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. Between 1922 and 1953 he covered walls in Mexico City, Chapingo and Cuernavaca in Mexico, and in San Francisco, Detroit and New York in the United States. Together with José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, he is counted among the “three greats” of Mexican muralism.

Rivera believed that art should belong to everyone. Instead of making pictures for a few collectors, he wanted to paint in public places where workers, farmers and schoolchildren could see them 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.

Rivera was born on December 8, 1886, in Guanajuato, a silver-mining city in central Mexico, to a well-off family. His twin brother Carlos died at the age of two. Diego began drawing at three; when he drew on the walls, his parents put up chalkboards and canvas to encourage 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. The Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910 while Rivera was in Europe. 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 married the Russian artist Angelina Beloff. Their son, born in 1916, died as a baby in 1918.

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), 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 September 1922 Rivera began painting the 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, between 1923 and 1927, its former chapel. 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 450 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 did more than almost any other work to shape how Mexicans and foreigners imagine the country’s history.

Rivera lived mostly in the United States from 1930 to 1934. 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 art student, 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. From 1937 they hosted the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky for several months. 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” caused a scandal, and the mural was hidden for years until Rivera removed it. 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 in Mexico City on November 24, 1957, and was buried at the Panteón de Dolores cemetery.

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 1929 the Mexican Communist Party expelled him, officially because of his suspected Trotskyist sympathies; critics on the left also objected to his acceptance of government and wealthy private commissions. Siqueiros, a more militant communist, attacked him in print in 1934 as an opportunist whose art served the state and foreign capital.

Scholars have interpreted this double position in different ways. Some, including sympathetic early biographers such as Bertram Wolfe, stress Rivera’s ability to place radical messages in official spaces, as in the National Palace or at Rockefeller Center. Others see his murals as helping the one-party state build a unifying national myth that obscured continuing inequality. Anthony Lee’s study of Rivera’s San Francisco murals and Catha Paquette’s work on his patrons at MoMA and Rockefeller Center examine how the meanings of his murals were negotiated with the institutions that paid for them.

The Rockefeller Center affair in particular has become a classic case in debates about artistic freedom versus property rights. Rivera argued that a work of art belongs to humanity; the building’s managers argued that they had bought the wall. 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 and anthropologists have also criticized this vision. Scholars such as Renato González Mello have examined links between Rivera’s imagery and state-sponsored anthropology of the period. Critics argue that indigenismo often celebrated Indigenous people as symbols of the past or as picturesque types, while the living Indigenous communities of Mexico had little voice in how they were represented and continued to face poverty and pressure to assimilate. The murals’ contrast between noble Aztecs and cruel Spaniards has also been called too simple by historians of the conquest.

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 his murals are protected as historic monuments, and the Detroit courtyard is a U.S. National Historic Landmark.