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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 Rivera 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, he angrily insisted the figure be painted out. Rivera refused and Rockefeller fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was destroyed by hammering. The films ''Cradle Will Rock'' and ''Frida'' include a dramatization of the controversy.

Contents

Early career in Europe

Career in Mexico

Later work abroad

Personal life

See also

External links

Early career in Europe

Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato, Mexico to a Converso family (descended from Jews who converted to Roman Catholicism)[1]. Rivera was sponsored to study art in Europe by Teodoro A. Dehesa Méndez, the governor of the State of Veracruz.
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. [2] 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). [3]
Paris in those years was witnessing the beginning of cubism in paintings by such eminent painters as Picasso and Braque; inspired by 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 Mexico

In 1920 Rivera left France and, after travelling through Italy, returned to Mexico in 1921 to continue his prolific career as an artist. Having been born in Guanajuato, he 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, and 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, tells stories. The mural “En el Arsenal” (''in the arsenal'') [4] which shows Vittorio Vidale to the left, 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 Trotskyists 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 abroad

In the autumn of 1927 Rivera, accepting an invitation to take part in the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, arrived in Moscow, Russia; but in 1928 he was expelled by the authorities because of his involvement in anti-Soviet politics and returned to Mexico. His mural "In the Arsenal" is interpreted by some as evidence of Vittorio Vidale's murder of Julio Antonio Mella, his involvement with Tina Modotti, and to relate to his expulsion from the Mexican Communist Party.
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.
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 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 ([5]).
The Arizona State University Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Arthur Ross Gallery (University of Pennsylvania), the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (UK), the DePaul University Museum (Chicago), the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires), the Guilford College Art Gallery (North Carolina), Harvard University Art Museums, the Hermitage Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Brazil), the Museum of Modern Art (New York City), the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), the Phoenix Art Museum (Arizona), the San Diego Museum of Art (California) and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (Iran) are among the public collections holding works by Diego Rivera.

Personal life

Rivera was a notorious ladies' man who had fathered at least two illegitimate children by two different women: Angeline Beloff gave birth to a 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 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. He died on 24 November[6] or 25 November[7] 1957.

See also

★ Frida Kahlo

★ Elaine Hamilton

★ María Izquierdo

★ José Clemente Orozco

★ David Alfaro Siqueiros

★ Rockefeller Center

External links

★ The Cubist Paintings of Diego Rivera: Memory, Politics, Place at the National Gallery of art, Washington

★ Artcyclopedia - Links to Rivera's works

★ Artchive - Biography and images of Rivera's works

★ Short biography with photograph

★ "Chronology & photographs" (year by year, animated)

★ Detailed biography (with timeline and paintings)

★ Biographical note with photographs

★ Short illustrated biography (in Dutch)

★ Biographical note (with self-portrait and photographs with Trotsky and Frida Kahlo)

★ Self-portrait from 1941 and other paintings

★ Marela Trejo Zacarías: "Visual Biography of Diego Rivera"

★ Diego Rivera at the Detroit Institute of Arts

★ Diego Rivera Mural Project

★ Diego Rivera House Museum

★ Virtual Diego Rivera Web Museum

★ Diego Rivera at Olga's Gallery

★ "Diego Rivera: Master Cubist" (12th painting in sequence: "Motherhood – Angelina and the Child Diego" (1916) depicting his common-law wife with their baby son.)

★ Painting by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) depicting on the very left herself, Diego Rivera and their daughter Marika, and on the right their mutual friends from Montparnasse, namely (top left to right:) Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani and his wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, the gallery owner Leopold Zborowski, and (bottom right corner:) Moise Kisling.

★ Life and paintings of Diego Rivera

★ Diego Rivera - Social Realist Muralist - A Virtual Gallery