Diego Rivera
From Philosopedia
Rivera, Diego (8 December 188 - 24 November 1957)
Rivera was a controversial Mexican muralist. A declared atheist, he was a Communist who mixed with rich capitalists. Patrick Marnham’s Dreaming with his Eyes Open (1998) depicts Rivera as a person who for a time and for effect wore a gun and holster. He was an overweight person who reached three hundred pounds, a Marxist who chummed in Mexico with Trotsky and André Breton, and a pal in 1914 with Picasso in Montparnasse and in the 1930s with the Rockefellers in Manhattan.
At a time when his first wife was pregnant, Marnham wrote, Rivera was sleeping with the photographer and Soviet agent Tina Modotti. When the mother of his first child was delivering their baby, he was sleeping with her friend, never acknowledging the daughter they had together. When married to the noted artist Frida Kahlo, he allegedly slept with her younger sister Cristina as well as with Paulette Goddard, Louise Nevelson, and others.
Rivera is said by Marnham to have exaggerated many personal stories, concluding that he was a dreamer “with his eyes open”: for example, averring that he was so sickly at birth he was discarded into a bucket of dung but miraculously somehow recovered; that he lived for two years with the Tarascan Indian wet nurse who had carried him off into a forest; that as a boy he lectured to Christians in their church about the falsity of their religion; that he once recommended eating “women’s brains in vinaigrette”; and that he was related on his mother’s side to the Emperor Maximilian’s wife, Carlotta.
(Detail of a Large Painting, Rockefeller Center, New York City. President Abraham Lincoln Helps Poor Workers Build Capitalists' Dreams. Photo by Michael Roedel, 2008)
Rivera “concentrated on Humanist themes,” according to Corliss Lamont. His Man at the Crossroads mural for Rockefeller Center in New York City (1933) depicted Lenin along with working class individuals—when Rivera refused to remove the likeness of Lenin, in the resultant furor the work was destroyed. Murals of his in the Detroit Institute of Arts as well as in numerous buildings in Mexico City typify his interpretation of industrial America and the importance of revolution. Marnham noted in 1932 at the time Edsel Ford was paying Rivera for the Detroit work, over 300,000 workers were being laid off and the remaining workers were receiving pay cuts from $33 to $22 per week: “At City Hall there was talk of closing the museum and selling its collection, and there on the platform of the central railway station stood a ‘foreign artist’ being greeted by the Mexican vice consul and the German-born museum director, an artist who was due to be paid $10,000 to cover a perfectly decent wall with Communist paintings.”
Rivera’s impact was wide, particularly upon artists such as Jackson Pollock. He was “emblematic,” The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote (20 December 1998), “in the debates about national or indigenous art versus art in the International style. And, Picasso aside, he was perhaps the only artist of the century whose popularity made him a global diplomat. Rivera became the cherubic public face of revolutionary, postcolonial Mexico.”
