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Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), (full name Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez) was a Mexican painter and muralist born in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato. Diego is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural, "Man at the Crossroads," in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. When his patron Nelson Rockefeller discovered that the mural included a portrait of Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff. The film Cradle Will Rock includes a dramatization of the controversy.
Early career in Europe
On his arrival in Europe in 1907 Rivera initially went to study with Eduardo Chicharro in Madrid, Spain, and from there proceeded to Paris, France, to live and work with the great gathering of artists in Montparnasse, especially at La Ruche, where his friend Amedeo Modigliani painted his portrait in 1914. [1] The circle of close friends that included further Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Modigliani's wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Leopold Zborowski, and Moise Kisling, was captured for posterity by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) in her painting "Homage to Friends from Montparnasse" (1962). [2] Paris in those years was witnessing the emergence of cubism in paintings by such eminent painters as Picasso, Braque and Cezanne. From 1913 to 1918 Rivera himself enthusiastically embraced this new school of art, as his masterly cubist paintings from this time demonstrate. His paintings began to attract attention; and was able to display them at several exhibitions. Career in MexicoImage:Rivera-the-arsenal.jpg En el Arsenal detail, 1928 In 1920 Rivera left France and while, traveling through Italy, returned to Mexico in 1921, where he continued his prolific career as an artist. Having been born in Guanajuato, he now became involved in the new Mexican mural movement. With such Mexican artists as José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, and the French artist Jean Charlot, he began to experiment with fresco painting on large walls. Rivera soon developed his own style of large, simplified figures and bold colors. He had also become interested in left-wing politics. Thus when he painted his first mural, he presented ethnic Mexican subjects in a political context. Many of his murals deal symbolically with Mexican society and thought after the country's 1910 Revolution. His art, in a fashion similar to the stellae of the Maya tell stories. One mural “En el Arsenal” 'in the arsenal' [3] which shows to the left Vittorio Vidale, Tina Modotti (holding an ammunition belt), and Julio Antonio Mella (with hat) is said by some to elucidate the political murder of Mella. Rivera's radical political beliefs, his attacks on the church, and clergy, as well as his flirtations with trotskyites and left wing assassins made him a controversial figure even in communist circles. Some of Rivera's best murals are in the National Palace in Mexico City and at the National Agricultural School in Chapingo, near Texcoco. Later work abroadImage:Rivera detroit industry north.jpg Detroit Industry, North Wall, 1932-33. Detroit Institute of Arts.
Rivera then painted several significant works in the United States. From 1930 to 1933 he completed a number of frescoes in the United States, mostly consisting of industrial life. Perhaps his finest surviving work in the United States are the 27 fresco panels entitled Detroit Industry on the walls of an inner court at the Detroit Institute of Arts that he painted in 1932. Image:Rivera detroit industry south.jpg Detroit Industry, South Wall, 1932-33. Detroit Institute of Arts. His mural Man at the Crossroads, begun in 1933 for the Rockefeller Center in New York City, was removed after a furor erupted in the press because at the time there was a fear of a violent revolution and his work contained a portrait of Lenin. As a result of the negative publicity, a further commission to paint a mural for an exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair was cancelled. In December 1933, an angry and humiliated Rivera returned to Mexico. He repainted the work in 1934 in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. This version was called Man, Controller of the Universe. On June 5,1940 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. "Pan American Unity" was unveiled November 29, 1940. The mural and its archives reside at City College of San Francisco, (www.riveramural.org). Personal lifeRivera was a notorious ladies' man who had fathered at least two illegitimate children by two different women: Angeline Beloff gave birth to his only son Diego (1916-1918); Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska gave birth to a daughter in 1918. He married his first wife, Guadalupe Marín, in June 1922, with whom he had two daughters. He was still married when he met the art student Frida Kahlo. They married on August 21, 1929; he was 42, she was 22. Their mutual infidelities and his violent temper led to divorce in 1939, but they re-married December 8, 1940 in San Francisco. After Kahlo's death, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946, on July 29, 1955. See also
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