Description of Diego Rivera Art

Diego Rivera, who's full name was the unwieldy "Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez" was born December 8, 1886, Guanajuato City, Guanajuato, Mexico. He remains one of the most famous Mexican painters of all time and worked as a painter and muralist in the early 20th century in the Americas as well as Europe. Although he was much more well known during his lifetime, he has gained more notoriety recently as the husband of Frida Kahlo, a Mexican painter who's work became stylish from the 1980s into the 21st century.

Print this article

Biography
- Diego's family moved to Mexico city while he was still young; he began to study at art at the Academy of San Carlos at age 10. He earned a government pension as a painter and muralist in 1905 and a scholarship to study art in Europe from 1907 to 1911. His connections introduced him to the world of surrealism and, from there, into the world of the avant garde European art scene, in which he eventually met Picasso. He followed Picasso into Cubism for a while, then studied renaissance art in Italy before returning to Mexico in the early 1920s. In 1922, he began one of his first murals in Mexico at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. From then on, he completed many murals or the government, some of which were considered quite controversial because of his leftest communist leanings. He was active in politics and the Mexican Revolution while completing murals all over the Americas until the 1950s. He died of heart failure in 1957 at the age of 71.
Early Artwork
- Rivera started out with simplified yet clear depictions of workers and families in Mexico. He often showed Mexican farmers, workers or women doing daily chores and wanted to shown the common everyday life of his countrymen. Rivera was especially interested in the folk and native customs of his home country.
Studying in Europe
- His works started to get more complicated in Europe, with his study of neo-impressionism and cubism. He was particularly influenced by Cezanne, who inspired his study of the classics. He would later draw heavily from Gauguin and Rousseau in his depictions of Mexico.
Back in the Americas
- Rivera simplified his works again, adapting his new interest and study of renaissance art as well as his exposure to neo-impressionism and cubism to create his new style that would eventually evolve into art-deco. He was recruited back to the Americas with a plea to his Nationalism and took his task of creating art for and by the Mexican people very seriously.
Rivera's murals
- Most of Diego's murals revolved around the idea of the community as a whole and equality among men. He was interested in Marxism and Lenin's communism; he tried to produce art that would be easily seen and understood by the masses and encourage the common man's self-empowerment and the importance of interdependence and egalitarianism.
Final Works
- Diego's latest works combined his original simplicity and subject matter with more overt communist imagery. He painted a mural for the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, which included a portrait Vladamir Lenin; when he refused to revise the mural to the RCA's satisfaction, his commission was withdrawn. The mural was destroyed in 1934. Ironically, in 1932, he had been dismissed from the communist party for failure to fully exemplify party ideals and was often thought more of an anarchist by the official party.