just a few years after the death of Lenin. Diego had made arrangements and helped Trotsky move to Mexico early in 1937. While there, Trotsky and his wife Natalia lived in Frida’s house, La Casa Azul until Diego and Trotsky had a falling out and he moved to another location. It is thought that the rift between Diego and Trotsky came about because of an affair that Trotsky had with Frida while staying in her house.

Diego and Women

The story of Rivera can’t be told without a reference to his relationships with women. Diego was a ferocious and successful ladies’ man although to look at him you might wonder why. He was not pretty and for most of his life he was quite … rotund. One can only assume that it was his passion for life, art and politics, and his true appreciation for the women he seduced that made him attractive to them.

His longest relationship was with artist Frida Kahlo with whom his fate was intrinsically entwined. He first met her when she was a fifteen year old student at the National Preparatory School, but their relationship did not develop until a few years later. Frida was a close friend of photographer Tina Modotti, who had served as a model for Rivera, and it was through her that Frida and Diego met again. They were married in 1929, when she was twenty-two and he was forty-three. Their relationship was deep and passionate, full of love but also full of betrayal. Diego did not stop his adultarous ways, Frida allowed herself to have affairs because of Diego’s behaviour, and the marriage ended in 1939, only to be remarried in December of 1940 for the remainder of Frida’s life.

An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can’t feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn’t capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won’t put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn’t a great artist. – Diego Rivera

Mural in the photo: Pacific Stock Exchange: Alegoría de California/Allegory of California, 1931, Diego Rivera

Finding Diego Rivera’s Murals Today

Mexico City:

Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Creation, Encaustic and Gold LeafAnfiteatro Bolívar 1922-23

Secretaría de Educación pública, Salón de Fiestas: Día de Muertos/Day of Dead – The Offering, 1923-24

Chapultepec Park: El agua, Origen de la Vida/Water, Origin of Life, 1951

Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes: Hombre en una Encrucijada/Man at the Crossroads, 1934

American University Auditorium: La Historia de la Cardiología/The History of Cardiology, 1943-1944

Palacio Nacional: La Gran Tenochtitlán/The Great City of Tenochtitlán, 1945; De la Conquista a 1930/From Conquest to 1930; El antiguo Mundo Indígena/The Indigenous World, 1929-1935, 1923-1924; Desembarco de Españoles en Veracruz/Disembarkation of the spanish in Veracruz, 1951

Cuernavaca:

Palacio de Cortés: Batalla de los Aztecas y Españoles/Battle between Aztecs and Spaniards

Chapingo:

Universidad Autonoma de Chapingo Chapel, North Wall: The Liberated Earth with Natural Forces Controlled by Man 1926

Universidad Autonoma de Chapingo Chapel, West Wall: Los Explotadores/The Exploiters, 1926

Universidad Autonoma de Chapingo Chapel, East Wall: Fuerzas Subterráneas/Subterranean Forces, 1926; La Sangre de los Mártires Revolucionarios fertilizando la Tierra/Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilizing the Earth, 1926

Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Administration Building: El Buen Gobierno/The Good Government, 1924

Universidad Autónoma de Chapingo, Administration Building: El Reparto de Tierras/Dividing the Land, 1924

San Francisco, California:

Diego Rivera Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute: La elaboración de un fresco/The Making of a Fresco, 1931

San Francisco City College: this is the mural from the 1940 San Francisco World’s Fair

Pacific Stock Exchange: Alegoría de California/Allegory of California, 1931. Take the elevator to the City Club on the 10th floor. It can be seen in the stairwell between the 10th and 11th floors.

Detroit, Michigan

Detroit Institute of the Arts: Industria de Detroit o Hombre y Máquina/Detroit Industry or Man and Machine, 1930-32

New York City:

Museum of Modern Art: Hombre en la Encrucuijada/Man at the Crossroads, Study for the RCa Building, 1932

New Workers School: Industria Moderna/Modern Industry, 1933

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