Diego Rivera

(Guanajuato, 1886 – Mexico City, 1957)

Author's artworks

19th-20th Century Mexican

Born on 8 December 1886 in the city of Guanajuato, at the age of six Rivera’s family moved to Mexico City, where he continued his education until 1896, when he enrolled at the San Carlos Academy.

In 1907 Rivera had his first solo exhibition and obtained a scholarship to study in Europe and further his knowledge of painting, first in Madrid and later in France and Italy. On his first trip to Europe—where he ended up staying fourteen years, until 1921—he lived in Montparnasse, in the very heart of the avant-gardes, and embraced, among other movements,
. On returning to Mexico in 1921, he became a cultural leader and undertook many mural works of historical-heroic subject matters.

A communist by ideology, Rivera is well known for his creation of works of high social content in public buildings, being regarded as one of the three greatest exponents of Mexican muralism, together with José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). Married with the painter Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), Rivera developed monumental paintings in various spots in Mexico City’s historical centre, as well as at the Escuela Nacional de Agricultura in Chapingo, in other Mexican cities (Cuernavaca and Acapulco), and also outside the country (Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Detroit and New York).

In 1941, Rivera undertook the construction of his Anahuacalli archaeological museum. In 1944 he was commissioned with new murals: in the interior courtyard of Palacio Nacional he addressed the theme of Tenochtitlan, and at Instituto Nacional de Cardiología he dealt with progress in medicine. Between 1947 and 1948 the artist painted Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park at Hotel del Prado, in Mexico City. In the case of his easel-painting, his landscapes and either worldly or indigenist portraits are particularly sought after in the art market. He died in Mexico City on 24 November 1957 and his mortal remains are buried at The Rotunda of Illustrious Persons inside the Panteón de Dolores.

It has been said that Rivera turned the traditions of indigenous and ethnic groups into a beautiful and inoffensive archetype. He was the most classical of “The Three Great Ones”. He distanced himself from, on one hand, the misanthrope José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), who defended the regenerating power of scepticism and saw the utopia of Revolution as a foreboding of death, mass migration and class conflict; and also, on the other, from the dogmatist Siqueiros (1896-1974), who proposed dynamic perspectives, spirited foreshortenings and extreme corporal proportions at the service of radical experimentation. In his art, Rivera developed a nationalistic vision of Mexico’s arduous transformation and a voluptuous pantheism that would led to a new academicism.