Diego Rivera: Education and Artistic Influences
Diego Rivera, a Mexican painter born on December 8, 1886, in Guanajuato, Mexico, and who passed away on November 25, 1957, in Mexico City, left an indelible mark on the world of art. His artistic journey transcended his native Mexico, embracing modern European movements before fusing Mexican and European forms to become one of his country's greatest muralists and a giant in the world of art. Rivera's life and work were shaped by his early education, exposure to diverse artistic styles, and the socio-political climate of his time.
Early Life and Education
Diego Rivera's early life was marked by a strong inclination towards art. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1886, the birthplace of Mexican independence from Spain in 1810, his father, Diego, was a schoolteacher of Spanish-Portuguese-Jewish background, and his mother was of mixed Spanish-Indian descent. A few years after he was born, Rivera’s family moved to Mexico City, where he grew up. Recognizing his artistic leanings, his parents enrolled him in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts in 1896 before he was ten years old. There, he studied under the guidance of Santiago Rebull, José Salomé Peña, Felix Parra, and José María de Velasco until 1902, when Rebull, the rector of the academy, died, to be replaced by Antonio Fabres.
However, the young Rivera soon rebelled against the deadening regime of realism imposed by Fabres and left the academy. Thereafter, Rivera studied and associated with the great José Guadalupe Posada and others. At this time, he also was stirred by the monumental native Mexican architecture. His exposure to both academic training and the vibrant artistic environment outside the academy laid the foundation for his future artistic explorations.
Rivera's early artistic development was also influenced by the political climate in Mexico. Beginning in 1910, Mexico experienced a violent revolution and civil war that sought to achieve social and racial equality for the landless indigenous working class. Rivera’s youthful, aesthetic rebelliousness was wholly compatible with the political and social struggles developing in Mexico. Although not yet really of the people, more and more his sympathies were with them. He and other prominent Mexican artists easily came to equate aesthetic freedom with political freedom and vice versa.
European Influences
Rivera's artistic horizons expanded when he received a scholarship to study at the prestigious San Fernando Academy in Spain under Eduardo Chicarro, a member of the Spanish realist school. In Spain, Rivera came under not only the influence of his teachers in Chicarro’s studio but also, perhaps more important, the work of El Greco and Francisco de Goya. Rivera’s first stay in Europe lasted two years, until 1909. During this time, he often left Spain to wander through Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and the British Isles.
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His time in Europe exposed him to a wide range of artistic styles and movements, including Cubism, Post-Impressionism, and Fauvism. Beginning in 1910, Mexico experienced a violent revolution and civil war that sought to achieve social and racial equality for the landless indigenous working class. When he returned to Europe in 1912, this time to stay until 1921, he was already experiencing profound changes in his worldview and his art. This second European episode and the events he witnessed during it generally set his new aesthetic-political outlook. As before, he traveled extensively and associated with artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso. He also felt comfortable among the Russian artists, communist and noncommunist, in exile in Western Europe. His art began to reflect the work of his fellow painters, and, in Paris, he sometimes exhibited his canvases with theirs. Rivera also felt the impact of World War I and the Russian Revolution, some of which he saw firsthand.
Gradually, Rivera drifted toward cubism, to which he became completely dedicated until at least 1917. made a significant contribution to the movement and firmly established him as a cubist of the first degree. Through Matisse, he also experimented with Fauvism. His Mexican background especially helped him appreciate the Fauvists’ use of color.
His exposure to Cubism, in particular, had a profound impact on his artistic style. From 1913 to 1917, Rivera enthusiastically embraced this new style. The Cubists sought to portray multiple dimensions of a single subject through the use of geometric forms or intersecting planes. Pablo Picasso and the recently deceased Paul Cezanne, Rivera's paintings became progressively more abstract.
However, around 1917, inspired by Paul Cézanne's paintings, Rivera shifted toward Post-Impressionism, using simple forms and large patches of vivid colors.
Rivera's time in Europe not only broadened his artistic horizons but also shaped his political views. He witnessed the social and political upheavals of World War I and the Russian Revolution, which influenced his commitment to left-wing political causes.
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Return to Mexico and Muralism
In 1920, José Vasconcelos, the newly-appointed Mexican Minister of Education, presented Rivera with a grant to fund a seventeen-month stay in Italy where he studied Etruscan, Byzantine, and Renaissance art. After José Vasconcelos became Minister of Education, Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 to become involved in the government sponsored Mexican mural program planned by Vasconcelos. In 1921, Rivera returned to Mexico for the first time since his departure in 1907. The post-revolutionary Mexican government was enacting a series of reforms to promote and solidify its nationalist and socialist ideals, and Vasconcelos recognized the power of murals for this purpose. He developed a government-sponsored public art program that commissioned artists to paint murals in government buildings throughout Mexico.
The program included such Mexican artists as José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, and the French artist Jean Charlot. Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco were among the most prominent of these artists and, together, became known as Los tres grandes (The Three Great Ones) for their contributions to Mexican art during this period.
The public mural program promoted what was known as Mexican Modernism; centered in Mexico City during the 1920s and 1930s, artists and intellectuals contributed to this dynamic period of artistic achievement through writing, painting, drawing, and photography.
Though much of Rivera’s previous artwork reflected his European training, the murals he created upon his return to Mexico were a unique synthesis of classical European style, elements of traditional Mexican art such as vivid colors and simplified figures, and Mexican subject matter.
Rivera's murals often depicted scenes from Mexican history, culture, and society, reflecting the country's 1910 Revolution. Rivera's art work, in a fashion similar to the steles of the Maya, tells stories.
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Rivera joined a group of artists, including muralist Jose Clemente Orozco and Mexican realist David Alfaro Siqueiros, in a government-sponsored mural program. genre, Creation, which he painted on a wall in the National Preparatory School auditorium in Mexico City, depicts a heavenly host with Renaissance haloes. The artist also joined the Mexican Communist Society during that first year of his repatriation. He founded the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors as well. until 1928. The finished work, consisting of over 120 frescoes covering more than 5,200 square feet, is installed in Mexico City's Secretariat of Public Education building. By now the artist was well into his 30s, and the Diego Rivera painting style had come into its own, featuring large figures with simplified lines and rich colors.
His murals became a powerful medium for conveying his political beliefs and promoting social change. Rivera's frescoes show festivals, such as "The Day of the Dead" and "The Maize Festival" from 1924.
In the autumn of 1922, Rivera participated in the founding of the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, and later that year he joined the Mexican Communist Party[24] (including its Central Committee). His murals, subsequently painted only in fresco, are about Mexican society and reflected the country's 1910 Revolution.
Like Picasso, Orozco, Siqueiros, and numerous other artists during the interwar period, Rivera was a communist, at least spiritually and emotionally if not doctrinally. He was not, however, a Stalinist.
In 1926-1927, Rivera completed his first masterpiece, a fresco cycle in the National Agricultural School in Chapingo. Rivera painted murals in the main hall and corridor at the Chapingo Autonomous University of Agriculture (UACh). He also painted a fresco mural titled Tierra Fecundada[31] (Fertile Land in English) in the university's chapel between 1923 and 1927. Fertile Land depicts the revolutionary struggles of Mexico's peasant (farmers) and working classes (industry) in part through the depiction of hammer and sickle joined by a star in the soffit of the chapel. In the mural, a "propagandist" points to another hammer and sickle. The corpses of revolutionary heroes Emiliano Zapata and Otilio Montano are shown in graves, their bodies fertilizing the maize field above. A sunflower in the center of the scene "glorifies those who died for an ideal and are reborn, transfigured, into the fertile cornfield of the nation", writes Rodrigues.
Rivera's commitment to social and political causes often led to controversy. In 1933, his mural "Man at the Crossroads," commissioned for the Rockefeller Center in New York City, was destroyed because it included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin.
Influence and Legacy
Diego Rivera's influence on the art world extends far beyond his own work. He helped to create the modern mural movement and also put art into the political arena on the side of the popular struggle for freedom and equality. Rivera was a true founder of the people’s art movement.
Rivera's work also had a significant impact on American art. Rivera is even credited with inspiring Franklin Roosevelt and his administration to found the New Deal’s Federal Art Project. By observing Rivera, the American government understood how art could affect a distressed population and allocated funds to invest in artists like Ilya Botolowsky, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Stella, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner.
His murals inspired a generation of artists and paved the way for the Federal Art Program of the 1930s.
Rivera's legacy as a painter, muralist, and social activist continues to inspire artists and activists around the world.
Personal Life
Rivera had a complex personal life marked by multiple marriages and relationships. After moving to Paris, Rivera met Angelina Beloff, an artist from the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire. They married in 1911, and had a son, Diego (1916-1918), who died young. Rivera divorced Beloff and married Guadalupe Marín as his second wife in June 1922, after having returned to Mexico. He was still married when he met art student Frida Kahlo in Mexico City. They began a passionate affair and, after he divorced Marín, Rivera married Kahlo on August 21, 1929. He was 42 and she was 22. Their mutual infidelities and his violent temper resulted in divorce in 1939, but they remarried December 8, 1940, in San Francisco. A year after Kahlo's death, on July 29, 1955, Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his agent since 1946.
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