Oil Painting

  Diego Rivera
  1886 -1957
     Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter and muralist. He 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.

     Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato City, Guanajuato, Mexico to a Converso family. 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. 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.

     Paris in those years was witnessing the emergence 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 he was able to display them at several exhibitions.

     In 1920 Rivera left France and, after traveling through Italy, returned to Mexico in 1921 to continue his prolific career as an artist. 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. Many of his murals deal symbolically with Mexican society and thought after the country’s 1910 Revolution. 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.

     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.

     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. 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.

     He died on 24 November or 25 November 1957.