Diego Rivera Biography | Oil Paintings

Considered the greatest Mexican painter of the 20th century, Diego Rivera had a profound effect on the international art world. Among his many contributions, Rivera is credited with the reintroduction of fresco painting into modern art and architecture and the impact on America’s conception of public art.

The outstanding muralist of Latin America, Diego Rivera studied art in Mexico City and Madrid; he went to live in Paris in 1911, where he met Picasso and began painting Cubist works, which were influenced by Juan Gris and Georges Braque.

However, Diego Rivera was not satisfied with this and was searching for a new form of expression in his paintings, a synthesis that could reach a large audience and at the same time express the complex new world he lived in.

He found it during a sojourn to Italy studying the frescoes of the Renaissance masters made such an impact on him that, on his return to Mexico in 1921, he found his medium and concentrated on large murals decorating the walls of public buildings, satisfying the need to express his world and viewed by large numbers of people at the same time. These depicted every aspect of life in Mexico and drew on the turbulent history of its people.

Diego Rivera's best work was carried out during a period when Mexico was dominated by left-wing, anti-clerical governments, which regarded Rivera as the leading revolutionary artist. He also worked in the USA where he painted murals extolling the industrial proletariat and preaching social messages.

In 1929 Diego Rivera married Frida Kahlo. He was influenced by her work and included her portrait in many of his murals. Rivera made the first of a series of trips to the USA, beginning in 1930, that would alter the course of American painting. In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Rivera arrived in Detroit, where, at the behest of Henry Ford, he began a tribute to the American worker on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. For several years after 1934 Diego Rivera concentrated on easel oil paintings, portraits, landscapes, and images of Mexican life. He evolved his own brand of folk art with overtones of such disparate elements as Aztec symbolism and Byzantine icons.

Art Movement: Cubism Art, Modernism.
Artists Influencing Diego Rivera: Eduardo Chicharro, Paul Cézanne, Juan Gris, Georges Braque.
He Traveled To USA, Spain, France, Italy, Russia.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist.