Diego Rivera

Among the artists that are regarded as belonging to the Mexican School of Painting there are hardly any who have contributed more with their work than Diego Rivera, who gave the movement an iconographic definition. Rivera had a strong, aesthetic interest in the school and aimed to integrate it into national Mexican culture. In order to support the identification, he decided to research and include the particular pictorial elements that define the country, the very essence of Mexico. The indigene population of Mexico as well as the common people must find their way back to their identity.

The great paradox of the modern era is reflected in this newly awakened interest in the indigene culture at a time when Mexico is on the verge of entering the 20th century. Rivera incorporates the indigene aspect in his painting style, not using it to represent ethnic tradition but rather as the embodiment of national identity. He was to stay with this characteristic style for the rest of his life. In his creative universe he concentrated on recovering all cultural treasures, which both the Pre-Hispanic population and the citizens of present-day Mexico had contributed to a modern, a new Mexico, which had just emerged from revolution.

Although Rivera did not experience the revoloution personally – he was studying at the time on a scholarship in Europe – on his return to Mexico he undertook several trips at the invitation of the Minister of Education, José Vasconcelos, to various places such as the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and Oaxaca, in order to experience Mexican reality at first hand. These journeys to rediscover the Mexican culture, with its very own roots, left very decisive impressions.

Rivera possessed an astounding creative ability, which, without exaggeration, might be described as ingenious. Evidence of this is his contribution to and active participation in the Cubist Movement during his student years in Europe. The solid, academic training that Rivera had received in Mexico and Spain provided him with the facility to assimilate the various doctrines circulating in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century.

On his travels through provincial Mexico it became clear to the artist that his work would demand a very significant didactical component. The enormous problem of illiteracy was evident everywhere, due to the fact that during the Porfiriat only specially chosen groups of citizens had access to education, with the result that the great majority had no opportunity at all to learn reading and writing.

For this very reason Rivera turned his work (his murals as well as his paintings) into a visual history lesson of enormous dimensions, into which he integrated both the cultural possessions of the Pre-Hispanic world and the materialisation of these possessions in contemporary Mexican folk culture. His work is distinguished by a combination of iconographic Mexicanism and a modern vision of Mexican culture. We should recall here that Rivera's political conviction was very strongly influenced by socialism and the Communist culture of the Soviet people.

It is therefore not surprising that the major part of his graphic art is a faithful image of this cultural blending, in which indigene elements are mixed with a modernistic vision which should also be understandable in other cultural areas. This possibly explains why he frequently received commissions for murals and other paintings from, of all countries, the USA, the heartland of capitalism.