What was diego riveras full name

In , at the height of the Great Depression, Rivera arrived in Detroit, where, at the behest of Henry Ford, he began a paean to the American worker on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Completed in , the piece depicted industrial life in the United States, concentrating on the car plant workers of Detroit. Rivera, however, did not fare nearly so well in his association with the Rockefellers in New York City. In the painting, Rivera included a scene of a giant May Day demonstration of workers marching with red banners.

It was not the subject matter of the panel that inflamed the patrons, but the clear portrait of Lenin leading the demonstration. When Rivera refused to remove the portrait, he was ordered to stop and the painting was destroyed. That same year, Rivera used the money from the Rockefellers to create a mural for the Independent Labor Institute that had Lenin as its central figure. Rivera remained a central force in the development of a national art in Mexico throughout his life. Some of the pieces have Mexican themes, such as the Guerrillero By he was producing pencil sketches of the highest quality, an example of which is his self-portrait.

He continued his studies in Europe, traveling throughout Italy learning techniques of fresco in which paint is applied to wet plaster and mural painting before returning to Mexico in Rivera believed that all people not just people who could buy art or go to museums should be able to view the art that he was creating.

He began painting large murals on walls in public buildings. The mural was painted using the encaustic method a process where a color mixed with other materials is heated after it is applied. Rivera had a great sense of color and an enormous talent for structuring his works. In his later works he used historical, social, and political themes to show the history and the life of the Mexican people. The frescoes in the Auditorium of the National School of Agriculture in Chapingo are considered his masterpiece.

The oneness of the work and the quality of each of the different parts, particularly the feminine nudes, show off the height of his creative power. The general theme of the frescoes is human biological and social development. In Rivera married the artist Frida Kahlo — The couple traveled in the United States, where Rivera produced many works of art, between and One of his most important works is the fresco in the Detroit Institute of Arts , which depicts industrial life in the United States.

Rivera returned to New York and began painting a mural for Rockefeller Center He was forced to stop work on the mural because it included a picture of Vladimir Lenin — , the founder of the Russian Communist Party and the first leader of the Soviet Union. Many people in the United States disagreed with communism a political and economic system in which property and goods are owned by the government and are supposed to be given to people based on their need and Lenin and the mural was later destroyed.

Rivera was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and many of his works included representations of his political beliefs. In New York Rivera also did a series of frescoes on movable panels depicting a portrait of America for the Independent Labor Institute before returning to Mexico in This was a copy of the project that he had started in Rockefeller Center. All three of her pregnancies had to be terminated, which caused the artist a lot of grief and heartache.

But a movie star is just a character. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Cover Letter. Ben Davis February 17, Why does Diego Rivera have a long name? Frida finally realized that one woman would never be enough for a man like Diego. She had polio as a child, and then as a teenager, she further crippled her legs in a streetcar accident. She spent her life bound up in suffocating casts and braces. A woman who could withstand that kind of pain knew how to manage the hurt of a broken heart.

She was a great painter in her own right. Diego respected her art almost as much as he cherished her love. By the end of , the world had turned upside down.

With the crash of the Wall Street Market, countries with capitalistic economies collapsed everywhere. Marx had always predicted that socialism would be born and thrive best within a highly developed industrial nation.

For centuries, inequities had existed between the wealth and well-being of the few versus the poverty and ill-being of the masses. Marx theorized that in a fully developed nation, built on the principles of equality, this grievous contradiction would, finally, be so blatantly exposed, that it would drive its citizens to the development of a socialist utopia.

Diego believed the United States was the country in which these idealist dreams were about to come true. He wanted to be a part of this great world event. Amongst enormous media controversy, in , Rivera, a very vocal proponent of Communism, was invited to paint a major mural in one of the bulwarks of American capitalism, the new San Francisco Stock Exchange Luncheon Club. Diego and Frida traveled to California where he painted California , based on a legend of a Black Amazon warrior queen, Califia, associated with the mythical "Island of California.

This mural is, without doubt, the most gorgeous art piece he ever produced. America was in love with him. His was the second one-man show to be invited to this new museum, Matisse having been the first. Diego was amazed at the modern architectural wonders of the soaring New York skyscrapers. After seeing California, almost immune to the depression, he was equally appalled at the despair he saw on the faces of the men, women and children standing in the breadlines and soup kitchens of New York City.

More than 57 thousand visitors a month came to view his art. It had an even more popular response than Matisse. Diego loved the industrial magnificence of the United States and spent the next ten years painting his salute to it.

Word quickly spread among the titans of American industry and he was asked by Henry Ford's son, Edsel, to paint a multiple paneled mural in the Detroit Institute of Art of the now famously depicted Detroit Industry Production and Manufacture of Engine and Transmission.

The showing opened in March, to become an American triumph. Detroit Industry or Man and Machine detail. Diego had been commissioned to paint a mural in the RCA building in the new prestigious Rockefeller Center, to begin painting on March 7, This daunting assignment might have made other artists decline but not, Rivera, the greatest muralist.

Detailed sketches were presented by Diego and approved by the building's committee. Rivera was working industriously on the mural into April when a New York World Telegram journalist reported that Diego had inserted a heroically depicted giant head of the communist, Vladimir Lenin, in the center of the mural and had depicted the capitalist, John D.

Rockefeller, martini-in-hand, on the marginal sidelines. The uproar that ensued between the upholders of capitalism and the upholders of free artistic expression can still be heard in the societies of money and art to this day.

Nelson Rockefeller was asked to intervene and he reasoned with Diego, and then demanded him, to replace the face on the image. Rivera, artistically always true to his personal beliefs, refused to do so. The Rockefellers paid him his full commission and removed him from the building. Months later, when the mural was jack hammered off the walls, the painter, John Sloan, declared the act "a premeditated murder of art.

In the end, when the painting was reproduced in Mexico City it was criticized as one of his worst art pieces. It could not have been worth losing his title as the grandest illusionist of them all. In , Diego and Frida returned to Mexico to move into a new dual residence in San Angel that he had built for them. The blue one was her home, connected by a bridge to the red one, used as his home studio.

With the advent of film, there was no longer the need for murals to convey the messages to the people. So, Diego returned to the artist's timeworn patronage of the past, the rich.

The society people wanted Riveras so he painted their portraits into Riveras. During the next twenty years, he also painted the people who were closely entwined in his personal life such as the portraits of Christina. Once again, his art betrayed a love affair with the painting's sitter. Only this time, it was quite unforgivable, for the reason that Christina was his wife's sister and her most cherished friend.

At the same time, he continued to paint Frida, clearly showing her enormous anger with him over his lusty affaires. He also painted Lupe, his first wife, who stayed close in his life because of their two children. Both women lived off and on at the Rivera home through many years. Lupe and Frida became friends and Lupe taught her how to cook to please another of Diego's huge appetites.

Late in life, Diego showed remorse for the way he had treated Frida, saying, "If I loved a woman, the more I loved her, the more I wanted to hurt her. Frida was only the most obvious victim of this disgusting trait. Leon Trotsky was a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist.

He was one of the three leaders of the Russian October Revolution, second only to Lenin and above Stalin. When Lenin was assassinated in , his death left Trotsky and Stalin vying for his vacant top power position. Stalin, being the bigger brute between the two, maneuvered himself into running the show and Trotsky ended up running for his life. He ran straight to Mexico into Diego's big welcoming arms. When the dust had settled, the idealist, Rivera, was on the side of the Marxist Trotskyites and stood against Stalin.

On January 9, , Leon and his wife, settled into Frida's family home that her father had built in Coyoacan. Diego turned the house into a small fortress with armed guards to assure their safety while in Mexico. In the beginning the two families spent much time together socializing. Eventually, Diego and Leon's differing opinions on what constituted a good Marxist split them apart.

Leon told Diego he was too much of an anarchist to be a true Marxist. Diego should have told Leon he was too much of a traitor to be a true friend. Would seem the ungracious Leon had a torrid love affaire with Frida while he and his wife were the Rivera's houseguests.

On May 24, , Communists fired thousands of rounds into the house but failed to kill Trotsky. On August 21, , a single hard-core Stalinist drove an ice pick into his neck. Trotsky died the next day.