MEXICO CITY.-

The film produced by Martin Garcia-Urtiaga was premiered at MNA with the presence of Consuelo Saizar, president of the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta), who mentioned that the decision of supporting this work was based in the fact that it fulfills the objectives of the cultural project of the organism she presides.

“This audiovisual work accounts for the talent and creativity of several artists, allowing the private sector to participate; besides, it uses video, a technological format, to divulgate culture, serving the society by showing one of the great works of the 20th century”.

Parting from different shots of the diego rivera mural, the brief documentary – 3 minutes and 20 seconds long- is a visual tour that synthesizes the history of our country, from the development of Prehispanic culture, the conquest, the Colonial age, the Independence, the Reform, the Mexican Revolution up to the different episodes of 20th century history.

Teresa Vicencio, head of the National Institute of Fine Arts (Inba) commented that projects like this guard the artistic legacy, giving it meaning and divulgation. “We watch in the documentary the ordeal of our people, as well as the one lived by diego rivera and all the Mexican artists that have given us identity, voice and perspective”.

Epopeya del pueblo mexicano was painted between 1929 and 1935 at the staircase of the central yard at Palacio Nacional, in Mexico City Historical Center, over a 276 square-meters surface.

The work is integrated by 3 sections: “Prehispanic World”, painted on the northern section, with scenes inspired by Mesoamerican cultures; at the center, “From the Conquest to 1930”, which represents passages from the conquest, Colonial times, Independence and Modern Mexico, up to Mexican Revolution, and the southern section, named “Mexico today and tomorrow”, where 20th century conflicts as well as social exploitation.

The production of this short film is part of the Bicentennial of the Independence and the Centennial of the Revolution commemorations, and the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), Fundacion Manuel Arango and Consejo Nacional Adopte una Obra de Arte participated.

The short film is to be distributed by Educal libraries and will be uploaded to www.conaculta.gob.mx

CORRESPONDENT

NEW YORK .-

 After 80 years, Diego Rivera returned yesterday to claim a star on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and revive a message that despite the passage of time, it seems more valid than ever.

Yesterday, we inaugurated the exhibition Diego Rivera murals for the Museum of Modern Art, that brings back five of the eight murals painted Mexican mobile for his first retrospective at MoMA in 1931, and in which captured images of the history of Mexico and harsh criticism of the economic and social situation left by the Great Depression, today, with nuances, is repeated in America.

In addition to the murals, the exhibition includes three sketches, prototype portable mural done in 1930 and smaller drawings, watercolors and prints by Rivera. The exhibition will open to the public next Sunday.

“I can think of no better metaphor for what happens with moves like” Occupy Wall Street ‘that have been replicated in the world and U.S. social stratification that appears in one of Rivera’s works, “said the director of MoMA , Glenn Lowry.

Journalists, collectors, entrepreneurs like Ignacio Deschamps, president of the main sponsor of the sample, BBVA Bancomer, Mexico’s Ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, and Consul in New York, Carlos Sada, gathered yesterday morning at the opening for the press, which hosts made Lowry and curator Leah Dickerman, the mastermind behind the sample.

In the afternoon, we performed the official opening, which was attended by the First Lady, Margarita Zavala.

It was Sarukhan who stressed the synergy between Mexico and the MoMA, remembering that there have already been three exhibitions of three artists associated with the country over the past two years: Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alos, and now Rivera.

“I think it speaks much of what we can do to use culture as a bridge between both countries,” Sarukhan praised, true believer in the crucial role that culture plays in Mexico’s global positioning.

Speaking about the work of Mexican and parallelism of the message he left 80 years ago today, Deschamps said: “Diego Rivera was a man committed to his time with social problems. He lived in a global economic crisis in those years we are living now, and I think it is a necessary reflection is very important that the development and fairness. “

Two special guests at the pre-opening yesterday were Mark and Vicky Micha, collectors, who served two murals-The Rise and Power, for the exhibition of Rivera.

“They’ve been at home, and now came to the museum and borrowed generously, and lending generously. I am more than happy to see you here, proud, happy, more than anything, Diego, because what he has done is repeated 80 years later, “said Micha renovation.

They are interested in Latin America

NEW YORK .- This exhibition of Diego Rivera, the MoMA in New York close ties with Mexico and Latin American art, which is in its permanent collection, rich in pieces by artists from the region.

“There is a real interest in Latin American art is broad, and that is not new,” said Leah Dickerman, curator in charge of the sample.

He recalled that the museum has many curators who choose artists that seem interesting for various reasons which have nothing to do with the origin.

“We are a museum stronger when we have different things at the same time.”

The parts of the sample

Of the eight murals he did for the MoMA exhibit:

· “Peasant leader Zapata” (1931)

· “Indian Warrior” (1931)

· “The Rising” (1931)

· “Frozen funds” (1932)

· “Electric power” (1932)

Two are too fragile for shipment

· “Sugar Cane” (1931)

· “Liberation pawn” (1931)

One is missing

· “Pneumatic drill” (1932)

The exhibition “Visions of Mexican Art,” consisting of pieces from the collection of payment in kind from the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit of Mexico, will be held from July 7 to August 22 at the premises of the institute.

The exhibition is divided into various artistic periods in Mexico, from “From Mexico to the universal,” consisting of works by Diego Rivera, Rafael Coronel, Antonio Ruiz “El Corzo”, among others, to “the contemporary” pieces of Thomas López Rocha, Javier Marin and photographs of Yolanda Andrade.

In the last four years, “Visions of Mexican Art”, curated by Maestro Rafael Pérez y Pérez, is one of the most important exhibitions he has received the Cultural Institute of Mexico.

In total, the sample consists of 54 works, 44 paintings, seven sculptures and three photographs, by artists such as Rina Lazo, Juan Soriano, Nahum B. Zenil, Francisco Toledo, Sebastian (creator of the Torch of Friendship in San Antonio), Rafael Coronel, Jose Luis Cuevas, and other artists.

“The exhibition will display Mexican art” notes the Director of the Cultural Institute of Mexico, Gabriela Franco. “Let’s take a tour of the main authors who represent Mexican art in the twentieth century”

The SHCP collection has been exhibited in Colombia, Guatemala, Vancouver, and this time in San Antonio, with some adjustments of parts for conservation reasons, with the aim of showing the art of Mexico.

“Visions of Mexican Art” will be presented free at the Cultural Institute of Mexico on Thursday, July 7 to Monday, August 22, Tuesday to Sunday from 11-17 hours. For more information about the institute, visit El Universal SAN ANTONIO, website portal.sre.gob.mx / culturamexsa, or call (210) 227-0123.

MEXICO CITY—British-born painter, writer and sculptor Leonora Carrington, considered one of the last of the original surrealists, has died, Mexico’s National Arts Council confirmed Thursday. She was 94.

They are Detroit legends, despite living here for less than a year.

Seventy-nine years ago, Mexican artist Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, rolled into Depression-era Detroit and quickly ignited so much controversy it nearly closed the Detroit Institute of Arts.

It was here, in this tough factory town seemingly on the verge of economic collapse, that both artists were pushed to create masterpieces. Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals at the DIA are considered one of his finest works. And Detroit is where a young and still unknown Kahlo created her first great paintings, one of which is now owned by another famous Metro Detroiter: Madonna.

Their story is a prototype of the fight we still have today about Detroit. Is it an innovative place for artists like Rivera believed? Or a “shabby old village” as Kahlo described the city in a letter to a friend dated May 26, 1932.

The epic tale of Rivera and Kahlo will be retold in a multimedia presentation during the upcoming Art X Detroit exhibition.

Art X is dedicated to the works of 38 local artists who have been awarded fellowships by the Troy-based Kresge Foundation. Today through Sunday, nearly 50 free events will be held at a dozen venues in Detroit, from a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit to jazz, classical, hip-hop, dance, theater, poetry readings and panel discussions. Rivera and Kahlo’s story will be told Saturday night at the DIA.

“Rivera reached a level of understanding about himself, his work and the world that is reflected in the Detroit murals and that does not appear in any of his work before and after,” said Linda Downs, author of “Diego Rivera: The Detroit Industry Murals,” adding that it is a “monumental modern work.”

Controversy in 1933

Long considered one of the city’s cultural gems, Rivera’s work initially angered a big swath of people back in the spring of 1933 when it was about to be unveiled. Many didn’t like Rivera for who he was: an avowed communist and foreigner.

“American artists should have at least been considered for the execution of this work,” said the Rev. H. Ralph Higgins, senior curate at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Detroit, in a 1933 Detroit News interview. “A question of much more (than) art is involved. It constitutes a war between communists and capitalism.”

Higgins was not altogether wrong. Communism appealed to many in Depression-era America. Just weeks before Rivera and Kahlo arrived April 1932, an estimated 60,000 marchers took to the streets of Detroit, many singing the socialist anthem “L’Internationale.” They were protesting the shooting deaths of five people during a rally outside Ford Motor Co.’s Rouge plant.

Many rich patrons of the DIA balked at the idea that a gigantic image of a factory, Ford Motor Co’s Rouge Plant, was going to be the centerpiece of the DIA, according to press accounts of the day. Dozens of religious organizations were convinced Rivera had mocked the Holy Trinity in a panel that depicts a child vaccination. The scene shows a young child with a horse, a cow and sheep at the infant’s feet. The composition of the figures forms a triangle like that of a nativity scene.

Additionally, groups representing hundreds of thousands of Metro Detroiters demanded that any public funding to the DIA be cut due to Rivera’s work. A front page editorial in The Detroit News on March 18, 1933, neatly summed up their anger:

“Rivera’s whole work and conception is un-American … and foolishly vulgar,” the unsigned editorial states. “It bears no relation to the soul of the community, to the room, to the building or to the general purpose of Detroit’s Institute of Arts. … This is not a fair picture of the man who works short hours, must be quick in action, alert of mind, who works in a factory where there is plenty of space for movement. The best thing to do would be to whitewash the entire work (and) completely return the court to its original beauty.”

As the threat became more real, the international press soon picked up on the drama.

The irony is that Rivera, so-called loyal socialist, was in complete awe of Henry Ford and Detroit’s technology

“Henry Ford (is) a true poet and artist, one of the greatest in the world,” Rivera said shortly before he arrived in Detroit, according to press accounts. Rivera, according to his autobiography “My Art, My Life,” believed American engineers — creators of factories, skyscrapers and highways — were the nation’s true artists and Detroit perfected the best expression of American art: the large-scale factory.

While Rivera had no intention of glossing over the misery in factories or Detroit streets, he was clearly entranced by its manufacturing muscle.

“This is the great saga of the machine and of steel,” Rivera declared about his DIA work,

Despite all the conservative fury, what saved Rivera’s work was the approval of Edsel Ford and the public. Detroiters flocked to see “Detroit Industry” when it was unveiled. People seemed impressed that an artist as famous as Rivera created something about them.

“I have yet to see a young person who doesn’t like the murals,” Mrs. Oscar Moon told The Detroit News on March 26, 1933. “Rivera paints with American rhythm and we have to learn it. I know the type of men portrayed. Those murals are Detroit.”

Rivera would never again achieve the impressive balancing act he pulled off in Detroit — public support and the money of an American tycoon. His next stop was New York City to paint a mural commissioned by the Rockefeller family for Rockefeller Center. That was destroyed due to controversy because he wanted to include images of communist leader Vladimir Lenin.

Kahlo feels ‘bit of rage’

Detroit was the start of Kahlo’s most notable work. What pushed Kahlo, 24, at the time, to create here was her own tragedy and the city’s dire straits.

She clearly noticed a little more than the poetry of factories. Even as she and her husband were invited to all the right society parties, Kahlo bit the corporate hand that fed her. (It was Edsel Ford who paid for Rivera’s $25,000 commission.)

“High society here turns me off and I feel bit of rage against all these rich guys here, since I have seen thousands of people in the most terrible misery,” Kahlo wrote in 1932. She deplored the open racism toward blacks, which she described as “medievalism.” Then she heard the many stories in Detroit that Henry Ford was anti-Semitic.

She, too, had a strange admiration for Henry Ford and even danced with the man during a Dearborn social function. But that wasn’t about to stop Kahlo.

“Mr. Ford, are you Jewish?” she asked Ford during a dinner party at his Fairlane mansion in Dearborn. According to Rivera, Ford laughed and called Kahlo a little pistol.

While in Detroit, she suffered a miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital, and her mother died in Mexico. That drove her to produce what critics contend are her first great works of art — a mix of her inner emotions and specific imagery of the city.

“Detroit was beginning of her brutal and truly unique paintings that now makes her one of the most popular artists in the world today. She created groundbreaking work there,” said Florian Steininger, a curator of Vienna’s Bank Austria Kuntsforum.

Vienna is one of several cities around the world to display Kahlo’s work. A staple of those exhibits — which always break attendance records — seems to be some of her Detroit works, which are now owned by private collectors and Kahlo’s estate in Mexico City.

At a recent Kahlo/Rivera exhibit at Istanbul’s Pera Museum, visitors were greeted by a huge photo of Rivera’s DIA murals as he stood on the scaffold and locked in embrace with Kahlo. Now that image is on display at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Ireland, which is hosting the same show.

One of Kahlo’s most famous paintings is titled “Self Portrait Standing on the Border Between Mexico and the United States.” The small painting combines the Ford Rouge plant, Mexican ruins and her inner landscape.

In November, it was on display at the Austria Kuntsforum. Steininger admired the Kahlo work, simply stating: “A masterpiece. Pure masterpiece.”

Frida Kahlo herself was probably the source of the claims to her Jewish connection. But why?

Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo by Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle Schirmer/Mosel 248pp, EU49.80 Edvard Munch: Die Selbstbildnisse by Iris Muller-Westermann Schirmer/Mosel 205pp, EU39.80 Richard Avedon: Woman in the Mirror by Anne Hollander Schirmer Mosel/ The Richard Avedon Foundation $65 For decades now, ever since an international revival of interest in the paintings and life of Mexico’s Frida Kahlo, art historians and critics, including this writer, have been writing that Frida’s photographer father was Jewish, possibly of Hungarian origin. A new book devoted to Guillermo Kahlo and his photography reveals that he had no Jewish genes and stemmed from a long line of German Protestants. Frida herself was probably the source of the claims to her Jewish connection. But why? My guess is that German connections during the Nazi era were an embarrassment to her. Communists in particular were strongly anti-Nazi and Diego Rivera, Frida’s great love and sometime husband, was an active communist. So of course was the nominally Jewish founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, who was Frida’s lover in Mexico City before he was murdered with an ice pick, at Stalin’s orders. In 1949 Frida actually wrote to her father inquiring about his origins. The letter survives. Carl Wilhelm Kahlo was born in 1871 in Pforzheim, to Lutheran parents whose antecedents, craftsmen, soldiers, gingerbread bakers and sluice keepers, have been traced back by Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle to the 16th century. Carl Wilhelm fell out with his family and at age 19 emigrated to Mexico, changed his name to Guillermo and began work as an accountant before discovering photography. Not all his negatives have been recovered, but he left behind a frank and unpretty record of life in Mexico at the turn of the century that is astonishingly modern in approach. Guillermo ran a professional studio and married a woman of mixed Spanish-Indian origin, who gave her daughters an ethnic link to both the rich and poor of Mexico. Frida and her taciturn, enigmatic father were famously concerned with themselves. Frida’s favorite subject was herself (she made a trademark of her eyebrows). Guillermo’s most riveting images are his self-portraits. Both father and daughter produced self-images that are silent witnesses to the tragedies of life. EDVARD MUNCH (1863-1944), the great Norwegian-born painter, painted many self-portraits, but they are not all delineations of his actually handsome physiognomy. Most are descriptions of mood and atmosphere and his presence is firmly felt even in symbolic narrative works in which his real face does not actually appear. This collection is interesting because it reveals a wide range of painterly approaches. One early canvas is 90 percent Van Gogh. Some narratives are obvious, like The Dance of Life. But what to make of the cover image, Artist and Model, 1919, in which the girl (dressed) occupies the foreground, while the painter stands well behind her? The composition is powerful, the handling lively. But it is all enigmatic, with just a hint of the eroticism that powers so many of Munch’s canvases. The lively gestural technique is just one of the facets that led the Nazis to attempt to destroy his work in German collections. These were transferred to a neutral Swedish collector at the 11th hour. Author Iris Muller-Westermann is a curator of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. AMERICAN-JEWISH fashion photographer and portraitist Richard Avedon (1923-2004) was perhaps the greatest of his country’s studio photographers. After serving in the wartime merchant marine, Avedon became the staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar and died in Texas while on assignment for The New Yorker, for whom he was staff portraitist for for over a decade. His in-your-face portraits were technically brilliant and humanly stunning. Woman in the Mirror, a large-format half-century of portraits, was first published in English last year by the newly established Richard Avedon Foundation. The portraits of women, which range from a Wyoming waitress to the stunning Gloria Vanderbilt, include studies of Isak Dinesen, Elton John in drag, Rose Kennedy, Maria Callas, Katharine Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot and Louise Nevelson, as well as a naked Kate Moss and sundry other famous models and society ladies. Avedon dealt with versions of reality, all of them somehow dramatized, even when taken out-of-doors.

Rivera said he literally heard bells. But that was probably just nerve damage, and if indeed there was a real epiphany, it didn’t precipitate his abandonment of reclining female figures but rather the end of a five-year fling with Cubism, one chronicled in Diego Rivera: The Cubist Portraits, 1913-1917, at the Meadows Museum through September 20.

Add that to his characterization in the film Frida and one might conclude Rivera (1886-1957) changed art movements like he changed wives. By 1921 he’d already moved on to the Social Realism we know him for, he was back home in Mexico painting common-law No. 2, Lupe Marín, into the thousand-square-foot mural Creation, and a teen-aged Kahlo was teasing him from behind a pillar.

But in this exhibition, totaling 31 works (23 chronologically arranged paintings with eight works on paper), the artist can be seen in a sincere search to find himself on his own canvas.

The first three paintings in the catalog, Girl with Artichokes, Girl with Fans and The Sculptor (Portrait of Oscar Miestchaninoff), all from 1913, record this search in progress. They pick up with Rivera’s first attempts at Cubist treatments after floundering for several years in what Mexican scholar and exhibition curator Sylvia Navarrete, calls “a rather insipid strain of naturalism.” Being transitional works, though, these don’t so much portray their subjects from Cubism’s different viewpoints as just shake them and then record the blurred image.

By the time Alexandre Zinoviev sat for Portrait of a Painter (1913), Rivera could at least bring himself to radically fragment his subject. However, the Russian artist (and spy for the czar) appears so mechanically split and splayed as to resemble a Joel Peter Witkin cadaver, or a trick with mirrors.

Not until Woman at the Well (1913) does Rivera appear to get it, although even that painting still echoes past reverberations. Finally comes 1914 and the kaleidoscopic Two Women (Portrait of Angelina Beloff and Alma Dolores Bastién), and it’s a horse race from there on out as he abandons fear of commitment and subscribes so fully to the Cubist canon he’ll soon pick fights with Picasso.

It may also be of interest to note that that last work from 1913 lay hidden for more than 60 years, covered by pigment on the other side of a canvas Rivera later used to paint Zapatista Landscape (1915), “the result of economizing during a period of hard times,” and only discovered by restoration efforts in 1977. The Meadows makes no big fuss about the curiosity, but displays the conjoined works in a freestanding, double-faced case atop a plinth. More than one viewer commented on examining both paintings without realizing they were two sides of the same canvas.

After his close shave with Vorobieva-Stebelska, another couple years would pass before Rivera actually abandoned cubism, departing Paris for Italy and that Picasso/Braque contrivance for socialist murals. But you can already see it coming in the catalog’s last three numbers, a distinct before-and-after as he shifts gears to accelerate his movement away from a movement.

It begins at number 29, Woman Seated in an Armchair (1917), which portrays the dangerous Marievna with pulchritude even Cubism can’t flatten, but also with Rivera’s signature and not-so-sexy Popeye wink, one eye a dot and the other a dash.

Then on her heels come 30 and 31, Seated Woman and Portrait of Madame Marguerite Lhote. And while both date from that same year, there now appear, amid all the prismatic planes, recognizably drawn facial features, delicate, Neoclassical strokes that mark his cooling towards passionless geometry.

So, in the end, Rivera snuck out on Cubism as coyly as he’d flirted with it at the start.

He describes his disenchantment in the autobiography My Art, My Life: “When it dawned on me that all this innovation had little to do with real life, I would surrender all the glory and acclaim cubism had brought me for a way in art truer to my inmost feelings.”

The Meadows exhibition is a thoughtful survey in general. Given the little recognition he actually received at the time, plus the fact that Rivera’s name is rarely connected with better known Cubists, it appears “all the glory and acclaim” he referred to must remain the legend in his own mind. And notes in the catalog and wall texts don’t claim otherwise.

Acknowledging what might be a mostly purist or academic appeal in the gathered works, Navarrete concedes, “everything would seem to indicate that Rivera’s experience with Cubism was little more than an interlude, a detour.” Still, that scenic overlook was worth the stop, happening as it did on the way to his becoming, if possible, the larger-than-life figure he is among early twentieth-century artists.

More importantly, the brevity of Cubism relative to other significant movements, the important cultural figures who were his, shall we say, fellow travelers and Rivera’s own short-term but intense devotion to the form, all come together in this exhibition to offer a rare, comprehendible and concise study of one artist’s quest for significance.

In 1904, wishing to extend my knowledge of human anatomy, a basic requisite for my painting, I took a course in that subject in the Medical School in Mexico City. At that time, I read of an experiment which greatly interested me.

Mexican Muralist Diego Rivera Whistling with Pencil Holder as He Studies His Sketches for Mural

A French fur dealer in a Paris suburb tried to improve the pelts of animals by the use of a peculiar diet. He fed his animals, which happened to be cats, the meat of cats. On that diet, the cats grew bigger, and their fur became firmer and glossier. Soon he was able to outsell his competitors, and he profited additionally from the fact that he was using the flesh of the animals he skinned.

His competitors, however, had their revenge. They took advantage of the circumstance that his premises were adjacent to a lunatic asylum. One night, several of them unlocked his cages and let loose his oversize cats, now numbering thousands. When the cats swarmed out, a panic ensued in the asylum. Not only the inmates but their keepers and doctors “saw cats” wherever they turned. The police had a hard time restoring order, and to prevent a recurrence of such an incident, an ordinance was passed outlawing “caticulture.”

At first the story of the enterprising furrier merely amused me, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I discussed the experiment with my fellow students in the anatomy class, and we decided to repeat it and see if we got the same results. We did — and this encouraged us to extend the experiment and see if it involved a general principle for other animals, specifically human beings, by ourselves living on a diet of human meat.

Those of us who undertook the experiment pooled our money to purchase cadavers from the city morgue, choosing the bodies of persons who had died of violence — who had been freshly killed and were not diseased or senile. We lived on this cannibal diet for two months, and everyone’s health improved.

During the time of our experiment, I discovered that I liked to eat the legs and breasts of women, for as in other animals, these parts are delicacies. I also savored young women’s breaded ribs. Best of all, however, I relished women’s brains in vinaigrette.

I have never returned to the eating of human flesh, not out of a squeamishness, but because of the hostility with which society looks upon the practice. Yet is this hostility entirely rational? We know it is not. Cannibalism does not necessarily involve murder. And human flesh is probably the most assimilable food available to man. Psychologically, its consumption might do much to liberate him from deep-rooted complexes — complexes which can explode with the first accidental spark.

I believe that when man evolves a civilization higher than the mechanized but still primitive one he has now, the eating of human flesh will be sanctioned. For then man will have thrown off all of his superstitions and irrational taboos.

“And what sort of man was I?” asks Diego Rivera toward the end of his autobiography, in the last year of his life. Indeed, with a life as rich in controversy as Rivera’s, the ambiguous answers to that question continue to fascinate scholars of his work. But it is the question of what sort of artist Rivera was, and the meaning of his undeniably prodigious contribution to twentieth-century art, that lie behind a new, major retrospective of his work, “Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution,” opening at the Cleveland Museum of Art on February 14, 1999.

The Fower Carrier

The show is the first major retrospective of Rivera’s work in this country in thirteen years. It contains 146 paintings, murals, prints, and drawings, and will be accompanied by an exhibition catalog that presents new scholarship and interpretations of Rivera’s work.

Rivera is generally acknowledged to be one of the most important artists of this century, and its most influential muralist. By the age of forty-five, he was among the most well-known and controversial artists in the world. He developed a painting style that synthesized the influences of European art, socialist ideals, and the cultural riches of pre-Columbian, indigenous Mexico. Today he is still revered as a Latin American folk hero.

But what sort of man was Diego Rivera? And what is the significance of his work? Political artist and visual satirist? Was his greatest contribution the populist mural, whose style he developed after he returned from Europe to Mexico in 1921 to participate in the “Mexican Renaissance?” He was a man of obvious contradictions, and occasionally revolting appetites. He was a devoted Marxist who nevertheless reviled Stalin and painted portraits of his own Hollywood friends. He was a lover of women, fond of marriage, who couldn’t remain faithful to any of his four wives, and whose unabashed experiment with cannibalism in 1904 he proudly recounts in his autobiography — including his favorite recipes, which chiefly involve the cadavers of young women.

Rivera’s life may be inextricable from his art, but it is the latter that interests the organizers of the massive traveling retrospective. “He’s the greatest Mexican artist of the twentieth century,” says Graham Beal, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The show appears there from May 30 through August 16, 1999, and will complement LACMA’s extensive holdings of Mexican and Latin American art. From there it travels to Dallas and Mexico City.

“With the death of communism, we can openly and without fear of repercussion address Rivera’s influence on the evolution of American field painting — the whole notion of a wall as a field that the spectator enters. Jackson Pollack and other important artists were looking at his work, yet Rivera had fallen out of favor.”

Rivera claimed to want to create not merely a public, but a populist art, according to William H. Robinson, associate curator for paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art and a curator of the exhibition — an art “possessing the visual and rhetorical power to change the world.”

Rivera invoked remarkable disputes and inspired — and contributed to — a body of legend that continues alternately to reveal and cloak the artist in mystery. His physical appetites were Rabelaisian — uncouth, enormous — and his intellect possessed the subtlety and energy to match. The only certainty is that opinion about Rivera’s contribution to twentieth-century art remains as sharply divided today as it was during his lifetime.

Why produce a new Rivera retrospective now? “For two reasons,” says Robinson. “There’s a lot of new research on Rivera at the moment; we’re bringing together new scholars.” Their articles on Rivera’s work appear in the exhibition catalog. “Also, the National Institute of Fine Arts Mexico co-organized the exhibition with Cleveland. They’ve been pursuing research on Rivera for the past fifteen years, which includes not only locating new works but uncovering new information about Rivera.” Robinson contends in the catalog’s introduction, “Nearly forty years after his death, Rivera remains an artist in need of serious reassessment.”

Diego Rivera was born in the mining town of Guanajuato, Mexico in 1886 and was sent by his parents at an early age to San Carlos Academy in Mexico City. There he studied mathematics and art and mastered the academic drawing style. He surrounded himself with other young artists and intellectuals. In 1907, after receiving an academic stipend to study abroad, Rivera traveled to Spain. Of this period, he writes in his autobiography, “I was twenty years old, over six feet tall, and weighed three hundred pounds. But I was a dynamo of energy…. For days on end, I painted from early dawn till past midnight.” This was the sort of schedule he was to maintain throughout his life. He spent the next fourteen years in Europe, mostly in Spain and France. He studied and painted, combining his view of the spatial distortions he found in El Greco’s work with strains of European modernism, such as divisionism and symbolism. While in France he became involved with artists of the avant-garde, including Picasso, Mondrian, Juan Gris, and Severini, gradually adopting and furthering cubism — his was an “austere, theoretical” form of the art. But by 1917 Rivera decided that cubism was neither a “collective” or “social” art, and he appeared to abandon its formulae almost entirely. According to Robinson, however, this is but one of the many misconceptions that have dogged Rivera’s reputation. Rivera’s work may appear to belong to discrete periods, signifying changes in his interest or focus; this, contends Robinson, is an illusion.

“Rather than abandoning ideas and styles,” Robinson writes in his introduction to the exhibition, “Rivera characteristically absorbed and redirected them. He was, above all else, a great synthesizer, possessing a remarkable quality to fuse his accumulated experiences of European and indigenous artistic conventions with personal iconography, aesthetics, and national cultural identity.”

The exhibition covers Rivera’s entire career, but unlike earlier examinations of his work, devotes one-half of its space to the work Rivera produced before returning to Mexico. It is divided into four sections, arranged thematically as well as chronologically. They are titled, From the Academy to the European Avant-Garde, 1886- 1913; Cubism and Classicism, 1913-1921; Muralism: A Proposal for Universal Humanism, 1922- 1932; and finally, The Artistic Languages of Diego Rivera, 1923-1957. In the first, as the title indicates, we follow Rivera as he leaves his roots in the Mexican academy and becomes involved with the European avant-garde. The second section traces his involvement with the Parisian avant-garde and his movement toward a more “socially relevant art,” which would synthesize modernist and classical styles. The third theme follows Rivera’s development as a muralist. The final section explores the vast range of Rivera’s art in the last four decades of his life, in which he produced a dazzling array of work and employed styles, according to Robinson’s introduction, “ranging from surrealist-inspired fantasy to the monumental, hieratic simplicity of pre-conquest Indian art.”

The exhibition is designed to draw attention from the standard obsessions with Rivera’s political interests, personal life, and a narrow view of his work as a muralist, and to shed light instead on the earlier work and the process he developed of assimilating and transforming artistic styles and techniques. For example, rather than promote the accepted view that Rivera “abandoned” cubism, the exhibition traces “his use of the planar, geometric structures of cubism in composing his later murals and scenes of Mexican life,” writes Robinson.

“I think Rivera was considered a traitor,” says Robinson, because he appeared to have “abandoned cubism and gone back to work for low wages in murals. Supporters of cubism worked to destroy his reputation. There’s a very different view of his work from Europe than the Americas.”

Rivera had indeed come to believe that cubism as an art form was only accessible to artistic cogniscenti; a view that was influenced at the time by his conversations with Mexican and Russian expatriate revolutionaries in Paris. They urged him to find a “more collective and social” art. At this time he was also greatly influenced by the work of Cézanne and Ingres, and eventually joined other artists in a Paris exhibition that trumpeted their work as “modern classicism.” He traveled to Italy where he sketched medieval and Renaissance frescoes – - which he believed ended his search for a “monumental, public art capable of persuading and educating the masses.”

Mexico in 1921 had just emerged from a protracted and bloody revolution. Rivera was also at a turning point artistically, tired of France and Italy, tempted by its political climate to go to Russia, but yearning for home. As he put it in My Art, My Life, the autobiography written with Gladys March,”The call of my country was stronger than ever. And a turn in the political situation seemed to favor my prospects…. An artist with my revolutionary point of view could now find a place in Mexico — a place in which to work and grow….the exile was coming home.”

Mexico’s new leader, President Obregon, supported the notion of free universal education. To further his project, his Minister of Education recruited artists to create murals in public buildings — works of art that would promote his educational programs, “rehabilitate” the indigenous Indian race, and integrate the peasants into mainstream Mexican society. In 1923 Rivera embarked on his second project for the government, a cycle of murals for the Ministry of Public Education. He used styles and subjects inspired by his travels in Mexico, and employed the technique of the true fresco — understood by Europeans and ancient Mayans alike — using earth, rather than commercial pigments, applied on wet plaster. “I had the ambition,” Rivera writes, “to reflect the genuine essential expression of the land. I wanted my pictures to mirror the social life of Mexico as I see it, and through the reality and arrangement of the present, the masses were to be shown the possibilities of the future.”

Although Rivera’s cubist period is dismissed as a lapse by some, other scholars maintain that it is impossible to overestimate its importance to Rivera’s later work.

“…Everything about the movement fascinated and intrigued me,” Rivera writes. “It was a revolutionary movement, questioning everything that had previously been said and done in art. …cubism broke down forms as they had been seen for centuries, and was creating out of the fragments new forms, new objects, new patterns and — ultimately — new worlds. When it dawned on me that all this innovation had little to do with real life, I would surrender all the glory and acclaim cubism had brought me for a way in art truer to my inmost feelings.”

Despite this apparent disillusion, Bertram D. Wolfe, contents in his book, The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, that Rivera regarded cubism “as the most important experience in the formation of his art.”

The exhibition also traces Rivera’s role in the anti- modernist reaction in France during World War I, and the relationship between his art and the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Massive and ambitious in scope, Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution suggests new interpretations of specific works and revised perspectives on the totality of his contribution. Indeed, its grand scale seems to mirror the man himself — an artist whose near-mythic life force and prolific output never slowed, even toward the end of his life. Suffering from a recurrence of cancer in the mid- 1950s, following the death of his third wife, the artist Frida Kahlo, he returned to Mexico from Moscow, where he had been treated for the disease. Surrounded by family and friends, he contemplated his tumultuous personal life, his contribution to art, and his feelings toward existence. Faced with these mysteries, he returned at length to the heart of the matter. He writes, “Right now, my fingers and I are literally itching to start work on my next mural.”

Robin Herbst is a writer in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Cleveland Museum of Art received $100,000 from the Endowment to help produce “Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution,” along with a catalog and public programs on the exhibition.