50 Fun Facts About Diego Rivera

In which Mexican city was Diego Rivera born in 1886?

His twin brother Carlos died at two; Diego started drawing a year later and his parents covered the walls in chalkboards.

How many wives did Rivera have?

A fellow artist, a novelist, Frida Kahlo and finally his agent; his only son died at the age of two.

Rivera's first wife, Angelina Beloff, came from which empire?

Elena Poniatowska's 1978 novel Dear Diego, with Love, Quiela is built from Beloff's letters to him.

Rivera's second wife, Guadalupe Marín, worked as a model and what else?

Her semi-autobiographical novel La Única appeared in 1938; she appears as a fertile goddess in his Chapingo chapel mural.

How old was Rivera when he married the 22-year-old Kahlo in 1929?

Her parents called it a marriage between an elephant and a dove.

Whom did Rivera marry in 1955, a year after Kahlo's death?

She had been his agent since 1946; he died two years later and was buried at the Panteón de Dolores.

From what age did Rivera study at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City?

The governor of Veracruz later sponsored his move to Europe in 1907, starting in Madrid.

Which Italian friend painted Rivera's portrait in Paris in 1914?

Their Montparnasse circle included Chaïm Soutine, Max Jacob and Ilya Ehrenburg.

Which style did Rivera enthusiastically embrace from 1913 to 1917?

Around 1917 Cézanne's work pulled him toward Post-Impressionism and simple forms in vivid colour.

Rivera's autobiography makes what widely doubted claim about his youth in 1904?

He said he and friends bought cadavers from the morgue; biographers treat it as an elaborate lie.

Which minister of education brought Rivera home for the government mural program in 1921?

The program also enlisted Orozco, Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and the French artist Jean Charlot.

What was the title of Rivera's first significant mural, painted in 1922?

He painted it in encaustic at the National Preparatory School while carrying a pistol against right-wing students.

How many frescoes was Rivera's cycle at the Secretariat of Public Education intended to have?

Begun in September 1922 and finished in 1928, it shows large simplified figures with a clear Aztec influence.

Which political organization did Rivera join in 1922?

He even sat on its Central Committee, before being expelled in 1929 for suspected Trotskyite sympathies.

The photographer shown holding an ammunition belt in Rivera's mural In the Arsenal is who?

Kahlo appears on the left handing out munitions; Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella faces Modotti.

Rivera's chapel mural Fertile Land is at an agricultural university in which town?

It shows Zapata's corpse fertilizing a maize field and Lupe Marín as a nude goddess.

Which exiled revolutionary lived with Rivera and Kahlo for several months?

The couple petitioned the Mexican government for his asylum and lent him La Casa Azul in Coyoacán.

Where did Rivera paint The History of Mexico between 1929 and 1935?

Its three walls run from Aztec times through conquest and revolution to a Marxist future; some panels are 70 metres wide.

Rivera travelled to Moscow in 1927 to mark which anniversary?

He was commissioned to paint the Red Army Club but was ordered out of the country in 1928.

Which American patron and MoMA founding director did Rivera meet in the Soviet Union?

MoMA gave Rivera a retrospective in November 1931, only its second solo show.

Which San Francisco architect commissioned Rivera in 1930 and again in 1940?

The first job was a $2,500 mural for the City Club of the Stock Exchange; tennis star Helen Wills modelled for it.

How many fresco panels make up Detroit Industry?

They fill an inner court of the Detroit Institute of Arts and became a National Historic Landmark in 2014.

Who contributed $20,000 to make the Detroit commission possible?

Some historians think he stoked the resulting controversy to publicize the work.

The main Detroit panels show workers at which Ford plant?

Rivera began by researching the complex itself, then the largest integrated factory in the world.

Which Detroit panel caused offence by casting a doctor and nurse as Joseph and Mary?

In the 1950s a sign in the courtyard defended the murals' merit while calling his politics 'detestable'.

Who commissioned Rivera to paint the Detroit Industry murals in 1932?

As director of the Detroit Institute of Arts he asked for 27 frescoes on the industries of the city.

Kahlo's 1932 painting Henry Ford Hospital records what event during their Detroit stay?

She shows herself weeping with an exposed heart, an image borrowed from the legend of La Llorona.

Man at the Crossroads was commissioned in 1933 for the lobby of which New York tower?

It is now 30 Rockefeller Plaza; Nelson Rockefeller had first wanted Matisse and Picasso for the flanking walls.

Whose portrait did Rivera refuse to remove from Man at the Crossroads?

He added it after a newspaper called the unfinished work 'anti-capitalist propaganda'.

Which assistant photographed Man at the Crossroads before it was destroyed?

Her black-and-white photographs are the only record of the original and let Rivera repaint it in Mexico.

Which artist's mural eventually replaced Rivera's in Rockefeller Center?

Rivera's fresco was peeled off the wall in February 1934; Sert's American Progress went up three years later.

What did Rivera call his 1934 repainting of the Rockefeller mural?

The Mexico City version added Trotsky beside Marx and Engels — and a pointed portrait of John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Which city cancelled a Rivera World's Fair mural after the Rockefeller scandal?

Rivera vowed to repaint the same mural wherever asked until the Rockefeller money ran out.

Which New Yorker writer published the ballad 'I paint what I see' about the affair?

Archibald MacLeish also wrote six 'irony-laden' poems about the mural.

Pan American Unity was painted live in 1940 at which event?

Ten panels, $1,000 a month, and portraits of Kahlo, Paulette Goddard and woodcarver Dudley Carter.

Which Hollywood actress is shown planting a tree with Rivera in Pan American Unity?

The mural is owned by City College of San Francisco and was shown at SFMOMA from 2021 to 2024.

Which skeletal figure did Rivera turn into a national icon in his Alameda mural?

José Guadalupe Posada invented her as a print; Rivera gave her a full body and indigenous features.

The Alameda mural was hidden for nine years over a sign denying the existence of whom?

Rivera, an atheist, finally agreed to remove the words held by Ignacio Ramírez 'El Nigromante'.

The Alameda mural was moved to its own museum after which 1985 event?

The Hotel del Prado that housed it was condemned; the Museo Mural Diego Rivera was built across the street.

Rivera's Anahuacalli Museum is built from what material?

The rock came from the Xitle eruption that formed the Pedregal de San Ángel, quarried on the site itself.

What did Rivera build the Anahuacalli to house?

Architect Juan O'Gorman and daughter Ruth Rivera finished it after his death; it opened in 1964.

Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros are known collectively by what name?

They claimed to be the 'voice and vote' of the Mexican national consciousness.

Which fellow muralist led a failed 1940 assassination attempt on Trotsky?

Trotsky's 14-year-old grandson was shot in the raid; Trotsky was murdered months later by a different assassin.

In 1926 Rivera joined which occult organization, later having to justify it to the Communist Party?

He co-founded its Mexico City lodge, named Quetzalcoatl, and claimed he joined to infiltrate a 'Yankee' body.

Who played Rivera in the 2002 film Frida?

Rubén Blades had played him in Cradle Will Rock three years earlier.

Which Rivera painting sold for $9.76 million in 2018, then a Latin American record?

It came from the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller — the family that had destroyed his New York mural.

Which Barbara Kingsolver novel features Rivera, Kahlo and Trotsky as major characters?

Its narrator works as a plaster-mixer and cook in the Rivera household before the Trotsky years.

Rivera's posthumous autobiography My Life, My Art was compiled by whom?

She spent months each year with him from 1944, filling 2,000 pages with his recollections.

How old was Rivera when he died in November 1957?

He was buried at the Panteón de Dolores in Mexico City; the government later declared his works historic monuments.

Rivera wrote in 1935 that which part of his ancestry was 'the dominant element in my life'?

His mother was said to have converso ancestry; he was never raised in any Jewish practice.