Diego Rivera: European Apprenticeship & Mexican Homecoming

In 1907, at age 21, Diego's paintings caught the eye of the governor of the state of Veracruz, who awarded him a traveling scholarship. The award enabled him to travel to Europe. For the first two years, he studied with Eduardo Chicharro in Madrid, Spain. From Spain he moved on to Paris, to live and work with the great gathering of artists in Montparnasse, including Modigliani.

View of Toledo, Diego Rivera, 1912 -  Cubist elements are evident even before the artist moved to Paris.

Diego returned to Mexico only once for a brief visit in 1910, just before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution that lasted for the next decade and whose violence devastated the country. Diego spent the years of the Mexican Revolution in Paris studying and working—and occasionally showing his work. 

Amedeo Modigliani's portrait of Diego Rivera (1914).

In those years, Paris was witnessing the beginning of cubism in the paintings of such eminent painters as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. From 1913 to 1917, Rivera enthusiastically embraced the Cubist school of art.

Paisaje zapatista. El guerrillero (Zapatista Country: Guerrilla Fighter), Diego Rivera, 1915.

But in 1917, Rivera shifted toward Post-Impressionism—inspired by Paul Cézanne's paintings and attracted by the simple forms and large patches of vivid colors. His paintings began to attract attention, and he was given even more opportunities to show his work.

Still Life, Diego Rivera, 1918. The style reflects the influence of Rousseau and Cezanne. 

The Outskirts of Paris, Diego Rivera, 1918 -- In the Post-Impressionist style of Rousseau and Cezanne. 

In 1920, at the urging of Alberto J. Pani, Mexican ambassador to France, Diego spent time in Italy studying the work of the Renaissance fresco masters, including Giotto, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Mantegna and Michelangelo.  

Viewing their masterpieces first-hand had a profound impact on Rivera's artistic sensibility—leading him to integrate his two main passions: the Post-Impressionist use of simple shapes and vibrant colors to represent realist subjects, and the application of paint to walls to create textured frescoes. In Italy, Diego laid down the artistic foundation for what would become the Mexican Mural Renaissance (described below). 

Mesoamerican Influences

But Rivera didn't limit his study to the European tradition. To ground his art in Mexico's history, Rivera studied Mesoamerican painting and portraiture—very likely before he left for Europe at age 21. I haven't been able to find objective confirmation of my intuitive sense that Diego's friend and mentor, the engraver-illustrator-political cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada might have suggested this direction to Diego, but it is difficult to ignore Posada's probable role.

An earlier post on Jenny's Blog discusses José Posada's work and its influence on the young Diego. Meanwhile, the fact remains that over his lifetime Diego collected thousands of precolumbian artifacts now housed at his Anahuacalli Museum in Coyoacán, Mexico City. 

Rivera's murals have a specific and unmistakable Mesoamerican feel for geometric shapes and use of colors. From Maya stele (stone columns on which were sculpted glyphs that recorded a ruler's deeds), Rivera acquired the powerful, yet challenging idea that a mural should tell a story rather than simply present an image—a concept strongly reinforced by Posada's body of work. 

Mexico's Revolution Winds Down  

With the election in 1920 of Álvaro Obregón Salido as president of the Second Republic of Mexico, the violence associated with the Mexican Revolution finally came to an end.

President Obregón appointed José Vasconcelos as Secretary of Public Education. Trained as an attorney, Vasconcelos was also an educator, writer, philosopher and politician who was serving as president of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) prior to his appointment as Secretary. Quite naturally, Vasconcelos promoted academic freedom and freedom of thought.

But Vasconcelos also championed an educated citizenry. In pursuit of this goal, he undertook a major public education effort that included construction of over 1,000 rural schools and almost 2,000 public libraries across the country. Above all, Vasconcelos reaffirmed traditional cultural, ethical and aesthetic values as constituting the essential foundation for the emergence of Latin America as a social and political reality.

Mexican Muralism, or Mexican Mural Renaissance

It was in this political and social context that Secretary Vasconcelos and President Obregón supported development of the art movement known today as Mexican Muralism, or the Mexican Mural Renaissance—a designation that recognizes the Mesoamerican roots of the movement.

Through Ambassador Pani, Diego was in contact with José Vasconcelos. In 1921 both men encouraged Diego to return to Mexico to apply his artistic skills in service to his country.

The Mural Movement was dominated by los tres grandes (the three great ones): Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. These artists helped to forge a new national cultural consciousness, or mexicanidad (Mexican-ness). To support their work, the government established a program of commissions for a large number of murals.

The overriding idea was that art ought to be accessible to all, and that each artist must contribute to glorifying the people's strengths and building a more egalitarian future. To this end, the painter Siqueiros wrote, "We condemn so-called easel painting and all the art produced by ultra-intellectual circles on the grounds that it is aristocratic, and we glorify the expression of monumental Art because it is public property." 

Diego Rivera: First Murals in Mexico

When Diego Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921, he was thirty-five years old. For one of his numerous autobiographies, "My Art, My Life" (1960), co-written in English with Gladys March, Diego reminisced:  

"My homecoming produced an aesthetic exhilaration which it is impossible to describe. It was as if I were being born anew, born in a new world... I was in the very center of the plastic world, where forms and colors existed in absolute purity. In everything I saw a potential masterpiece—the crowds, the markets, the festivals, the marching battalions, the workingmen in the shop and in the fields—in every glowing face, in every luminous child....   My style was born as children are born, in a moment, except that this birth had come after a torturous pregnancy of thirty-five years.“ [Emphasis added]

In this ecstatic description, Diego's enormous ego is evident ("I was in the very center...."). Equally striking is the glimpse the artist gives us of his creative imagination ("In everything I saw a potential masterpiece...").

It is the last sentence, however, that may be most significant—illuminating, as it does, Diego Rivera's awareness of the lengthy and 'torturous' artistic training that laid the foundation for what might look to the outsider as an 'instantaneous' emergence of artistic style. Not so, says the artist. One might be excused for  sensing perhaps the slightest whiff of messianic purpose as Diego describes himself assuming the role he may well have believed himself destined to perform in his country's history.   

Rivera's first murals in Mexico, titled La Creación, were made in the Anfiteatro Bolivar (Bolivar Lecture Hall) of the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. Critics suggest that these murals are not as advanced as work done during Rivera's Cubist period in Paris—likening the style of these murals to a version of what is recognized today as Art Deco. At this point, sniff these critics, Diego's political ideas were more radical than his artistic ones.

Creación [Artística y Scientífica], Diego Rivera, Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, 1921.

In 1922 Rivera was the leading figure in the formation of a Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors whose manifesto—borrowing language of the Russian Revolutionary Constructivists—proclaimed a collective repudiation of so-called easel-painting and all art of ultra-intellectual circles in favor of art works that were both physically and intellectually accessible to the mass public. The manifesto thus reflects Diego's artistic vision—that is, the influence of José Posada's art for the people and the story-telling concept implicit on Maya stele. 

The first murals in Rivera's fully mature style were done for the east patio of the Secretaria de Educación Pública (SEP) in Mexico City. Working up to eighteen hours a day, it took Rivera just over four years to complete this gigantic series of compositions—117 fresco panels covering almost 1600 square meters of wall. The intense mental and physical effort begun by Rivera in 1923 ended early in 1928 and established the artist as a leader of the new Mexican school.

Diego Rivera: (Detail) Día de muertos (Day of the Dead), fresco, 1923-1924,  Patio de las Fiestas, SEP. 

Is Diego's debt to Posada perhaps acknowledged in this mural?

Diego Rivera: Mecanización del campo (Mechanization of the Countryside), fresco, 1926, Patio de las Fiestas, SEP.

Diego Rivera: La liberación del peón (Liberation of a peasant), fresco, 1928, Patio de las Fiestas, SEP. 

The frescoes in the Auditorium of the National School of Agriculture in Chapingo (1927) are considered by many critics to be his masterworks. The general theme of the frescoes is human biological and social development. The overall unity of the work and the quality of each of the different parts, especially the female nudes, show Rivera at the height of his creative power.

In the old hacienda chapel—now the University Ceremonies Room—is a mural by Diego Rivera called Tierra Fecundada (Fertile Land). Begun in 1924 and completed in 1927, the work covers an area of over 700 sq m (7,500 sq ft) and is divided into three parts. The left panel depicts man’s struggle to acquire land; the center panel depicts the communion between Man and Earth (an element of the Mesoamerican worldview); the right panel shows the evolution of Mother Nature. 

Keen contradictions existed between Rivera's politics and his art. His political beliefs implied opposition to the United States, but his reputation was greatly helped by North American enthusiasm and patronage. One of his finest series of murals (1929-1930)—depicting the fight against the Spanish invaders—were commissioned for the Palacio de Cortés in Cuernavaca  by the influential American ambassador to Mexico, Dwight D. Morrow. 

From the cycle: “Historia de Cuernavaca y Morelos”. Construcción del Palacio de Cortés, 1930-1931.

Rivera's own political career was both public and stormy—at times with deleterious effects on his art. In light of the history of his mother's Jewish family, he felt himself to be a natural Communist. Reflecting back on his formative years, he wrote, "My Jewishness is the dominant element in my life. From this has come my sympathy with the downtrodden masses which motivates all my work."

However, Rivera was often on bad terms with both the Mexican Communist Party and with the official Communists in the Soviet Union—resigning from and rejoining both organizations several times. Attending a conference in Moscow, he was asked to leave by the Soviet government, which branded him a 'renegade'.  

Rivera's stormy relationship with Communism is relevant to his idea of Modernism. For much of his career, Diego tried to make art that would achieve objectives aligned with those of Soviet Socialist Realism. But inside Mexico, Rivera's overriding goal was to make art that would speak directly to the Mexican people—and in the 1920's illiteracy in Mexico was widespread.

Mexican Culture: Visual and Performance (Dance, Film) Arts First—Literature Last

But illiteracy is only a piece—arguably the least interesting piece—of the story. When we were tourists in San Miguel de Allende five years ago, our thirty-something expat innkeeper (who had lived in San Miguel for several years), remarked, "Reading is not part of Mexican culture."

As a lifelong reader, I confess I am just beginning to understand the implications of her remark. If literature is one side of the cultural coin, then the visual and performance arts may be considered the other. Certainly, the exceptional creativity of Mexico's graphic arts today is readily apparent even to a casual visitor.

The woman who helped me with our house in Pátzcuaro was not educated, but she engaged creatively and enthusiastically with the paintings and artesanía in Casa Mariposa. These art objects spoke to her, and she spoke to them—this dialogue, which she shared with me, was lively, delightful, revealing.

To state the obvious: Mexican culture is highly visual; moreover, as a people, Mexicans tend to be visual and auditory learners—cultural characteristics that Diego Rivera understood all too well!

In order to make art for Mexico's common people, then, Rivera had to abandon much that was typical of Modern art—most notably, fragmentation of imagery and the disguise of appearances. But above all, he had to discipline his work to the demands of narrative—a discipline most emphatically rejected by the early Modernists.

Fortunately, story-telling was a discipline that had been enthusiastically championed by the youthful Diego's friend and mentor, José Guadalupe Posada, who conveyed to his young disciple important techniques for using images to tell stories. Many of these techniques were also embraced by subsequent Mexican Muralists—most notably, by José Clemente Orozco, who had also come under the influence of the engraver when, as a student he passed by Posada's shop and stopped for brief chats. Over time, these muralists came to regard Posada as a revered ancestor figure.


Diego Rivera's enormous talent and keen intellect also found expression in work done in the United States, where—unleashed by cultural constraints, no matter how willingly embraced—his imagination was free to explore cutting-edge social-political themes and artistic techniques. But that is for another post!

Still curious?

MOMA in New York City is exhibiting Diego Rivera "Murals at the Museum of Modern Art", which runs until May 14. In its five-week run from December 22, 1931, to January 27, 1932, the exhibit shattered MOMA attendance records. MoMA brought Rivera to New York six weeks before the exhibition’s opening and gave him studio space within the Museum, a strategy intended to solve the problem of how to present the work of this famous muralist when murals were by definition made and fixed on site.

Working around the clock with two assistants, Rivera produced five “portable murals”—large blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime, and wood that feature bold images drawn from Mexican subject matter and address themes of revolution and class inequity. After the opening, Rivera made three more murals.  These eight murals are the core of the current exhibit.

•  Link to announcement: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1168 
•  Link to MOMA exhibition site: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/rivera/index.php

Excellent chronology of Diego's life, with links to paintings (dates provided):  http://www.riveraexperts.com/chrono/chrono1886.html

Good biography, including artistic influences on Diego Rivera:  http://www.diego-rivera.org/article6-diego-rivera-influences.html

Interesting discussion of how Diego's politics affected his art:  http://www.leninimports.com/diego_rivera.html#partone

Good biography of Diego Rivera:  http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Diego_Rivera.aspx