Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter best known for his large frescoes—paintings made on fresh wet plaster so that the colour becomes part of the wall. From 1922 until the 1950s he painted walls in Mexico and the United States, from government buildings in Mexico City and an agricultural school at Chapingo to a museum courtyard in Detroit. Together with José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, he is counted among the “three greats” of Mexican muralism. Born in Guanajuato in 1886, he died in Mexico City on November 24, 1957, at the age of 70; his most influential murals date from the 1920s and 1930s.

Rivera believed that art should belong to everyone. He also painted many canvases for collectors, but his great ambition was to paint in public places where workers, farmers and schoolchildren could see his work for free. His murals tell stories: the history of Mexico from the ancient Aztec world to the twentieth century, the struggles of the Mexican Revolution, and the work of ordinary people in fields, mines and factories.

He was also a controversial public figure: a Marxist who worked for capitalist patrons, a man of enormous energy and charm who was also famous for his temper and his many love affairs, and a storyteller who often exaggerated his own life. His marriage to the painter Frida Kahlo made the couple one of the most famous in the history of art.

Guanajuato, the silver-mining city in central Mexico where Rivera was born on December 8, 1886, was home to his well-off parents. He was one of twin boys, but his brother Carlos died when they were about eighteen months old. According to family stories, the small Diego drew everywhere, walls included, and his parents answered by covering a wall with chalkboards and canvas rather than punishing him.

From about the age of ten he studied at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City, the country’s main art school, where he learned the academic European tradition of drawing and painting. With a grant from Teodoro Dehesa, the governor of Veracruz, he left for Europe in 1907, first studying in Madrid.

At that time Mexico was ruled by the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, whose government admired European culture and paid little attention to Indigenous traditions. In September 1910 Rivera sailed home to show his European work in an exhibition, and he was in Mexico when the Mexican Revolution broke out that November; in 1911 he returned to Paris, where he spent most of the revolutionary decade. Its long civil war and its promises of land and justice for the poor would later become his greatest subject.

From Madrid Rivera moved to Paris, then the centre of modern art. He lived among artists and writers in the Montparnasse district; his friends included the painters Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1914, Chaïm Soutine and Moïse Kisling, and the writer Ilya Ehrenburg. In 1911 he began a ten-year partnership with the Russian artist Angelina Beloff, often described as his first wife. Their son Diego, born in 1916, died of pneumonia in 1917, about fourteen months old.

Between 1913 and 1917 Rivera painted in the Cubist style developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, breaking objects and people into overlapping flat planes. His Cubist paintings, such as his portraits of friends, are now exhibited in major museums. Around 1917, influenced by Paul Cézanne, he moved toward simpler forms and large areas of bright colour.

In 1920, encouraged by the Mexican ambassador Alberto Pani, Rivera travelled through Italy to study Renaissance frescoes by artists such as Giotto and Michelangelo. These great wall paintings, which told religious stories to people who could not read, showed him how art on walls could teach a whole society.

When the fighting of the Revolution ended around 1920, President Álvaro Obregón appointed the philosopher José Vasconcelos as minister of public education. Vasconcelos launched a government programme to paint murals on public buildings. The goal was to educate a largely illiterate population, celebrate the Revolution, and build a new national identity that took pride in Mexico’s Indigenous and mestizo (mixed) heritage. Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 to join it.

His first major mural, Creation (1922–23), was painted in encaustic (colour mixed with hot wax) in the Bolívar Amphitheatre of the National Preparatory School. It is an allegorical composition still close to European models. According to the story he told, he painted it carrying a pistol to protect himself from hostile right-wing students. In the same year he helped found the Union of Revolutionary Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors, whose manifesto called for public art for the people, and he joined the Mexican Communist Party.

The muralists did not always agree with the government or with each other. Vasconcelos preferred classical European forms, while the painters increasingly used a bolder style and openly revolutionary content. Orozco’s work was darker and more tragic, Siqueiros’s more experimental and militant; Rivera’s was the most narrative and orderly, full of clearly outlined figures and details of daily life.

In 1923 Rivera began painting the walls around the two courtyards of the new Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico City, a former convent. By 1928 he and his assistants had painted over a hundred fresco panels around its courtyards. They show Mexican festivals, markets, dances, miners, weavers and farmers, and—on the upper floor—revolutionary ballads, including the panel In the Arsenal, in which Frida Kahlo is shown handing out weapons. Here Rivera developed his mature style: large, simplified, rounded figures, strong outlines and warm earth colours, partly inspired by pre-Hispanic art.

At the National School of Agriculture at Chapingo, near Texcoco (today the Autonomous University of Chapingo), he painted the main hall and corridor of the school and its former chapel, working there between 1924 and 1927. The chapel murals are often called his masterpiece of the 1920s. Where a church would show saints, Rivera painted the transformation of the land and of society. The murdered revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata and his comrade Otilio Montaño lie buried beneath a field, their bodies nourishing the corn. A reclining nude on the end wall, modelled on his second wife, Guadalupe Marín, symbolizes the liberated, fertile earth.

These cycles show how Rivera turned the language of Christian art—processions, sacrifice, resurrection—into a secular story of labour, revolution and renewal. They also show his mixing of sources: Italian fresco technique, Cubist composition, Mexican folk art and ancient Mesoamerican imagery.

Rivera’s most ambitious work is on the main staircase of the National Palace, the seat of government on the Zócalo, the great central square of Mexico City. Painted between 1929 and 1935 and covering about 276 square metres, the staircase murals, often called The History of Mexico or The Epic of the Mexican People, tell the country’s story from the ancient past to Rivera’s own day, like a giant triptych.

The right wall shows the pre-Hispanic world centred on the god-hero Quetzalcóatl. The huge central wall shows the Spanish conquest with its violence—including torture and slavery—as well as friars defending Indigenous people; above it come the wars of independence, the U.S. and French invasions, the Reform era and the Revolution. The left wall shows modern Mexico as Rivera saw it in the 1930s: corrupt politicians and foreign capitalists on one side, and Karl Marx pointing to a future society of workers on the other. Frida Kahlo appears here too.

On the first-floor corridor Rivera later painted a series of panels on pre-Hispanic cultures, such as the great market of Tlatelolco and the peoples of Michoacán, Oaxaca and the Huasteca—Tarascans, Zapotecs, Mixtecs and Huastecs— ending with the arrival of Hernán Cortés at Veracruz. The series was never finished. The palace murals became widely reproduced and influential images of Mexican history, for Mexicans and foreign visitors alike.

Rivera worked mainly in the United States from November 1930 until the end of 1933. In San Francisco he painted murals for the City Club of the Stock Exchange and for the California School of Fine Arts. In 1931 the new Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him a retrospective exhibition, for which he painted portable fresco panels.

In 1932 the Detroit Institute of Arts, with money from Edsel Ford, commissioned him to paint its central courtyard. After studying the Ford River Rouge plant for months, Rivera and his assistants painted twenty-seven panels in about eight months. Detroit Industry shows workers building the 1932 V8 engine among blast furnaces and assembly lines, together with scenes of medicine, chemistry and aviation. Rivera himself thought it his most successful work. When it was unveiled, some clergy called a vaccination panel—arranged like a Nativity scene—blasphemous, and a newspaper called the murals “un-American,” but the museum and Ford kept them. They were designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 2014.

In New York in 1933 Rivera began Man at the Crossroads for the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. When he added a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, Nelson Rockefeller asked him to remove it. Rivera refused, offering instead to add Abraham Lincoln. He was stopped, paid in full, and the unfinished fresco was covered and in 1934 destroyed. A General Motors commission in Chicago was cancelled. In 1934 Rivera repainted the composition, from photographs, at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City as Man, Controller of the Universe.

Rivera married Frida Kahlo, then a 22-year-old painter, in 1929, when he was 42. Their marriage was stormy: both had affairs, and they divorced in 1939, only to remarry in San Francisco in 1940. They lived in linked houses and studios in Mexico City and shared a passion for Mexican popular culture and radical politics. They helped the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky obtain asylum, and he and his wife lived in Kahlo’s family home, the Blue House, from 1937 to 1939. Kahlo died in 1954; in 1955 Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his art dealer.

In 1940 Rivera painted Pan American Unity in front of visitors at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, a ten-panel mural about the meeting of the art and technology of North and South America. In 1946–1947 he painted Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central for a Mexico City hotel: a crowd of figures from Mexican history strolling in the park, with the young Rivera holding the hand of the skeleton La Catrina, a figure borrowed from the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada. An inscription reading “God does not exist”, a phrase of the nineteenth-century writer Ignacio Ramírez, caused a scandal in 1948, and the mural stayed covered for eight years until Rivera replaced the words in 1956. After the 1985 earthquake the mural was moved to its own museum.

In his last decades Rivera also designed the Anahuacalli, a pyramid-like building of volcanic stone in Coyoacán to house his large collection of pre-Hispanic objects; it opened as a museum in 1964, with about 2,000 pieces on display. He died at his house-studio in San Ángel, in Mexico City, on November 24, 1957, aged 70, and was buried two days later in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons at the Panteón Civil de Dolores.

Rivera’s career was shaped by a tension between his Marxist convictions and his patrons. In Mexico he worked for a post-revolutionary state that promoted national unity but increasingly moved away from radical reform; in the United States he was paid by the Rockefellers and the Fords. In September 1929 the Mexican Communist Party expelled him. The official charge was that he kept accepting commissions from the Mexican government while it was repressing Communists; behind it lay the factional struggle in world communism, and Rivera, who had become sympathetic to Trotsky’s Left Opposition during his stay in Moscow in 1927–28, declared his solidarity with it that December. Siqueiros, a more militant communist, attacked him in print in 1934 as an opportunist whose art served the state and foreign capital.

Historians still debate how far his murals challenged, and how far they served, the governments and patrons who paid for them. Anthony W. Lee’s Painting on the Left (1999) places his San Francisco murals within the city’s radical politics, museums and corporate patronage of the 1930s. Catha Paquette’s At the Crossroads (2017) studies how Rivera and his patrons at the Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller Center and Mexico City’s Palace of Fine Arts used art to influence debates about labour, international relations and political systems. Jacob Zumoff has examined how the Rockefeller affair looked from within the divided left of the 1930s.

The Rockefeller Center affair in particular has become a classic case in debates about artistic freedom versus property rights. Rivera refused to alter his design, while the building’s managers, who controlled the wall, paid him his fee, had the fresco covered and in February 1934 destroyed it. The affair inspired poems by Archibald MacLeish and E. B. White and remains a reference point in discussions of censorship in public art.

Rivera’s murals were central to indigenismo, the post-revolutionary movement that celebrated Indigenous cultures as the root of Mexican identity. His idealized Aztec market at Tlatelolco and his Quetzalcóatl cycle at the National Palace presented a golden age destroyed by conquest, and his Indigenous farmers and labourers became national icons. He also collected pre-Hispanic art on a large scale and built the Anahuacalli to display it.

Historians have also examined the limits of this vision. The art historian Renato González Mello, who has studied the links between Rivera and the anthropology of his time, argues that Rivera turned the photographic “types” of anthropometry, the science of measuring human bodies, into symbols of national identity. In his account, Latin American indigenismo grew out of an environment steeped in racism and built a modern national culture with the racial categories of its day, even while it celebrated Indigenous peoples.

Rivera’s transformation of La Catrina offers a small example of his myth-making. Posada’s original print was a satire of Mexicans who imitated European fashions. In the Alameda mural Rivera gave her a full body and Indigenous features and placed her at the heart of Mexican history, helping turn her into the national icon now linked to the Day of the Dead.

Rivera worked mainly in true fresco (buon fresco): each day a section of wet lime plaster was laid, the design transferred from full-size drawings, and the pigments painted in before the plaster dried. This required careful planning and a team of plasterers and assistants, including artists who later became well known, such as Ben Shahn, Lucienne Bloch and Rina Lazo. His compositions combine Renaissance perspective and Cubist interlocking planes with the flat, crowded storytelling of pre-Hispanic codices.

Much of what we know about Rivera’s life comes from his own tales, which he embellished freely. His autobiography, compiled by Gladys March from years of interviews and published after his death in 1960, includes claims—such as having practised cannibalism as a student—that historians regard as inventions. Biographers therefore check his stories against letters, contracts, photographs and the testimony of others.

Rivera’s influence was enormous. His success in the United States is often credited with encouraging the New Deal mural programmes of the 1930s, and Mexican muralism later inspired the Chicano mural movement and public art throughout Latin America. His painting The Rivals (1931) held the auction record for a Latin American artist until 2021, when it was surpassed by a work by Frida Kahlo. In Mexico a presidential decree of 1959 declared all his works, together with Orozco’s, historic monuments that may not be exported without permission, and the Detroit courtyard is a U.S. National Historic Landmark.