Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera was the dominant figure of Mexican muralism, a communist who painted vast public histories of his country and took commissions from American capitalists. Born in Guanajuato in 1886, he entered the San Carlos Academy at eleven and won a scholarship to Europe in 1907. He spent fourteen years there, mostly in Paris, where he painted in a cubist manner and knew Picasso, Modigliani and Gris. A journey to Italy in 1920-21 to study Renaissance fresco changed his direction entirely. He returned to Mexico in 1921 as the education minister José Vasconcelos launched a state mural programme intended to teach a largely illiterate population its own history. Rivera covered the walls of the Ministry of Public Education, the National Palace and the chapel at Chapingo with a national narrative running from pre-Columbian civilisation through the conquest to the Revolution, in a flattened monumental style drawing on Aztec and Maya sources. He married Frida Kahlo in 1929; the marriage involved affairs on both sides and a divorce and remarriage. His American commissions in the early 1930s included the Detroit Industry frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Arts, funded by Edsel Ford, which treat the assembly line with genuine ambivalence and which he considered his best work. Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center in 1933 was destroyed after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin. He was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party, persuaded the government to grant Trotsky asylum in 1937, and later supported a plot against him. He repainted the Rockefeller mural in Mexico City. He died in 1957.

• Lived: 1886 CE – 1957 CE
• Nationality: Mexican
• Roles: painter, muralist