Diego Rivera Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

He was born in Guanajuato on December 8, 1886 to María del Pilar Barrientos and Diego Rivera Acosta. He had a twin brother named Carlos, who died at two years old.

Starting in 1896 he began taking night lessons at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City , where he met the well-known landscape painter José María Velasco . Read the full biography

Diego Rivera Biography

He was born in Guanajuato on December 8, 1886 to María del Pilar Barrientos and Diego Rivera Acosta. He had a twin brother named Carlos, who died at two years old.

Starting in 1896 he began taking night lessons at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City , where he met the well-known landscape painter José María Velasco . In 1905 he received a scholarship from the Minister of Education, Justo Sierra , and in 1907 another from the governor of Veracruz which allowed him to travel to Spain and enter Eduardo Chicharro 's school in Madrid .

From then, and until mid- 1916 , he lived between Mexico, Spain and Italy , associating with intellectuals and artists such as Alfonso Reyes , Pablo Picasso , Ramón del Valle-Inclán and Amedeo Modigliani , who also painted a portrait of him. In that same year he had a son from his first wife, the Russian painter Angelina Beloff , who died the following year. In 1919 he had a daughter with the artist Marija Marevna Vorob'ëv ( 1892 - 1984 ), Marika Rivera Vorobev ( 1919 - 2010 ), whom he never recognized, but whom he helped financially. In 1922 he joined the Mexican Communist Party and began painting his murals on public buildings in Mexico City. In the same year he married Guadalupe Marín with whom he had two daughters: Lupe, born in 1925 , and Ruth, born in 1926 . In 1927 he divorced Marín and was invited to the Soviet Union to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution . In 1929 he married the painter Frida Kahlo , in a civil ceremony as he was an atheist .

The subjects of his compositions are often simple people placed in a political context. At the same time, Rivera does not spare attacks on the church and the clergy. With other artists such as José Clemente Orozco , David Alfaro Siqueiros , and Rufino Tamayo , he experiments with large mural frescoes with a simplified style and vivid colors, often portraying scenes from the turn-of-the-century Mexican Revolution . Among the most emblematic frescoes are those of the National Palace in Mexico City and those of the National School of Agriculture in Chapingo .

In the following four years he also created numerous works in the United States where his communist themes caused much controversy in the press. This happened most notably with a mural in New York 's Rockefeller Center . The building, located on Fifth Avenue , represented one of the most important emblems of capitalism. On this occasion, Diego Rivera began the mural called "El Hombre in cruce de Caminos" ( The Man in the Crossroads of Paths ) or "El hombre controlador del Universo" ( The Man Controller of the Universe ). But when he included a portrait of Lenin , criticism was not long in coming.

Rockefeller saw the portrait as a personal insult and ordered the entire mural covered, later calling for its destruction. In 1934 Rivera returned to Mexico, where he painted the same mural on the second floor of the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City [1] Another consequence of these controversies was the cancellation of the commission for the frescoes intended for the Chicago International Fair . In 1936 Rivera supported Leon Trotsky 's request for political asylum in Mexico which was granted the following year. Because of this, in 1937 , he was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party together with his wife Frida Kahlo . In 1939 he distanced himself from the well-known Russian dissident and divorced Frida Kahlo , only to remarry her in 1940 . In the same year he entered the Exploration Committee of the Anti-Communist Revolutionary Party to evaluate the candidacy of the entrepreneur Juan Andreu Almazán in the presidential elections with the support of that party.

In 1950 he illustrated Pablo Neruda 's Canto General and in 1955 , after Frida's death , he married for the fourth time, to Emma Hurtado, and went to the Soviet Union for surgery. Rivera dedicated the last years of his life to making his wife's work known. Full of admiration he reiterated: "Frida is the first woman in the history of art to have addressed with absolute and inexorable frankness, one could say in a ruthless but at the same time calm way, those issues that concern exclusively women". He died on November 24, 1957 in Mexico City. His remains were placed in the Rotunda of Illustrious People , thus contravening his last wishes