Diego Rivera

My mother, Jim, told me once that while she and my dad were in Mexico City on their honeymoon, they visited several museums. She said that in one they saw a politically inspired mural by a famous painter, and that someone had damaged it by throwing paint on it. She said that she thought the artist’s name was Rivera.

Well, when I got off the phone, I immediately Googled Rivera to see if I could find out anything about him. Sure enough, there was a prominent artist from Mexico named Diego Rivera who was quite famous by 1941 when my parents saw his mural, both as an artist and as a political figure. There have been two movies made about his life, Cradle will Rock, made in 1999, and Frida, featuring Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo. Coincidentally, I had seen Frida shortly before Jim told me about the mural.

Rivera was born in Mexico, but studied art in Paris and lived there for several years where he became a prominent artist, and a close friend of Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait. In 1920, after the Mexican revolution, he returned to Mexico where he became active in the communist party, painting nationalistic murals, and founding the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors. At the time, his work was so inflammatory that he armed himself with a pistol while he painted.

Coincidentally, 1921 was when Wenonah’s family lived in San Antonio. I tell the story in the book, Wenonah’s Story, about how her father tried to go into the business of selling Mexican real estate, and failed, probably because of the political unrest there.

The mural my parents saw has quite a history. Rivera first painted it in Rockefeller Center in New York City in 1933 with the title, “Man at the Crossroads.” The painting, which had been commissioned by the Rockefeller family, became controversial when an image of Vladimir Lenin was discovered inside it. Rivera refused to remove the image so the painting was destroyed, and Rivera returned to Mexico City. There he reproduced the mural my parents saw, renaming it “Man the Controller of the Universe.”

Wikipedia didn’t mention that the second version was defaced, but Jim got the idea it had been recent in 1941. Once again I was just amazed that she remembered anything about it at all.