Word: riveras
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...next decade, Rivera did what is probably his greatest work: 124 frescoes in the Ministry of Education, a historical mural in the Cortés Palace at Cuernavaca, and his frescoes in the old expropriated chapel that has been part of Mexico's Agricultural School at Chapingo since 1920. Part of the chapel at Chapingo he decorated with an agricultural allegory in which the earth is personified by a series of nudes. They were modeled by Lupe Marin, the tempestuous, olive-skinned beauty who was his second wife...
Undertaker Joe. When he finished at Chapingo, Rivera decided it was time for a visit of homage to Moscow. He went there in 1927, and seemed to enjoy himself hugely. He stood for three icy hours on one occasion sketching a parade in the Red Square, later sold 45 watercolors of it to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. He also met and sketched Stalin. He was in one of his pro-Stalin moods, and he felt moved and honored. Later, in one of his unpredictable flipflops, he changed his mind, wrote sarcastically (in Esquire...
...When Rivera got home from Moscow he married Frida Kahlo, a pretty, sloe-eyed art student who had sworn to her schoolmates, at 13, that she would some day bear him a child (she never has, but Lupe had borne him two girls). Diego and Frida moved into her sparkling Spanish-colonial home in Coyoacan (a Mexico City suburb). There, in the course of time, came many old and new friends of Diego. One of them, after Diego soured on Stalin, was Leon Trotsky. For almost two years (1938-39), Trotsky lived as the Riveras' guest, writing his life...
...Rivera now vows that he was never a Trotskyite, and that he sheltered Stalin's enemy merely out of kindness, "despite his political errors." Rivera's own bitterly anti-Stalin writings, he explains solemnly, were "just a trick to mislead the stockholders of Bethlehem Steel." But the Reds have reason to know that there is always one more trick in Rivera's trunk. When he applied for readmission to the party, in 1946, their response was a horrified no. "So I have no right," he says with elephantine humility, "to call myself a Communist...
Trouble at the Crossroads. Rivera's murals heavily influenced the WPA muralists who spread their work across the walls of U.S. post offices in the 1930s. About the same time, his own became increasingly complicated. He started spelling things out-caricaturing his personal and political enemies, deifying his heroes -and his paintings lost their poetic savor. But if his art was no longer so lyrical, Rivera's mural in Mexico City's old National Palace still made powerful prose. So did the clamorous panels he painted in the Detroit Institute of Arts to celebrate the machine...