Diego Rivera Research Papers

Horace Hall Professor Sansome Latin America Humanities March 7, 2016 Diego Rivera: 1 Mexican Painter Diego Rivera was a big man, and not only because he stood over six feet tall and weighed, at times, more than three hundred pounds. Rivera dominated the Mexican art world from soon after the end of the country's revolution in 1920 until his death in 1957. At the age of seventy. 1 Rivera revived, and put to use, the antique medium of fresco painting. Fresco painting used pigments impregnating a paste of marble dust or sand and water-treated lime, which dries rock hard. His energy and his optimism charmed all sorts of people, from Parisian avant-gardes to American captains of industry.
From 1910 to 1920 the Mexican revolution was a response created
by Porfiro Diaz’s comments in an interview with an American journalist. 2 The revolution began as a political event but soon developed into a social movement. During the chaotic years of the 2nd decade of the 20th century, many different elements in Mexico’s society began to make their demands known. 3 The economic progress of Mexico excluded most citizens. 4 The Mexican Revolution, however, was not simply a revolt against economic deprivation. Changes in the social order and political uncertainty also provided the opportunity for people to protest and demand improvements.
Diego Rivera has been in most of his work, a political artist.
This was done deliberately, as a self-conscious political commitment. 1 Rivera was born to a middle-class family in Guanajuato in 1886. He was said to have drawn obsessively from the age of three. When he was ten he entered art school, in Mexico City. In 1907, a scholarship took him to Paris, where he stayed for fourteen years. While there he became a credible Cubist and a friend of bohemian luminaries, including Modigliani and Soutine. After the triumph of the Mexican revolution, Rivera returned to Mexico, where the brilliant minister of education, Jose Vasconcelos, envisioned a program for public arts. In the year 1922 Rivera joined the Mexican Communist Party where he was later expelled from. In august of that year, Rivera later married fellow artist Frida Kahlo.
One of Rivera’s most famous paintings “The Flower Carrier” represented the struggles of a working men living in a capitalist society. 5 Rivera was concerned about the struggles of the peasants in Mexico. Because of this, he intended this piece to move the audience to question the social effects that capitalism has on the working class. In the picture, we see an exhausted peasant on the ground because of the large weight of the flowers. Rivera illustrates the farmer as small and frail. In the photo, we also see the women helping the overburdened worker with the
load.
5 The peasant and the woman are meant to represent the working class of Mexico, such as the native and indigenous people. Their clothing and skin represent that they are hard-working mestizos, not aristocrats descended from a pure line of Spanish elite. By having the women come to the aid of the fatigued worker, Rivera points to the good nature of the common people. The flowers are the key to understanding the picture. The peasant isn’t carrying corn or any other crop; he is collecting flowers instead. 5 The flowers are a product only used to adorn the homes of the wealthy and those in power. Because of this, Rivera is implying that the excessive, luxurious lifestyle of the upper class is debilitating to the lower classes.
Diego Rivera demonstrated in an exemplary way that art is able to realize an elevated function politically without having to compromise the aesthetic quality of the artwork. Painting and partisanship: these are two realms that aesthetes and average artists believe to be irreconcilably divided, yet when they are engaged by a brilliant artist like Diego Rivera they can be shaped into an indivisible whole.