Rivera, Diego

RIVERA, DIEGO (1886–1957). Mexican Diego Rivera made a tremendous impact on the mural movement north of the Rio Grande through murals he created in the United States in the 1930s and the controversy and personal contacts they generated. The enduring controversies about his work and the nature of the work also made him an exemplary figure for the revived mural movement of the 1960s. Although his murals cover thousands of square feet in his native Mexico, Rivera is best remembered in the United States for a work he never completed—Man at the Crossroads, made for Rockefeller Center in New York City (1933). Originally intended as the artistic focal point of the vast office complex, the mural was covered with a canvas, then destroyed, when Rivera refused to remove a prominent and positive portrait of Lenin. The incident became and remains a major cause célèbre in the history of modern art.

The Rockefeller Center mural was not his first in the United States, nor was it to be his last. Rivera had done Allegory of California for the Luncheon Club of the Pacific Stock Exchange (1930). This was followed by the Making of a Fresco at the San Francisco Art Institute (1930); his major U.S. achievement, Detroit Industry, at the Detroit Institute of Arts (1933); a series of twenty-one fresco panels, Portrait of America, at the New Workers School in New York City (1933); and Pan-American Unity, at the City College of San Francisco (1940). The Detroit murals were threatened with destruction when first completed and again during the McCarthy era, but were saved by the intervention of the Ford family, which had commissioned the work. Only a few panels of the Portrait of America series remain, surviving in museum and private collections.

Diego Rivera. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1986.

Favela, Ramon. The Early Life and Times of Diego Rivera. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Hamill, Pete. Diego Rivera. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

Wolfe, Bertram. The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. New York: Stein and Day, 1963.

The Diego Rivera Foundation. Complete Works. https://www.diego-rivera-foundation.org