Diego Rivera - Playa Del Carmen

Diego Rivera (c.1886-1957), husband of Frida Kahlo , was arguably the greatest of Los Tres Grandes , the "Big Three" Mexican artists who interpreted the Revolution and Mexican history through the medium of enormous murals and put the nation's art onto an international footing in the first half of the twentieth century. His works (along with those of José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros ) remain among the country's most striking sights.

Rivera studied from the age of ten at the San Carlos Academy in the capital, immediately showing immense ability, and later moved to Paris where he flirted with many of the new trends, in particular Cubism. More importantly, though, he and Siqueiros planned, in exile, a popular, native art to express the new society in Mexico. In 1921, Rivera returned from Europe to the aftermath of the Revolution, and right away began work for the Ministry of Education at the behest of the socialist Education Minister, poet and Presidential hopeful José Vasconcelos. Informed by his own Communist beliefs, and encouraged by the leftist sympathies of the times, Rivera embarked on the first of his massive, consciousness-raising murals , whose themes - Mexican history, the oppression of the natives, post-revolutionary resurgence - were initially more important than their techniques. Many of his early murals are deceptively simple, naive even, but in fact Rivera's style remained close to major trends and, following the lead of Siqueiros, took a scientific approach to his work, looking to industrial advances for new techniques, better materials and fresh inspiration. The view of industrial growth as a universal panacea (particularly in their earlier works) may have been simplistic, but their use of technology and experimentation with new methods and original approaches often has startling results - this is particularly true of Siqueiros' work at the Polyforum Siquerios.

Communism continued to be a major source of motivation and inspiration for Rivera, who was a long-standing member of the Mexican Communist Party. When ideological differences caused a rift in Soviet politics, Rivera supported Trotsky 's "revolutionary internationalism", and in 1936, after Trotsky had spent seven years in exile from the Soviet Union on the run from Stalin's henchmen and was running out of countries who would accept him, Rivera used his influence over Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to get permission for Trotsky and his wife Natalia to enter the country. They stayed with Diego and Frida rent-free at their Coyoacán house before Trotsky moved down the road to what is now the Museo Casa de León Trotsky . The passionate and often violent differences between orthodox Stalinists and Trotskyites spilled over into the art world creating a great rift between Rivera and ardent Stalinist Siqueiros, who was later jailed for his involvement in an assassination attempt on Trotsky. Though Rivera later broke with Trotsky and was eventually readmitted to the Communist party, Trotsky continued to admire Rivera's murals finding them "not simply a 'painting', an object of passive contemplation, but a living part of the class struggle".

Following the Rivera trail
There is a huge amount of Rivera's vast output accessible to the public, much of it in Mexico City, but also elsewhere around the country. We've given a run-down of the major Rivera sites organized by region and approximately ordered in accordance with...
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