Young Man with a Fountain Pen

The pen the title names

At the lower left a black shaft lies diagonally across a pale sheet, narrowing to a small gold nib, with folded papers fanned out beneath it. It is the only object in the picture painted as one unbroken thing.

No institution names the sitter. The Museo Dolores Olmedo publishes no online object catalogue, and the record it made with Google Arts & Culture gives a title, a date, a medium, dimensions and an acquisition line, but no identification.

The pen and the papers are the only evidence of who he might be, and they say only that he writes.

Dots inside the Cubism

The cream band behind the head is covered evenly in small green dots, laid on without following any form. Divided touch of that kind belongs to Neo-Impressionism rather than to Cubism, and Diego Rivera kept using it through his Cubist years.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art makes the same observation about The Café Terrace of the following year, where he used small dots of colour to amplify contrasts in texture and pattern rather than to model light.

1914 is early in that run. He had taken up Cubism seriously around 1913, and the National Gallery of Art puts his eventual output at nearly two hundred Cubist works. It is also the year Amedeo Modigliani, a neighbour in Montparnasse, painted his portrait.

The Museum of Modern Art does not own it

The painting is regularly attributed to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is not in that collection. MoMA's own published collection data contains no work of this title.

The confusion has a source. MoMA does hold a Diego Rivera oil of 1914 painted in Paris — Young Man in a Gray Sweater (Jacques Lipchitz), 65.1 by 54.9 centimetres, accession 412.1941, given by T. Catesby Jones. Its sitter is the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.

Young Man with a Fountain Pen belongs to the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City, which acquired it in 1959 from the Parke-Bernet galleries in New York.

The collection it belongs to

Dolores Olmedo assembled the largest private holding of Diego Rivera's work and opened it to the public at La Noria, a sixteenth-century estate in Xochimilco in the south of Mexico City. She quoted him on what he taught her: to see, to know, to choose, to read, to find things out, and he chose some of the pieces himself.

The museum also holds work by Frida Kahlo, by Angelina Beloff — the Russian painter who was Diego Rivera's companion through the whole Paris period — and by Pablo O'Higgins, alongside pre-Hispanic art and Mexican folk art.

It closed for several years and was open again at La Noria by April 2026, Tuesday to Sunday, from ten in the morning to six, with last entry at half past five. It publishes no object catalogue online, so a visitor cannot check in advance whether a particular canvas is hanging.

Why no large reproduction is shown

Diego Rivera died on 24 November 1957, and Mexico protects an author's work for the life of the author plus a hundred years, so the painting is in copyright there until 2057. The Artists Rights Society represents his estate in the United States.

Wikimedia Commons does host a very large capture of this painting, tagged public domain on a rule that depends on publication before 1918. No museum documents such a publication, so the atlas does not rely on the tag.

A reduced reproduction is shown here under fair use, for commentary, and excluded from commercial reuse. The four-factor rationale and the archived rights probes are kept beside the image file.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

A sitter has been taken apart and put back in a different order: an ear at one height, an eye at another, a mouth on a plane of its own. Follow the face first, then the hat, the dotted field behind the head, the bow tie and the pen the picture is named for.

Detail views use the same reproduction throughout. Reproduction from the Google Arts & Culture capture of the painting.