Mexican muralist who spent eleven years in Montparnasse first — 1909 to 1920, most of them as a serious Cubist. Modigliani painted his portrait, the 1917 'affaire Rivera' ended his Cubism in a public quarrel, and Italian frescoes sent him home to invent Mexican muralism.
Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter and the leading figure of the Mexican mural movement, which put large public paintings of Mexican history on the walls of government buildings after the revolution. He was born at Guanajuato on 8 December 1886 and died in Mexico City on 24 November 1957.
He painted enormous frescoes in the National Palace in Mexico City, the Ministry of Education, the chapel at Chapingo, and in Detroit and San Francisco.[1] They tell Mexican history from the Aztec period through the conquest, the colony, the dictatorship and the revolution.
He was a communist, and his politics wrecked one of his most famous commissions. The Rockefeller family hired him to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center in New York in 1933; he included a portrait of Lenin, refused to remove it, and the unfinished fresco was destroyed.
He was married to the painter Frida Kahlo, twice — from 1929 to 1939, and again from 1940 until her death in 1954.
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez was born on 8 December 1886 at Guanajuato, in central Mexico. His twin brother Carlos died at eighteen months.
His father was a teacher and local official with liberal politics; the family moved to Mexico City in 1893 when his politics made Guanajuato uncomfortable.
Rivera drew obsessively from the age of three, and after he covered the walls of the house his father gave him a room with blackboard walls and canvas to draw on. He entered the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City at eleven.
In 1907 a state scholarship sent Rivera to Europe. He studied in Madrid, then moved to Paris in 1909, and spent most of the next twelve years there.
He lived in Montparnasse, painting at addresses including 26 rue du Départ, the building where Piet Mondrian also worked, and drinking with the poets and dealers at the Café de la Rotonde. Amedeo Modigliani painted him twice in 1914; Chaïm Soutine was another neighbour. He worked through the styles available: Impressionism, then Cubism seriously from about 1913. He produced around two hundred Cubist canvases, among them Zapatista Landscape of 1915, with its rifle and sarape, and was a recognised member of the circle around Picasso, with whom he quarrelled over accusations of borrowing.
His companion through the whole Paris period was the Russian painter Angelina Beloff, his common-law wife. Their infant son died in the war winter of 1918.
In 1917 a scornful review by the critic Pierre Reverdy ended with Rivera striking him at a dinner. The art press called it the affaire Rivera, and it closed off his place in the Cubist circle.
He abandoned Cubism the same year. Cézanne was one reason and Ingres another; the third was political. He wanted an art that people without education could read, and Cubism could not do that.
In 1920 and 1921, funded by the Mexican embassy, he travelled through Italy studying fresco, filling notebooks with Giotto, Masaccio and the Byzantine mosaics. He sailed for Mexico in 1921, leaving Beloff in Paris, and came home with a technique and a plan.
Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921, into a country rebuilding after ten years of revolution. José Vasconcelos, the education minister, was commissioning artists to paint the walls of public buildings so that a largely illiterate population could see its own history.
Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco became the three big names of the programme. Rivera painted at the National Preparatory School, then the Ministry of Education, where he covered two courtyards over four years with 235 panels, and then the chapel at the agricultural college at Chapingo.
His style settled into the one everyone knows: solid rounded figures, strong flat colour, crowds of workers and peasants, and imagery taken from before the conquest. Conquistadors, landowners and dictators are painted with the features of specific historical figures. He used real people as models, including his family and friends, and he painted the Aztec past as a working civilisation rather than a prelude to conquest.
Rivera met Frida Kahlo in 1928, when she brought him her paintings to ask whether they were any good. She was twenty-one and had spent years recovering from a bus accident that broke her spine and pelvis; he was forty-one and already famous.
They married in August 1929. Her family called it the marriage of an elephant and a dove.
The marriage was turbulent and both were unfaithful — Rivera constantly, and Kahlo with women and men, including, in 1937, Leon Trotsky. They divorced in November 1939 and remarried in December 1940.
Kahlo painted their relationship repeatedly. Rivera put her in the murals. He said after her death that the day she died was the most tragic of his life, and that he had realised too late that the best part of it had been his love for her.
In 1932 Rivera was commissioned by Edsel Ford to paint the courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts. He spent months in the Ford River Rouge plant watching the production line.
The result, Detroit Industry, is twenty-seven panels covering four walls: the assembly line, the blast furnaces, the workers of different races side by side, and a vaccination scene composed like a nativity that local clergy denounced as blasphemous.
There were calls to whitewash it. Edsel Ford defended it publicly, and it survived. Rivera considered it his best work, and it is now a National Historic Landmark.
Kahlo was in Detroit with him and miscarried there, which produced the paintings that made her own reputation.
In 1933 Nelson Rockefeller commissioned a mural for the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York, on the theme of humanity at the crossroads. Rivera called it Man at the Crossroads.
Rivera included a portrait of Lenin. The commission had not specified it and the sketches had not shown it. When newspapers noticed, Rockefeller asked him to replace the head with an anonymous face. Rivera refused, offering instead to balance it with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.
He was paid off, the mural was covered, and in February 1934 it was chipped off the wall and destroyed. He repainted a version the same year in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, under the title Man, Controller of the Universe, where it still is, and added a portrait of John D. Rockefeller Jr. drinking in a nightclub near a dish of syphilis bacteria.
Rivera was a member of the Mexican Communist Party, was expelled in 1929, and for a period supported Trotsky against Stalin.
In 1937 he persuaded the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas to grant Trotsky asylum, and Trotsky and his wife lived in Kahlo's family home, the Blue House in Coyoacán, for two years. The friendship ended in 1939, over politics and over Trotsky's affair with Kahlo.
Kahlo had her own Paris moment that year. André Breton's circle exhibited her work in the city in 1939, and she disliked both the place and the Surrealists.
Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City in August 1940 by a Stalinist agent. Rivera later applied repeatedly to rejoin the Communist Party and was readmitted in 1954.
Rivera went on painting murals into the 1950s, including the enormous history of Mexico on the staircase of the National Palace, worked on over decades, and a water-themed mural at[2] the Lerma waterworks partly designed to be seen underwater.
Kahlo died in July 1954. Rivera married Emma Hurtado, his art dealer, the following year.
He had cancer, was treated in the Soviet Union in 1955 and 1956, and died of heart failure in Mexico City on 24 November 1957, aged seventy. He had asked to be buried beside Kahlo; instead he was interred in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons in Mexico City.
Rivera made public art work at a scale nobody had attempted since the Renaissance. He did it for a purpose: to give a country that had just fought a revolution a version of its own history it could read on a wall for free.
The influence went north. American painters working for the New Deal art programmes in the 1930s took the mural idea from Mexico. Among them was a young Jackson Pollock, who watched Siqueiros and Rivera at work. The murals in American post offices and public buildings come out of that transfer.
A third result, which he did not intend: for decades Frida Kahlo was known as Rivera's wife, and today Rivera is more often known as Kahlo's husband.
The Paris canvases are mostly in Mexico. The Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City and the Museo Casa Diego Rivera at Guanajuato, built in the house where he was born, hold the major groups. The Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City owns Young Man with a Fountain Pen. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds a different Paris canvas of 1914, Young Man in a Gray Sweater (Jacques Lipchitz), accession 412.1941.
Born on 8 December at Guanajuato in central Mexico. His twin brother Carlos dies at eighteen months.
The family moves to Mexico City after his father's liberal politics make Guanajuato uncomfortable.
Enters the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City at eleven.
Wins a state scholarship to study in Europe and travels to Madrid.
Moves to Paris and settles in Montparnasse, where he stays for most of the next twelve years.
Begins working seriously in Cubism, and produces about two hundred Cubist canvases over the next four years.
Amedeo Modigliani paints his portrait.
Abandons Cubism, wanting an art that people without education can read.
Travels through Italy for a year studying Renaissance frescoes, especially Giotto, and makes hundreds of sketches.
Returns to Mexico, where the education minister José Vasconcelos is commissioning murals for public buildings.
Paints his first mural, Creation, at the National Preparatory School, and joins the Mexican Communist Party.
Begins the murals at the Ministry of Education, eventually covering two courtyards with 235 panels over four years.
Completes the murals in the chapel of the agricultural college at Chapingo.
Travels to the Soviet Union for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution.
Meets Frida Kahlo, who brings him her paintings to ask whether they are any good.
Marries Frida Kahlo in August. Is expelled from the Mexican Communist Party. Begins the National Palace staircase murals.
Travels to the United States and paints murals in San Francisco.
Is commissioned by Edsel Ford to paint the courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and spends months watching the production line at the Ford River Rouge plant.
Completes Detroit Industry, twenty-seven panels on four walls. Local clergy denounce a vaccination scene as blasphemous and there are calls to whitewash it; Edsel Ford defends it publicly.
Nelson Rockefeller commissions a mural for Rockefeller Center. Rivera includes a portrait of Lenin, refuses to remove it, and is paid off. The work is covered.
The Rockefeller Center mural is chipped off the wall and destroyed in February. Rivera repaints a version in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.
Persuades President Lázaro Cárdenas to grant Leon Trotsky asylum. Trotsky lives in Kahlo's family home in Coyoacán for two years.
Breaks with Trotsky over politics and over Trotsky's affair with Kahlo. Divorces Kahlo in November.
Remarries Kahlo in December, in San Francisco. Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico City in August.
Begins teaching at La Esmeralda art school in Mexico City.
Paints Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central, including a portrait of himself as a boy beside a skeleton in a hat.
Completes the murals at the Lerma waterworks, partly designed to be seen underwater.
Frida Kahlo dies in July. Rivera is readmitted to the Communist Party.
Marries Emma Hurtado, his art dealer. Travels to the Soviet Union for cancer treatment.
Dies of heart failure in Mexico City on 24 November, aged seventy. He had asked to be buried beside Kahlo; instead he is interred in the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons.
Painting
Twenty-seven fresco panels covering all four walls of a courtyard at the Detroit Institute of Arts, painted by Diego Rivera between 25 July 1932 and 13 March 1933. They show the Ford Motor Company: the engine and body production lines, the raw materials under the ground, the chemistry that industry also makes, and the men and women who did the work. They are painted into the walls of the building and cannot be lent, moved or sold.
Painting
A worker in overalls stands at a set of controls at the centre of a wall eleven and a half metres wide. Four long lenses cross behind him, carrying cells, nebulae, a sun and embryos. To his left are police, the unemployed and a nightclub; to his right, Lenin joining the hands of four workers. Diego Rivera painted it in 1934 for the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, after the Rockefellers destroyed the first version in New York.
Painting
A Paris café table, taken apart and reassembled: a green bottle, a stemmed glass, a slotted spoon and an open box of cigars, spread across a cloth painted entirely in coloured dots. Diego Rivera painted it in 1915, in the middle of the eleven years he spent in Montparnasse. Alfred Stieglitz bought it in New York in 1916 for a hundred and seventeen dollars, and it reached The Metropolitan Museum of Art with his collection in 1949.
Painting
A sitter taken apart and put back in a different order. An ear sits at one height, a fully painted eye at another, a nose and mouth on a pale plane of their own, and a broad green hat sweeps off to the right. At the lower left a black pen with a gold nib lies across a fanned sheet of paper. Diego Rivera painted it in Montparnasse in 1914, and the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City has owned it since 1959.
Painting
A rifle stands upright through the middle of the canvas. Around it are a striped sarape, a wide-brimmed hat, a panel of painted wood grain and a sheet of folded paper, all built out of flat overlapping planes against grey mountains and a field of cobalt blue. Diego Rivera painted it in Paris in 1915, while the revolution it refers to was being fought four thousand miles away. The Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City owns it, and calls it Paisaje zapatista — El guerrillero.
Sat for a portrait by · 1914
Modigliani painted Rivera at least twice in 1914, Montparnasse neighbours in the emigre circle of the 1910s; the Dusseldorf canvas sketches the heavy, amused face in loose dark strokes on ochre.
Met
Modigliani and Rivera knew each other in Paris during Rivera's fourteen years there, and Modigliani painted his portrait in 1914. The painting is in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen at Düsseldorf.
Married to · 1929–1954
Married at the Coyoacan town hall on 21 August 1929, divorced in 1939 after infidelities on both sides, and remarried in San Francisco on 8 December 1940. They stayed married until her death in 1954. Kahlo's mother called it a marriage between an elephant and a dove.
Art movement · 1907–1914
Roughly two hundred Cubist canvases painted in Montparnasse between 1913 and 1917, Zapatista Landscape the best known. The association ended with the affaire Rivera, the public 1917 quarrel with the critic Pierre Reverdy.
A Mexican painter, born in 1886 and died in 1957, and the leading figure of the Mexican mural movement, which painted large public frescoes of Mexican history on government buildings after the revolution.
He included a portrait of Lenin in it. When newspapers noticed in 1933, Nelson Rockefeller asked him to replace the head; Rivera refused, offering to add Abraham Lincoln instead. He was paid off, the mural was covered, and in February 1934 it was chipped off the wall. He repainted a version in Mexico City, adding a portrait of John D. Rockefeller Jr. drinking near a dish of syphilis bacteria.
Twice. They married in August 1929, when he was forty-two and she twenty-two, divorced in November 1939, and remarried in December 1940. She died in 1954. Both were repeatedly unfaithful, and Kahlo's affairs included one with Leon Trotsky in 1937.
Mostly in Mexico: the National Palace staircase in Mexico City, the Ministry of Education, the chapel at Chapingo and the Palace of Fine Arts. In the United States, Detroit Industry covers four walls of a courtyard at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and there are murals in San Francisco.
Yes. In 1937 he persuaded the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas to grant Trotsky asylum, and Trotsky and his wife lived in Kahlo's family home in Coyoacán for two years. The friendship ended in 1939 over politics and over Trotsky's affair with Kahlo. Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City in 1940.
For about four years. He worked in Paris from 1909, took up Cubism seriously around 1913, and produced roughly two hundred Cubist canvases before abandoning the style in 1917, because he wanted an art that people without education could read.
Associated with · 1913–1917
Roughly two hundred Cubist canvases painted in Montparnasse between 1913 and 1917, Zapatista Landscape the best known. The association ended with the affaire Rivera, the public 1917 quarrel with the critic Pierre Reverdy.
Lived at · 1912–1919
Rivera and Angelina Beloff moved to the Montparnasse studio in autumn 1912. The address appears in contemporary exhibition records and the view from its windows entered Rivera’s Paris paintings.
Sat for a portrait by · 1914
Modigliani painted Rivera at least twice in 1914, Montparnasse neighbours in the emigre circle of the 1910s; the Dusseldorf canvas sketches the heavy, amused face in loose dark strokes on ochre.
Married to · 1929–1954
Married at the Coyoacan town hall on 21 August 1929, divorced in 1939 after infidelities on both sides, and remarried in San Francisco on 8 December 1940. They stayed married until her death in 1954. Kahlo's mother called it a marriage between an elephant and a dove.
Met
Modigliani and Rivera knew each other in Paris during Rivera's fourteen years there, and Modigliani painted his portrait in 1914. The painting is in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen at Düsseldorf.
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Diego Rivera and their work.
The museum's record of the 1932-33 commission, the twenty-seven panels and the controversy over them.
Reference article cross-checked for the Guanajuato childhood, the Paris years, the mural commissions, the Rockefeller destruction and the marriages.
Museum record of his work, used for the Cubist period and the New York years.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Diego Rivera page.
MoMA's own collection record for the 1914 Paris canvas often confused with Young Man with a Fountain Pen.
The museum that owns Young Man with a Fountain Pen, and holds work by Angelina Beloff alongside the Rivera and Kahlo collections.
Biographical evidence used to verify chronology, relationships, and historical context connected to Diego Rivera.
Catalogue scholarship used to verify attribution, provenance, chronology, and interpretive context for Diego Rivera.
Catalogue scholarship used to verify attribution, provenance, chronology, and interpretive context for Diego Rivera.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Diego Rivera. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
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