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From Recognition to Renown |
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In the same year Rivera received a
commission for a mural project, his first for several years - once again
from the United States. With the signing of the Russo-German
Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939, Rivera's negative attitude towards the
United States changed, and he accepted the invitation to California. His
anti-fascist views led to his coming to stand for the solidarity of all
American countries against fascism, and this is reflected in the
subject-matter of the San Francisco project. The ten wall-panels entitled
Pan-American Unity show scenes from Mexican and
North American history, with special emphasis on cultural development.
In the central part of
the polyptych, against the background of San Francisco Bay, the fusion of
both cultures takes place in the shape of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue,
symbolizing dualism; she is represented on one side in the manner of an anthropomorphic figure
following the tradition of monumental Mexican stone sculpture, and on the
other side turns into a metal, robot-like machine.
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Pan-American Unity
1940
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Pan-American Unity
1940
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Pan-American Unity
1940
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Pan-American Unity
(detail-Frida Kahlo)
1940
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Pan-American Unity
1940
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Pan-American Unity
1940
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Carnival of
Mexican Life
Dictatorship
1936
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Carnival of Mexican Life
Folkloric and touristic Mexico
1936
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In San Francisco, during his work on
this mural, Rivera married Frida Kahlo, whom he has portrayed as an artist
in the central area of the fresco, for the second time. He himself, with
his American assistant Paulette Goddard, with whom he is said to have had
a relationship, is depicted planting behind Kahlo the tree of life and
love, symbol of the union of the two cultures of the American continent.
Kahlo, after a prolonged stay abroad in 1938/39 and her first
international success as an artist, had left Rivera and moved to her
parents' home in Coyoacan. Both partners, however, found the separation
difficult to endure, and when Kahlo returned to San Francisco to have
treatment for her spinal column from a doctor friend, she immediately
accepted Rivera's proposal and their second marriage took place on 8
December 1940. Shortly afterwards Kahlo returned to Mexico, and in
February 1941, when he had finished the San Francisco mural, Rivera moved
into the "Blue House" with her in Coyoacan. From then on he used the San
Angel Inn house exclusively as a studio and retreat.
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1941
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In 1942, after his return from San
Francisco, Rivera began a project that was to occupy him for the rest of
his life. He had discovered a passion for collecting works of folk art and
pre-Columbian archaeological finds in the early 1920s, and on these he had
since spent a large part of his income. Inspired by the
antique cultures of his native country, Rivera conceived the idea of
constructing a monumental building modelled on the Aztec pyramid of
Tenochtitlan. Originally intended as a house and studio on Pedregal Field,
which at that time lay outside Mexico City, "Anahuacalli", meaning "the house of
Anahuac" in the Nahuatl language, was later used primarily as an
exhibition space for a collection that had grown to 60,000 items.
At this time Rivera was receiving
increasing public recognition, his standing as one of Mexico's foremost
artists was undisputed, and in 1943 the Mexican president, Avila Camacho,
made him one of the first fifteen members of the newly founded National
College (Colegio Nacional), an association of prominent Mexican scholars,
writers, artists, musicians and intellectuals; he and Orozco represented
the plastic arts. At the same time he was appointed to a professorship at
the Academy of Art in La Esmeralda, which had opened the year before.
Twenty-two artists were appointed to the staff in a thoroughgoing reform
of art teaching, including Frida Kahlo besides Rivera. This was the
latter's first teaching appointment since his short spell as director of
the San Carlos Academy of Art in 1929/30. Shaped by the Mexican-national
orientation of its staff, the teaching at La Esmeralda differed from that
of other academies. Here at last Rivera was able to some extent to realize
his conception of the artist's education. Instead of putting students to
work before plaster models in a studio or having them copy European
models, teachers sent them onto the street or into the countryside, to get
their stimulus direct from Mexican reality. Besides their education in
art, students were also taught academic subjects and left the Academy with
normal school-leaving qualifications.
Like other teachers, Rivera went with
his students on expeditions into the city and the provinces, to which, in
the years 1943 and 1944 especially, drawings and watercolours of everyday
scenes and a number of landscapes bear witness. A group of watercolours
and ink drawings depicting the eruption of the volcano El Paricutin in the
State of Michoacan and the oil painting Day of the
Dead date from this period.
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Erupting Volcano
1943
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Day of the
Dead
1944
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Nude with Calla Lilies
1944
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Girl
with Calla Lilies
1944
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In 1947, shortly after his recovery from
an inflammation of the lungs, Rivera began work on a large-scale new
mural. In the foyer of the sumptuous Hotel del Prado, situated in the
centre of Mexico City opposite the south side of Alameda Park, he painted
Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park. This
condensed representation of the history of Mexico, with its background of
the central point of Alameda Park, a favourite goal for the Sunday walks
of city-dwellers seeking rest and recreation, is the last and most
autobiographical of Rivera's great historical murals. The 15-metre fresco
takes the viewer on a Sunday walk through the Park, meeting numerous
prominent figures from Mexican history in a continuous row, chronological
from left to right. In the central part the boy Diego is led
by the hand by Dame Catrina ("Calavera Catrina"), a skeleton figure
parodying vanity created by the popular graphic artist Jose Guadalupe
Posada. Posada, who is portrayed on the right of Dame Catrina, gallantly
offering her his arm, was highly revered by Rivera, who claimed him as one
of his artistic forebears and teachers. It is not known, however, whether,
like Orozco and Siqueiros, as a young painter Rivera actually did spend
time in the street-front city studio of the graphic artist and publisher
of corridos, cartoons and broadsheets, as has often been
asserted, or whether he first became
interested in Posada's work after his return to Mexico from Europe. In any
case, there is no doubt that the ironic narrative method of this gifted
popular artist was an extremely influential model for Rivera's mural
painting in particular. Calavera Catrina, a symbol of the urban
bourgeoisie at the turn of the century, must also be taken here as an
allusion to the Aztec Earth Mother Coatlicue, who is frequently
represented with a skull. She wears the plumed serpent, symbolic of her
son Quetzalcoatl, round her neck as a boa, and her belt-buckle displays
the Aztec astrological sign of Ollin, symbolizing perpetual motion. In
this mother of the gods, here also a mother-figure to Rivera himself, the
origin of both life and of the quintessential Mexican spirit is
represented, as well as the dual principle of pre-Columbian mythology,
which has its counterpart in the Yin-Yang symbol of Chinese philosophy,
which the adjacent figure of Frida Kahlo holds in her hand. Kahlo's other
hand rests maternally on the shoulder of the young Diego, who sets out on
his walk through life and the world under her protection.
This mother-child aspect of the couple's
relationship is also brought out by Kahlo in her article "Portrait of
Diego" published in honour of the artist in 1949. After major exhibitions
of works by the muralists Orozco and Siqueiros, who with Rivera formed the
mural-painting committee of the National Institute of Fine Arts (Instituto
Nacional de Bellas Artes or INBA), in the year 1947, a comprehensive
retrospective in 1949 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of
Rivera's artistic career, comprising over a thousand works, was opened by
the Mexican president, Miguel Aleman, in the Palace of Fine Arts.
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Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park
1947-1948
Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City
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Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park
(detail)
1947-1948
Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City
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Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park
(detail)
1947-1948
Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City
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Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park
(detail)
1947-1948
Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City
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Dream of a Sunday
Afternoon in Alameda Park (detail)
1947-1948
Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City
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Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park
(detail)
1947-1948
Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City
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Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park
(detail)
1947-1948
Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City
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