Diego Rivera (c.1886-1957), husband of
Frida Kahlo , was arguably the greatest of
Los Tres Grandes , the "Big Three"
Mexican artists who interpreted the Revolution
and Mexican history through the medium of
enormous murals and put the nation's art onto an
international footing in the first half of the
twentieth century. His works (along with those
of
José Clemente Orozco and
David
Siqueiros ) remain among the country's most
striking sights.
Rivera studied from the age of ten at the San
Carlos Academy in the capital, immediately
showing immense ability, and later moved to
Paris where he flirted with many of the new
trends, in particular Cubism. More importantly,
though, he and Siqueiros planned, in exile, a
popular, native art to express the new society
in Mexico. In 1921, Rivera returned from Europe
to the aftermath of the Revolution, and right
away began work for the Ministry of Education at
the behest of the socialist Education Minister,
poet and Presidential hopeful José Vasconcelos.
Informed by his own Communist beliefs, and
encouraged by the leftist sympathies of the
times, Rivera embarked on the first of his
massive, consciousness-raising murals ,
whose themes - Mexican history, the oppression
of the natives, post-revolutionary resurgence -
were initially more important than their
techniques. Many of his early murals are
deceptively simple, naive even, but in fact
Rivera's style remained close to major trends
and, following the lead of Siqueiros, took a
scientific approach to his work, looking to
industrial advances for new techniques, better
materials and fresh inspiration. The view of
industrial growth as a universal panacea
(particularly in their earlier works) may have
been simplistic, but their use of technology and
experimentation with new methods and original
approaches often has startling results - this is
particularly true of Siqueiros' work at the
Polyforum Siquerios.
Communism continued to be a major source of
motivation and inspiration for Rivera, who was a
long-standing member of the Mexican Communist
Party. When ideological differences caused a
rift in Soviet politics, Rivera supported
Trotsky 's "revolutionary internationalism",
and in 1936, after Trotsky had spent seven years
in exile from the Soviet Union on the run from
Stalin's henchmen and was running out of
countries who would accept him, Rivera used his
influence over Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas
to get permission for Trotsky and his wife
Natalia to enter the country. They stayed with
Diego and Frida rent-free at their Coyoacán
house before Trotsky moved down the road to what
is now the Museo Casa de León Trotsky .
The passionate and often violent differences
between orthodox Stalinists and Trotskyites
spilled over into the art world creating a great
rift between Rivera and ardent Stalinist
Siqueiros, who was later jailed for his
involvement in an assassination attempt on
Trotsky. Though Rivera later broke with Trotsky
and was eventually readmitted to the Communist
party, Trotsky continued to admire Rivera's
murals finding them "not simply a 'painting', an
object of passive contemplation, but a living
part of the class struggle".
