Rivera, Diego

Rivera, Diego (1886–1957). Mexican painter, the most celebrated figure in the revival of monumental fresco painting that is Mexico's most distinctive contribution to modern art. He was born in Guanajuato, to educated parents of liberal views. In 1892 the family moved to Mexico City, and in 1896 Rivera enrolled in evening classes at the Academy of San Carlos whilst still at school. He became a full-time student there two years later; one of his teachers was Dr Atl. In 1907 he went to Madrid on a four-year scholarship. He visited Paris in 1909 and after a brief return to Mexico he settled there from 1911 to 1920. During this time he became one of the lions of café society and was friendly with many leading artists. He became familiar with modern movements, but although he made some early experiments with Cubism, for example, his mature art was firmly rooted in Mexican tradition. At about the time of the Russian Revolution he had become interested in politics and in the role art could play in society. In 1920–1 he visited Italy to study Renaissance frescos (already thinking in terms of a monumental public art), then returned to his homeland, eager to be of service to the Mexican Revolution.

In 1920 Alvaro Obregón, an art lover as well as a reformist, had been elected president of Mexico, and Rivera, who was an extremely forceful personality, swiftly emerged as the leading artist in the programme of murals he initiated glorifying the history and people of the country in a spirit of revolutionary fervour. Many examples of his work are in public buildings in Mexico City, and they are often on a huge scale, a tribute to his enormous energy. His first mural, the allegorical Creation, was painted for the National Training School in 1922. His most ambitious scheme, in the National Palace, covering the history of Mexico, was begun in 1929; it was still unfinished at his death, but it contains some of his most magnificent work. Rivera's murals were frankly didactic, intended to inspire a sense of nationalist and socialist identity in a still largely illiterate population; their glorification of creative labour or their excoriation of capitalism can be crude, but his best work has immense vigour and shows formidable skill in choreographing the incident- and figure-packed compositions, in combining traditional and modern subject-matter, and in blending stylized and realistic images.

In 1927 Rivera visited the Soviet Union and in 1930–4 he worked in the USA, painting several frescos that were influential on the muralists of the Federal Art Project. His main commission in America was a series on Detroit Industry (1932–3) in the Detroit Institute of Arts; another major mural, Man at the Crossroads (1933), in the Rockefeller Center, New York, was destroyed before completion because he included a portrait of Lenin. It was replaced with a mural by Brangwyn. Throughout his career Rivera also painted a wide range of easel pictures, in some of which he experimented with the encaustic (wax) technique. There is a museum of his work at Guanajuato.

Rivera was an enormous man (standing over six feet and weighing over 20 stones), and although he was notoriously ugly he was irresistibly attractive to women. He had numerous love affairs and was married three times, his second wife (and his third, for they divorced and remarried) being the painter Frida Kahlo. Her parents said ‘it was like a marriage between an elephant and a dove', and a biographer wrote: ‘Part of his appeal was his monstrous appearance—his ugliness made a perfect foil for the type of woman who likes to play beauty to a beast—but the greater attraction was his personality. He was a frog prince, an extraordinary man, full of brilliant humour, vitality, and charm.’