The beginning of a changed course in art...
If any man can be said to have changed the course of a nation's art single handed, it is Diego Rivera. He was born in 1886 in the Mexican silver mining town of Guanajuato. His father, a freemason with a 'liberal' background, was a teacher at the time of Diego's birth and later became a school inspector. Rivera was the elder of twin boys, but his brother died at the age of two. His family left his birthplace when he was six, driven out partly by the failure of certain mining speculations and partly by the unpopularity generated by his father's liberalism.Rivera soon showed himself to be a precociously gifted artist and began to study in the evenings at the Academy of San Carlos at the age of ten. At sixteen Rivera joined a student strike at the Academy and was expelled. In due course he was officially reinstated, but never returned, instead working independently for the next five years.
Realizing that his son was getting nowhere in his chosen profession, Rivera senior helped Diego win a scholarship, awarded by the Governor of the Province of Veracruz, to study abroad. The young artist arrived in Spain in January 1907. Rivera made Spain his base for an extended tour which took in France, Belgium, Holland and England. He was in France in 1909, where he encountered the work of the Fauves and Cezanne, but he was later to claim that the artist who impressed him most was Henri Rousseau, 'Le Douanier' 'the only one of the moderns whose works stirred each and every fibre of my being.
They told fantastic tales about him; that he had the ability to suckle young at his Buddhic breasts ... that he was all covered with hair, which must have been true because on the wall of his study, by a Russian woman artist, Marionne [Marievna Vorobiev Stebelska, one of Rivera's mistresses], who painted in his studio, in a man's suit, with the boots of a tigertamer and a lion's skin, was his portrait, nude, with legs crossed and covered in kinky hair.
Awards and acknowledges...
From 1913 onwards Rivera was working within the orbit of Cubism. There was a particularly clear kinship between the work he was producing - still mostly landscapes - and the work of Robert Delaunay. The winter of 1917 was a time of emotional upheaval. The woman with whom he lived, Angelina Beloff, had a child. The baby was sickly (it died early in 1918), and Rivera, who resented the amount of attention Angelina gave to it, took himself off to her rival, Marievna, for five months. Marievna also became pregnant. Rivera was working like a demon, in isolation from his former friends and full of real or imaginary ills. It was soon after this that he decided to break with Cubism. in 1919 he set off for Italy with David Alfaro Siqueiros, who had just arrived from Mexico, using money provided by Alberto Pani, the Mexican Ambassador to France. Together they studied the frescoes of the great Italian masters, and discussed the future of Mexican art. The decision to go back to Mexico was made in 1921.the Central Committee ... my fellow guests smirking with satisfaction, drooling with superiority ... they might have been entering paradise. ... Suddenly a peanut shaped head, surmounted by a military haircut, decked out with a magnificent pair of long moustaches, rose above them ... one hand slipped into his overcoat and the other folded behind him a la Napoleon. ... Comrade Stalin posed before the saints and worshippers.
Rivera's Russian hosts found him rather more of a handful than they had bargained for. He got on badly with the assistants assigned to him, and the much heralded mural project was soon at a standstill. In May 1928 a solution was found to what had become a dilemma: Rivera was ordered home by the Latin American Secretariat of the Comintern as a prelude to his expulsion from the Party in 1929. The year 1929 witnessed other momentous changes in his life. One reason for his eagerness to go to Russia was that he was tired of the tantrums of his first wife, the beautiful but termagant Guadalupe (Lupe) Marin.
He trailed off...
In 1930 Rivera was invited to go to the United States, and decided to exploit his new found fame north of the border, despite a deep rooted suspicion of gringos. In November 1930 he arrived in San Francisco to paint a mural for the Stock Exchange. This was followed by a witty fresco for the California School of Fine Art showing the painter and his team at work: right at the centre of the composition is Rivera's enormous backside. He returned briefly to Mexico, then went to New York in November 1931 for a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This was the Museum's fourteenth exhibition and only its second one man show - the first had been devoted to Matisse. It broke all previous attendance records and made Rivera and his wife into major American celebrities. His next stop was Detroit, where he had been invited to provide murals for the inner courtyard of the Detroit Museum.After the New York fiasco Rivera found it difficult to secure commissions for murals, even at home. Between 1935 and 1943 he received no government co mmissions of any kind. The best he could get - in 1936 was a mural commission for the new Hotel Reforma in Mexico City, from his old patron, Alberto Pani. But here, too, there was a disagreement, and as a result the murals were altered without the artist's consent. Mexican laws on this subject being different, and stricter, than those which prevailed in the United States, Rivera was able to bring a suit for damages and win it.
His last years...
In September 1954 he was finally re-accepted by the Communists. But this dubious success came a little late since earlier in the year he had lost Frida. Due to an appalling accident suffered when she was still an adolescent she had been in poor health for many years, and in the last period of her life was in constant pain and often bedridden. Her husband was shattered by the loss. He was not in good health himself, and in 1953 he used his re-acceptance by the Party to go to Russia for medical treatment. On his return he had yet another surprise in store for the Mexican public which avidly continued to follow his activities. Some years previously he had painted a mural for the Del Prado Hotel in Mexico City, one of his most delightful compositions. (This was seriously damaged in the earthquake of 1985) Called Dream of a Sunday Afternoon on the Central Alameda, it is an autobiographical work which shows the artist as a boy, hand in hand with a female skeleton in grand Edwardian costume - a typically gruesome piece of Mexican folklore. They are surrounded by characters from a fantastic paseo. The mural was kept covered after its completion because Rivera had included the slogan 'God Does Not Exist'. Now he ceremoniously painted out the offending words, thus announcing his reconciliation with the Church though the reconciliation somehow did not involve another breach with the Communist Party. With the opposing forces in his life, and in Mexican culture, now neatly in balance, Rivera died in November 1957.Credit to Artchive for taking their text.
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