Studying Diego de Ribera and its stages
Culture is a way to appropriate our future, not only for the desire to create and approach a really desire, but with the intention of helping us exist, fighting evil and developing our conscience on earth. Throughout its history, Mexico has responded to the material and spiritual conquest of the West with its own vast culture. The Mexican territory witnessed, since pre -Columbian times, of the presence of scattered cultures from arid America to the current Costa Rican lands. With the population that survived, the conquest began racial miscegenation and, therefore, cultural viceroyalty, audiences and general captains. Under these forms of government, locations and regions were configured with differentiated features that at the same time shared lifestyles, value systems, traditions and beliefs, in addition to being part of a political system that articulated the territory and established the foundations of what would bethe sense of belonging of the different groups to a nation.
Mexico, from the consummation of its independence in 1821 and during the following thirty years, along with successive foreign invasions, wars and continuous rebellions, the differences between liberals and conservatives were exacerbated, to the point that the Mexican State raised to the category ofRight a modern conception of society that broke with the organizations and privileges of the prolonged and restrictive colonial period. This gradual transformation of the social structures, articulated in the reformist movement and in the laws, gave rise, questioned and fought the conservative and longing vision of the culture imposed by the metropolis and managed to embody, in the Constitution of 1857, a liberal concept andProgressive who assumed an awareness as a state and as a nation willing to build with the world without repressing what is its own. Unfortunately, this process of lucid self-affirmation was interrupted by the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, which privileged positivism, technology and foreignization as pillars of progress, to the detriment of humanized modernity that liberal thought had begun.
In 1921, at the end of the first social movement of the twentieth century, the 1910 revolution, the Mexican nation resumed the liberal line for several decades, which defended a specific culture and promoted a way of being and thinking that it contributed to build and consolidate the countryFrom the perception of its reality, permanently perfectible, but without subscribing vain projects waiting for others to save us. For almost half a century, however, the interpretation of the Mexican was thin by an official nationalism and a sacralization of the revolutionary feat that distorted the vision of themselves as men of Mexico, but also of the world, without fears or complexes, which, whichIt would take the country by surprise to a precipitated and asymmetric commercial opening, and a manipulative globalization after.
In the 1930s, the United States immersed itself in the great depression, caused by the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929. The banking economy and unemployment were the distinctive stamps of the time, and the crisis was exacerbated by the prolonged drought and dust storms that annihilated the agricultural lands again and again. In that environment, Mexican muralists, with the help of Americans who had visited Mexico in the 1920s, fought to impose muralism as the international avant -garde canon and as part of the leftist thought. These facts will inspire one of the most emblematic muralists in the history of Mexico.
One of the most prominent artists of the second decade of the twentieth century was Fernando Best Pontones, who marked the pattern at the national level and sold his paintings to Mexican and foreign patrons. However, due to his admiration for Félix Díaz, the new generation condemned him to ostracism. José Vasconcelos and Diego Rivera promoted the renewal of post -revolutionary practice and education in the early years, in which visual arts played a preponderant role as Spanish culture and identity dissemination. In 1923 the mural ‘Creation’ of Diego Rivera was inaugurated at the Bolívar amphitheater of the National Preparatory School. Diego combined in that mural a figurative language with a cubist construction where symbolism and totalizing idea required explanations.
Diego’s figure was winning a place in the press, since he assumed the active part in the definition of what should be the revolutionary painting and the role of the artist in that task. To achieve this, he not only painted, but also wrote, recorded events and about his frustrated attempt to capture, through the characters of the mural, the genuine Mexican beauty.
Diego Rivera, husband of Frida Kahlo, was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, on December 8, 1886, and died in Mexico City on November 24, 1957. He was an outstanding Mexican mural of communist ideology, famous for portraying works of high social content in public buildings. He was the creator of several murals in different points of the now called Historic Center of Mexico City, as well as at the National School of Agriculture of Chapingo, 4 and other Mexican cities such as Cuernavaca and Acapulco, American and South American cities such as Buenos Aires, SanFrancisco, Detroit and New York.
The works of art of Diego Rivera crossed the border, reaching the cities of Detroit, New York and San Francisco in 1933. Diego Rivera’s arrival in the United States was essential to bring modern art to this country. Rivera’s first individual exhibition in the United States reflected its link with pre -Columbian pieces, so the aesthetics of this art influenced the artists of the time. When Rivera realized that the consequences of the great depression of 1929 would last over time, he began to impregnate his American works of a more social trend, from the worker’s perspective. After his fight with Rockerfeller Rivera, he would no longer return to the United States, where McCarthyism made his works remain in the shadows for years, as happened with those of other artists similar to communist ideas.
Diego Rivera narrated different episodes of the revolution, his trip to Tehuantepec and the first mural painted in the SEP staircase. Between 1928 and 1932, Rivera was in charge of the decoration of the Ministry of Public Education, the Ministry of Health and the National Palace, in Mexico City;The Palacio de Cortés in Cuernavaca, Morelos, and the Chapel of the School of Agriculture in Chapingo, State of Mexico.
Upon his return from a prolonged stay in the United States, José Clemente Orozco painted prostituted world, called catharsis by Justino Fernández, an extended panel (4.44 x 11.45) with the fresco technique. It was located on the third floor of the Palace of Fine Arts, on the wall opposite where Diego Rivera was painting the man at the crossroads of the roads, a mural that had been destroyed in the Rockefeller Center in New York, and that now, withSome changes, I was recreating in Mexico.
Diego Rivera traveled to the United States, where, according to authors and critics of his art, they served everything in the silver tray: the Dwight W diplomat. Morrow eliminated obstacles for Diego to enter the United States and paint murals in California. The Morrow diplomat introduced Diego to the banker John Pierpont Morgan, who, in turn, presented the Detroit Institute of the Arts Circle of Directors: DRS: DRS: DRS. William Valentiner and Edgar Richardson, and presented Edsel Ford, the main sponsor of the museum. The directors asked Rivera to decorate the central courtyard of the museum, which would not be linked to the Mexican Revolution, but, according to the sponsor’s wishes, should tell Detroit’s story.
For the New York mural, Diego had written a script with elaborate descriptions. Rivera dedicated and gave John D’s wife. Rockefeller a sketch where man in the center of the mural corresponded to the previous description;However, in the mural, the union of peasants, workers and soldiers did not seem as bright as in the sketch, where one was next to each other;In addition, the painter added another character to his mural: Lenin’s head to the left of the imposing central figure. The change was notorious;In May 1933 he was asked by all the means to withdraw him, and the artist refused;He left the unfinished mural, as the photographs attest, and returned to Mexico. A game of hinges hides a significant controversy between what is shown and what is hidActive, and this proposal, in the building, was unacceptable.
The mural was repeated in Mexico with the changes Diego wanted. When he arrived in Mexico, Rivera was preceded by a huge fame for being an ‘anti -imperialist’ that had opposed those who had destroyed their murals. It would be with World War II and the Cold War that social murals would be marginalized in the United States;Realistic vocabulary would be stigmatized as socialist realism, and art sponsored by new patron would become abstract vocabulary related to the kingdom of emotions. The contract to rebuild the mural in Mexico was signed in 1934, and some details had to be removed, and others included. His theme addressed the overwhelming world of machines, whose industrial universe constituted the dream model, the nemesis of the revolutionary social system that Rivera had accepted as the basis of his art, and that was part of his idea of the future of Mexico.
That revolution had to be guided, according to the painter’s ideology, by the figure of Lenin, a symbol of a radical political management system. Although the mural caused considerable controversy among the inhabitants of Detroit, in the end, the directors of the institute won the battle, and today this great work of Diego remains in sight. With this mural, the painter showed that, despite his fame as a communist, he was able to represent the American world without controversy with the structure of capitalism, inserting his language in capitalist practice.
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