Class struggle diego rivera biography

Mexican muralist (1886–1957)

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Rivera y Barrientos and the second or maternal family name is Acosta y Rodríguez.

Diego Rivera (Spanish pronunciation:[ˈdjeɣoriˈβeɾa]; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the mural movement in Mexican and international art.

Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted murals in, among other places, Mexico City, Chapingo, and Cuernavaca, Mexico; and San Francisco, Detroit, and New York City, United States. In 1931, a retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; this was before he completed his 27-mural series known as Detroit Industry Murals.

Rivera had four wives and numerous children, including at least one illegitimate daughter. His first child and only son died at the age of two. His third wife was fellow Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, with whom he had a volatile relationship that continued until her de

The public persona of Diego Rivera and the heroic status bestowed upon him in Mexico was such that the artist became the subject of myth in his own lifetime. His own memories, as recorded in his various autobiographies, have contributed to his image as a precocious child of exotic parentage, a young firebrand who fought in the Mexican Revolution, and a visionary who completely repudiated his participation in the European avant-garde to follow a predestined course as the leader of Mexico's art revolution.

The facts are more prosaic. The product of a middle-class family, the young artist completed an academic course of training at the prestigious Academic course of San Carlos before leaving Mexico for the traditional period of European study. During his first stay abroad, like many other young painters, he was greatly influenced by Post-Impressionists Paul Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. As for participating in the early battles of the Mexican Revolution, recent research would seem to indicate that he did not. Although he was in Mexico for a time in late 1910-early 1911, his tales of fighting with the Zapatistas cannot be substantiated.

From the summer of 1911 until the winter of 1920, Rivera lived in Paris. This period of his career has been brilliantly illuminated by Ramon Favela in the 1984-85 exhibition "Diego Rivera: The Cubist Year." The work of these years reveals diverse influences, from the art of El Greco and new applications of mathematical principles, in which Rivera had been well schooled at San Carlos, to subject matter and techniques that reflect the discussions on the role of art in the service of the revolution that preoccupied the community of emigre artists in Montparnasse.

During this time period, Diego Rivera left Spain for a long tour in France, Belgium, Holland and England hoping to solve a problem he couldn't really define. He admired greatly the work of Breughel, Hogarth and Francisco Goya. He wished

CH003.qxd 6/12/07 3:24 PM 3 Page 51 “A Living Part of the Class Struggle” diego river a’s THE FLOWER a n d t h e h o l ly w o o d l e f t CARRIER Frank Krutnik This chapter explores a curious visual legacy of the Hollywood Left. The Flower Carrier, a 1935 easel work by the flamboyant Mexican muralist and Communist Diego Rivera, is prominently displayed in several films released during the period in which Hollywood was under intensive scrutiny from HUAC.1 The recurrence of The Flower Carrier across The Woman on Pier 13 (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), The Prowler (1951), and several other films amounts to an enigmatic communication from a turbulent past. In a mysterious and provocative instance of countertextual inscription, this painting is incorporated within the flow of images to emblematize a political critique that could not otherwise be articulated. The films themselves also carry explicit political resonance, even if their methods and agendas contrast sharply. In a Lonely Place is often read as an allegorical treatment of the culture of suspicion that prevailed in Hollywood during the HUAC era. The Prowler is a tough, socially grounded crime film that critiques the skewed postwar culture of materialist aspiration; it was the product of a left-wing director and writers who would soon become blacklist exiles. As Thom Andersen suggests, such politically inflected tales of criminal transgression were attractive to the Hollywood Left in the late 1940s and early 1950s, perhaps because the familiar generic framework of the crime story provided an effective yet contained vehicle for exposing the flaws of contemporary American society.2 The Woman on Pier 13, by contrast, uses the materials of the crime film from a divergent political perspective. But although it was a notorious entry in the cycle of Hollywood anti-Communist thrillers produced in the late 1940s and earl

The left wall of the monumental stairway

Top left and center right

Frida Kahlo, Diego River's wife, and her sister Cristina, teachers of Marxism

Center and lower right