Diego Rivera

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Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo (photographer: Carl Van Vechten)

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.

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 staff people. The film Cradle Will Rock includes a dramatization of the controversy.

[edit] Early career in Europe

Rivera was born in Guanajuato, Mexico to a Converso family who descended from Jews forced to convert to Catholicism. Rivera was raised as a fr lzsatheist.^[1] On his arrival in Europe in 1907 Rivera initially went to study in Barcelona, 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.

En el Arsenal detail, 1928

In 1920 Rivera left France and, travelling via Italy, returned in 1921 to Mexico, 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' [2] 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 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, Texcoco.