Diego Rivera (1886-1957)
Diego Rivera was a Mexican artist. He became famous for mural about Mexican life and history. Rivera was controversial because of his radical political beliefs and his attack on the church and the clergy. Rivera was born on Dec. 8 1886, in Guanajuanto. In the 1920’s, he became involved in the new Mexican mural movement. With such Mexican artists as Jose Clemente Orozoco and David Siqueiros, he began to experiment with fresco painting on large wall. 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. Some of River’s best murals are in the National Palace in Mexico City and at the National Agricultural School in Chapingo, near Mexico City. Rivera painted several significant works in the United States, which he visited in the early 1930’s and again in 1940. Perhaps his finest surviving U.S. work is a mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
A More Indepth Look as Rivera's Life
On December 8, 1886, Diego Rivera was born in Guanajuato Mexico. At the age of two, before Diego was even able to read, his father set up a studio for him. The family lived in Guanajuato until 1892, when they moved to Mexico City. At the young age of 10, Diego decided he wanted to become an artist. So he began taking evening classes at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. He enrolled in military college at the request of his father. But Diego did not like the strict regimen and after two weeks, in 1898, he attended San Carlos as a full-time student.
Rivera left Mexico and arrived in Barcelona, Spain, to study with the Spanish painter Chicharro, whom he studied with for two years. He sent many of his paintings home to justify his scholarship. Diego said he “learned about his country’s art from Jose Posada, a teacher he found himself” (Hamil 34). Posada owned a small shop near the “San Carlos Academy where Diego would often stop and admire” (Hamil 12) his works. But Rivera still felt there was something missing in his art that technical growth could not supply.
In 1918, Rivera met Elie Faure, which began a lifelong friendship between the two men. Faure reawakened Rivera’s enthusiasm for murals and encouraged him to go to Italy and study the works of the masters. While in Italy, he was exposed to frescoes from hundreds of years earlier. They were often painted on the walls of churches so that everyone in the towns could enjoy and appreciate them.
In 1922, he married Guadalupe Marin, whom he met while on travels in Mexico to study the various landscapes and history. Over the next four years, Rivera worked on 124 frescoes on the courtyard walls of the Ministry of Public Education. This particular work made him famous in the Western world and truly began the revival of mural painting.
In the fall of 1927, Diego traveled to the Soviet Union to take part in the tenth anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution. He traveled as a member of an official delegation of the Mexican Communist Party. When he returned to Mexico, his marriage to Guadalupe Marin, the mother of his two children, ended. In 1928, he went on to meet Frida Kahlo, at a weekly party.
He and Kahlo married in 1929, the year he was also appointed the head of the Department of Plastic Crafts at the Ministry of Education, a position he held until 1938. Rivera, with the help of David Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, created the Labor Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors.
In November of 1930, Rivera began work on his first two major American commissions: the American Stock Exchange Luncheon Club and the California School of Fine Arts. But it was in 1932 that Nelson Rockefeller asked him to paint a mural in the Radio Corporation Arts building in Rockefeller Center. And in 1933, he began the mural entitled Man at the Cossroads. However, conflict arose over the mural in which Rivera included Lenin, leader of the Soviet Union. As a result, the mural was never completed and was chipped off the wall and destroyed in February of 1934. Rivera was “determined to compete the mural but in a different location” (Hamil 34). His new version called Man, Controller of the Universe, was done in Mexico City and included a portrait of Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Rivera returned to Mexico at the end of 1933.
In 1940, Diego and Frida were separated, divorced, and remarried in December of the same year. Rivera went to San Francisco to participate in the 1940 Golden Gate international exposition. Rivera suffered a great loss in “July of 1954 when his wife Frida Kahlo” (Hamil 65) died. But one year later, he married Emma Hurtado, his dealer since 1946. Following an operation towards the end of the year, Rivera went through cobalt treatments. In April of 1956, he returned to his native Mexico and recuperated at the home of his friend Dolores Olmedo. On November 24, 1957, Rivera died of heart failure in his San Angel studio. He was buried in the Rotunda of Famous Men in Civil Pantheon of Mourning. Today, he is still considered a Latin American folk hero.
Biographical Information courtesy : "Rivera, Diego." The World Book Encyclopedia. 16th ed. 2004. |