Diego Rivera

Among the most important artists of post-revolutionary Mexico, Diego Rivera possessed a modernist vision that was inseparable from his tireless advocacy of Indigenous art. The visual language of Rivera’s paintings and murals, replete with Mesoamerican imagery, was developed in and through his collection of nearly sixty thousand pre-Columbian artifacts that the artist assembled between 1910 and his death in 1957.

Born to a wealthy family in central Mexico, Rivera began his formal training as a painter at the age of ten, studying at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. In 1907, he traveled to Europe, studying briefly in Madrid before settling in Paris, where he befriended a group of international artists as associated with the School of Paris. In 1920‒21, Rivera traveled to Italy to study frescoes. The monumental schemes of Renaissance wall painting had a formative impact upon his conception of public art when he returned to Mexico in 1921. As artists and politicians grappled with how to memorialize the ten-year Mexican Revolution (1910‒20) and how to visualize ensuing social change and reform, Rivera’s socialist-inflected, large-scale mural programs used images of Mexico’s pre-colonial past to express the nationalist identity of the future.

As he rose to prominence with highly visible mural commissions in Mexico and the United States, Rivera promoted the popular art and culture of Mexico as a contributor to and editor of the English-language journal Mexican Folkways, published by Frances Toor between 1925 and 1937. He traveled to Moscow in 1927 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Rivera remained in the Soviet Union until the following year, when he was expelled for participating in anti-Soviet political activity; the Communist Party subsequently revoked his membership. Before he left Moscow, Rivera met Alfred H. Barr Jr., who championed the artist’s work in a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1931) and helped him to secure additional commissions in the United States.

In 1929, Rivera married the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. After traveling throughout the United States between 1930 and 1934, Kahlo and Rivera returned to their homes in Coyoacán, on the outskirts of Mexico City. For the next decade, they lived between Kahlo’s family home, La Casa Azul, and their home and adjoining studio built in 1931–32 by the Mexican architect and painter Juan O’Gorman. In 1945 Rivera began to design a museum to house his collection: a basalt stone structure, built on a lava bed, that resembles a pre-Columbian pyramid. Rivera created large-scale mosaics with mythological themes to adorn the roof, and integrated elements of the landscape within its open-air design. Within the interior, Rivera created an intricate display program with the assistance of the anthropologist Alfonso Caso, choosing two thousand works to exhibit. In his memoirs, Rivera lamented that the project depleted his financial resources and remained unfinished. After his death, the construction of the Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli was completed by architects O’Gorman and Heriberto Pagelson.