Diego Rivera
Biography
(1886-1957)

Many diverse and opposing "facts" have been written about this artist, including major historical discrepancies scripted in his own autobiographical writings. There are more myths about him thought to be true than the truth itself, and Diego, the spellbinding storyteller, was behind most of this spun life.

Diego Rivera was not your ordinary human mortal in terms of physical size, imagination, creativity and, most of all talent. He was determined to create his own legend so people would be sure to know just how great he intended to live, think and paint. What did he probably consider to be his three most important assets?

Large, Large, and Large.

He lived large, he dreamed large and he painted large!

Diego started to draw at the age of three, as he has said about himself, "Just as soon as I could get my short little fat fingers around a pencil, I was drawing on everything. So I wouldn't destroy the entire house, my father hung canvas over the walls and floor in my room and I just never stopped drawing." He started to read at four and had an endless curiosity about the inner workings of every gadget he could get his hands on, forever taking them apart and putting them back together again.

His father, Diego Rivera, was a criollo, a person born in Mexico but descended from European ancestry. His family was one of the wealthy early 18th Century aristocrats of Guanajuato but by the time Diego was born, the silver had played out and they lived a rather shabby, yet, genteel lifestyle. Nonetheless, his father had a decent library, was a schoolteacher at the time of Diego's birth and would later become employed in governmental administration positions in Mexico City.

Senior was a political liberal and secular Freemason. He was very aware and greatly concerned about the rural poverty that left eighty-five percent of all Mexicans illiterate. Diego spent a great deal of time with his father and these shared feelings were the source of Rivera's enormous compassion for the impoverished masses of Mexican Indians. Later in life, in all his Mexican art, he would portray them with dignity and grace. He honored them as descendants of the mighty Mayans and Aztecs.

His mother, Maria del Pilar Barrientos, was a mestizo, part European, and part Indian, a devout Catholic, such as ninety-five percent of the Mexicans at that time. Her family was considered respectable middle class. She was also one of the few mestizo women to be educated and went later to the state school of obstetrics and worked as a midwife. Diego claimed his family was dirt poor and his mother could neither read nor write. This was pure storytelling probably done to create an image of "a poor disadvantaged boy, heroically struggling, destined to conquer the world."

In truth, he was quite spoiled, dropped out of all three of his parents’ chosen schools and demanded to be enrolled in the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts at the age of ten. He started out at the finest young adult man’s art school in Mexico as a frog eyed, fat boy in short pants and with all kinds of disgusting little slimy things boys like to carry around, crawling out of his pockets. He ended up, six years later, graduating at the top of his class, destined to become San Carlos’s most world renowned artist. This is the stuff that legends are made of and it’s all fact. Diego’s artistic mastery was the only one consistent real truth in all his life.

The rigid traditional perspective drawing instructed at San Carlos would turn Diego into the finest draftsman among all of his 20th Century peers. It drives his success of the tromp l’oeil in his mural work. The deftness of his pure linear draftsmanship lies beneath all his seemingly simplistic folk art paintings. He was most strictly instructed in the Golden Section, the ancient pseudo-scientific theory regarding mathematical rules of proportion. Forever, Rivera’s adherence to rules in art would distinguish his work from the Post Impressionist artists. Diego owes much of his achievement to this rigorous and rational training he received during those six years at the academy.

The most consequential wisdom garnered from San Carlos, that would forever mark his art, was the knowledge of the greatness of the pre-conquest Indian civilizations who lived and ruled in Mexico centuries before Cortez stepped foot onto their land. Rivera painted a lot of easel art to pay for his avid collecting of Pre-Columbian art. In his later easel paintings he even worked on multiples of six at the same time, claiming it was a skill he had learned from watching the mass-production on Detroit’s auto assembly lines.

Nude with Calla Lilies 1944

Peasants 1947

Upon graduating in the spring of 1906, Diego was determined to go to Europe to study the Old Masters as well as meet the avant-garde European artists of the day. Through his father's connections, but not his political allegiance, Senior was able to get his son a scholarship from the Porfirian government who were in power at that time under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Diego chose not to go directly to Paris as most other émigrés had done, so instead, he sailed to Spain, arriving on January 6, 1907. He would stay to study and paint there for two years. He was so absorbed in Goya's paintings that his own style at that time began to emulate this great Spanish artist. The other renowned artist whom he studied intensively was El Greco.

All of the Old Masters he absorbed while in Spain can be seen emanating later from Rivera's grand murals. In his own life time, the name Mural and Diego Rivera would become synonymous. The seed of his majestic murals' success was undoubtedly planted there in the soil of Spain.

While living and touring the Spanish countryside, he was industrious as he would always be, painting, earning a living and sending his canvases home to oblige his Mexican patronage. His accomplished paintings such as the Old Stone and New Flowers show the skillfulness of his talent, but later in life, Diego believed his Spanish pieces to be the worst of his life, pictorially pleasant, at best.

Back home in 1910, the tumultuous Mexican Revolution was well under way but Rivera took little notice. He was too busy preparing his first one-man art exhibit which was concocted by President Diaz for the sole purpose of propagandizing his corrupt Mexican regime. Years later, Diego would claim to have personally championed the rights of the poor suffering masses but there is no evidence to substantiate this claim or his even more incredulous claim of actually taking up arms and fighting with the heroic guerrilla, Emiliano Zapata. Diego would have a very financially successful exhibition and return to Paris to sit out the fighting, far away from his fellow countrymen.

He would later paint the great revolutionaries in his great revolutionary art. But was Diego Rivera a Revolutionary?

Never, this was one of his most gargantuan myths.

Diego returned to Paris in mid 1910 and stayed until 1920. At last his work began to undergo major shifts. He was totally immersed in Cubist art by 1913. Pablo Picasso, the inventor of Cubism, went to Rivera, not the other way around, as most people would surmise. Picasso recognized Rivera's innate understanding of the Cubist theories on the canvases Diego was producing during this period. They became best friends and worked together for over four years. The mathematical rules Rivera had learned at the San Carlos Academy transformed him into one of the world's most acknowledged great Cubists. As Diego's fame grew as an artist so did his ego. He became an outrageous braggart, spinning ever increasingly fantastic tales about his cannibalism and his heroic feats in faraway Mexico.

By 1921, Diego was weary of Paris and Angeline. He longed to go home. The Mexican Revolution was over and Alvaro Obregon, the greatest general of the war's victors had been elected President of Mexico.

New educational programs swept in with this newly enlightened government. Rivera, along with other well known Mexican artists, were invited to paint massive wall murals throughout Mexico for the grand purpose of uniting all its multi-race citizens into a Country of One. Mexico was determined never again to suffer the inferiority complex of a colonized nation.

Before he sailed for Mexico, Diego took a detour through Italy to learn everything he could about fresco painting. This Italian trip was a good investment of his time because the next gun to be fired in Mexico was not for the Revolution of Politics. It was for the Revolution of Art. The gunshot to be heard would signal the start of the great mural race and Diego was now set to be at the head of the pack.

When Diego arrived home in June, 1921, thousands of new schools were being built, millions of books were being distributed and the illiteracy rate dropped by thirty percent within four years. This new free-spirited liberal government, however, needed a more effective media than books in which to sell their Glorious New Nation's story. After all those guerilla victories, the vast majority of their ethnic population still could not read or write.

Into Mexican history walks a man by the name of Jose Vasconcelos, the newly appointed Minister of Education. He is a visionary, like none seen before in his country. In the early 20th Century, film was a phenomenon on the horizon of discovery but Vasconcelos had the futuristic insight to realize that "a picture is worth a thousand words." Diego Rivera is bent on becoming his new best friend. The rest is history as we can look back in hindsight and know why the great Mural Renaissance of Mexico was born.

Rivera's first public mural was the Creation, painted in two stages of time.