Word: rivera
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...when he did his enormous fresco cycle of Mexican history in the Palacio de Cortes at Cuernavaca, a work that made no bones about his Communist sympathies, his $12,000 fee was paid by Dwight W. Morrow, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico. In 1931 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller bought Rivera's sketchbook of the 1928 May Day parade in Moscow...
Though such pairings were tailor-made for satire, nothing suggests that his Yanqui patrons were masochists. They wanted the best public art they could get and believed, with reason, that Rivera could supply it. They thought him a cross between Whitman and Picasso...
...display such sympathies in the Depression made management look benign. When Edsel Ford wanted to celebrate the Rouge complex and the auto industry, he got Rivera to paint a mural cycle in Detroit; it attracted 86,000 visitors in its first month. Rivera had no problems in casting American engineers as the heroes of a new age. Encouraged by this, John D. Rockefeller in 1932 commissioned a Rivera mural, Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, for the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Rivera put in a head...
...Rivera became a cubist after 1913, but he was no mere follower. Not only are his cubist canvases a lot bigger and more fiercely colored than those of most of his contemporaries, but they strike a peculiar stance between boldness and indecipherability, making the work of minor French cubists like Gleizes or Metzinger seem wispy and ladylike by comparison. The extreme case was Zapatista Landscape--The Guerrilla, Rivera's masterpiece of 1915. It has everything in it from a rifle and pistol holster to a sarape, a sombrero and the snow-capped Mexican cordillera. Yet despite all the detail...
...also been thinking long and hard about public art, which cubism never pretended to be. He was already a celebrity in Mexico. When Alvaro Obregon swept into office as President, Rivera found he had an enthusiast in the Minister of Education, Jose Vasconcelos, who invited him back to Mexico to take part in a huge program of public painting. In Mexico and Russia, unlike most of the early 20th century world, a fresco could still be counted on for political impact. Mexico had a huge illiterate population, used to learning doctrine by looking at images. Painting had little...