Diego Rivera (c.1886-1957), husband of Frida Kahlo
, was arguably the greatest of Los Tres Grandes , the "Big
Three" Mexican artists who interpreted the Revolution and Mexican
history through the medium of enormous murals and put the nation's
art onto an international footing in the first half of the
twentieth century. His works (along with those of José Clemente
Orozco and David Siqueiros ) remain among the country's
most striking sights.
Rivera studied from the age of ten at the San Carlos Academy in
the capital, immediately showing immense ability, and later moved
to Paris where he flirted with many of the new trends, in
particular Cubism. More importantly, though, he and Siqueiros
planned, in exile, a popular, native art to express the new society
in Mexico. In 1921, Rivera returned from Europe to the aftermath of
the Revolution, and right away began work for the Ministry of
Education at the behest of the socialist Education Minister, poet
and Presidential hopeful José Vasconcelos. Informed by his own
Communist beliefs, and encouraged by the leftist sympathies of the
times, Rivera embarked on the first of his massive,
consciousness-raising murals , whose themes - Mexican
history, the oppression of the natives, post-revolutionary
resurgence - were initially more important than their techniques.
Many of his early murals are deceptively simple, naive even, but in
fact Rivera's style remained close to major trends and, following
the lead of Siqueiros, took a scientific approach to his work,
looking to industrial advances for new techniques, better materials
and fresh inspiration. The view of industrial growth as a universal
panacea (particularly in their earlier works) may have been
simplistic, but their use of technology and experimentation with
new methods and original approaches often has startling results -
this is particularly true of Siqueiros' work at the Polyforum
Siquerios.
Communism continued to be a major source of motivation and
inspiration for Rivera, who was a long-standing member of the
Mexican Communist Party. When ideological differences caused a rift
in Soviet politics, Rivera supported Trotsky 's
"revolutionary internationalism", and in 1936, after Trotsky had
spent seven years in exile from the Soviet Union on the run from
Stalin's henchmen and was running out of countries who would accept
him, Rivera used his influence over Mexican President Lázaro
Cárdenas to get permission for Trotsky and his wife Natalia to
enter the country. They stayed with Diego and Frida rent-free at
their Coyoacán house before Trotsky moved down the road to what is
now the Museo Casa de León Trotsky . The passionate and
often violent differences between orthodox Stalinists and
Trotskyites spilled over into the art world creating a great rift
between Rivera and ardent Stalinist Siqueiros, who was later jailed
for his involvement in an assassination attempt on Trotsky. Though
Rivera later broke with Trotsky and was eventually readmitted to
the Communist party, Trotsky continued to admire Rivera's murals
finding them "not simply a 'painting', an object of passive
contemplation, but a living part of the class struggle".