Diego Rivera
The master of the Mexican murals.
Diego Rivera painted gigantic murals about Mexico's history and its workers. He was married to Frida Kahlo.
Diego Rivera was born in 1886 in Guanajuato, Mexico, and showed talent early. He studied at the San Carlos Academy in Mexico City and in 1907 received a scholarship to Europe. He stayed for almost fifteen years, mainly in Paris, where he mixed with Picasso and painted Cubist pictures. One of the best known from that period is Zapatista Landscape of 1915.
After a journey to Italy, where he studied Renaissance frescoes, he returned to Mexico in 1921. After the revolution the new government wanted to reach the people through public art, and Rivera, together with José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, became a leader of Mexican muralism. He painted large cycles in the Ministry of Education in Mexico City and in the National Palace, where Mexico's history, from the indigenous empires to the revolution, fills the walls of the main staircase.
Rivera worked in true fresco, that is, with paint on wet lime plaster. His style is clear and narrative, with rounded, heavy figures, bright colours and many people in the same picture. He celebrated peasants and workers and criticised colonialism and capitalism. He was a communist, but his relationship with the party was changeable.
In the early 1930s he worked in the United States. Detroit Industry, the murals about the car industry in the Detroit Institute of Arts of 1932–33, is regarded as his finest work in the country. At the Rockefeller Center in New York he included a portrait of Lenin and refused to remove it. The mural was destroyed in 1934, and he painted a new version in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
In 1929 Rivera married Frida Kahlo. The marriage was stormy, and they divorced in 1939 but remarried the following year. Together they received Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1937. Rivera died in 1957. He made the mural an art form for political and popular storytelling and inspired mural painting throughout the Americas.