A pinch of Mexico in Madrid for Diego Riversa
Casa México hosts for five months the exhibition Diego Rivera, a universal artist to bring Rivera’s art to the Spaniards, the exhibition reflects the stages of the clearly differentiated artist, is also responsible for visualizing the political and social Mexico of the time throughIts muralist stage which is one of the most important since it is the maximum representative of muralism. His work brings us closer to Mexico of the nineteenth and twentieth century.
In the exhibition Diego Rivera, universal artist we will go on a trip where we will know thorough. The works have been assigned by the Veracruz Institute of Culture from the Museum of Art of the State Veracruz.
Diego Rivera, universal artist is located in Casa Mexico in Spain located on Alberto Aguilera Street, can be visited from October to February of the next year.
Casas Mexico wants to emphasize, through this exhibition, the dissemination of Mexican art, make an approach to the Spanish public occur. With this project of great quality and great aesthetic value we can glimpse the great historical meaning also the approach of cultural traditions and values that it supposes for Mexico.
Diego Rivera was born on December 8, 1886 in Guanajuato, Mexico. From an early age he began to feel passion for art and at age eleven to be part of the National School of Fine Arts of San Carlos. His work begins by approaching European painting through Murillo and Antonio Fabres, from this stage we have its first landscapes.
In 1907 he arrived in Spain through a scholarship granted by the governor of Veracruz. Once in the country he studies the great national artists who are exposed in the Prado Museum;Goya, Velázquez, Zuloaga … In addition, he manages to enter the Circle of Fine Arts and is done with the avant -garde Madrid.
In 1909 he made a trip through France, England, Belgium, the Netherlands … but ends up falling in love with France and there he began to paint in the free academies. After a while he travels to witches, Belgium and there he meets Angelina Beloff who will be married and installed in Paris years later. A year later he makes a trip to Brittany and exhibits his works at the Societé des Artists Independants. In this exhibition he will establish relations with Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna invites him to participate in the exhibition of full painters in which Cubism will be presented for the first time in Madrid. Here he will present "My American Trophy", a work in which he makes a mixture of the most vibrant Mexican colors introducing Cubist elements.
A year later he enters a new trip through Europe that makes him contact the trends of the time. In 1915 he stays in Paris (Montparnasse) and this is where we will find strong influences of the Avant-Garde. Rivera will enter the search for his own language as a Mexican and universal artist.
After six years in Paris he will return to Mexico where the Minister of Education, José Vasconcelos will invite you to decorate the walls of public buildings. Rivera will be one of the greatest representatives of Mexican muralism, which consisted of an art that was responsible for representing social realism. Rivera along with José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, Jean Charlot or David Alfaro will become pioneers of the first independent artistic movement of Europe who will later expand throughout America. In 1922 he made his first mural “La Creation” that was a commission for the Simón Bolívar amphitheater, from that moment his painting becomes a very important reference for the Mexican and Latin American muralist movement.
I continue to make murals, which, which are the most important are in the Cortenavaca Palace in Cuernavaca. In 1946 he painted one of the most important murals of his entire work "Dream of a Sunday afternoon in the Central Alameda", in this exhibition we do not have the original work, but in a single room for the work we find a recreation of the work to sizeoriginal in which you can enter and go through all the characters that make up the work and admire them. In this mural Rivera appears self-portrayed as a child who walks through the central alameda in which he is accompanied by the thirty most emblematic characters of the four hundred years of the history of Mexico. We can see how all his women are in the mural and even he appears very attached to Frida Kahlo, which is his wife at that time. The entire left zone is related to the colonial conquest, the independence of Mexico, European invasion and intervention.
Another work to highlight in this exhibition is the picture with which the work is presented and the one we can find in all the advertising and brochures of this exhibition, which is "naked with sunflowers". In the work we can visualize a brunette woman who is on her back to us and kneel. Rivera places women as a reflection of female beauty, hence the fact that it appears naked because it is allowed to appreciate female beauty in all its splendor.
Diego Rivera, a universal artist, despite having only ten works makes us a very good tour of the artist’s stages, we go through works such as Barranca de Mixcoac (1904) that shows us the beginning of Rivera’s artistic life in the academy in the academyOf arts, although this picture is done after the expulsion of the academy and moves to the capital, so you can visualize the different influences he received from the different teachers he had, that determined how his artistic development would be later.
We have works of his stage living in Spain as is burned lands of Catalonia (1911), here we can see the clear influence of pointillism. Rivera had come into contact with the current of symbolism that was expanding through Europe. This work is a great example of symbolism, but Rivera made him his, had characteristics that made his works distinction.
Another fairly remarkable work of the exhibition is an actress’s portrait (1948), the portrait says she is the famous actress Silvia Pinal, but she is not corroborated. You can see certain influences of modernism, it portrays an actress who appears as a femme fatale, the woman appears hesitant smoking, she goes out with very large eyes, as exalted as if she was not rope. It represents it in a somewhat cadaveric way we can visualize it in the zone of the cheekbones and in the very outstanding bones of the dolls. A pretty relevant work is peasant carrying a Guajolote (1944), this representation is responsible for approaching traditional Mexico, the countryside and how you work there.
The exhibition also has an interactive zone apart from the area of the mural of a Sunday dream, there is an area where a Rivera video is reproduced. The painter makes his appearance walking through the streets and markets of Mexico paying close attention to his people to, then draw them. The video was made by Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Gabriel Figueroa, both friends of Rivera.
In conclusion, this exhibition shows us the great artistic career of Diego Rivera and helps us to feel a little closer to his work through this collaboration with Casa Mexico. In addition, they enter Spaniards to learn a little more Mexican culture.
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