49 Fun Facts About Diego Rivera

In which Mexican city was Diego Rivera born?

Guanajuato is where his parents, finding the small boy drawing on the walls of the house, answered by giving him wall space of his own to cover.

Rivera and Frida Kahlo lived in her family home in Coyoacán, now a museum, known by which name?

The Blue House, La Casa Azul, takes its name from its cobalt walls; after Kahlo died there in 1954, Rivera left it to the Mexican people, and it opened as a museum to her in 1958.

Rivera's murals helped inspire which of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agencies?

The Works Progress Administration put jobless artists to work on public walls, an idea credited in part to the example Rivera set with his murals of American life.

The separate studio-houses built for Rivera and Kahlo in San Ángel were linked by what?

A rooftop bridge was the only link between the two buildings Rivera commissioned from Juan O'Gorman in 1931, one for each of them, independent of each other and each with its own studio.

Kahlo's mother called her daughter's marriage to Rivera an elephant and a what?

Dove to his elephant: Rivera was tall, heavy and already 42, Kahlo petite, fragile and 22, when they married in August 1929.

Which unlikely patron paid Rivera to paint the Cortés Palace murals in Cuernavaca in 1929?

The American ambassador, Dwight Morrow, was a great admirer of his work and gave him the commission just as Rivera's own political allies turned on him.

After studying in Madrid, Rivera spent most of the 1910s among the avant-garde artists of which city?

Paris gave him his avant-garde friends and then took them away: a violent quarrel with the critic Pierre Reverdy ended his friendships with the leading painters of his circle.

Which Italian friend painted Rivera's portrait in 1914?

Amedeo Modigliani turned their whole circle into a portrait gallery, painting Rivera along with Picasso, Soutine, Max Jacob and Rivera's lover Marevna.

Which style did Rivera enthusiastically embrace from 1913 to 1917?

Cubism struck him as a truly revolutionary way of painting, but around 1917 the example of Cézanne drew him back toward simpler forms and vivid colour.

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

He practised cannibalism, he claimed, clubbing together with friends to buy cadavers from the city morgue; biographers file it with his other tall tales, such as kinship with an empress.

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

José Vasconcelos conceived the government-backed mural project to build a shared sense of nationhood after the Revolution, and gave Rivera his first wall in Mexico.

What was the title of Rivera's first mural, painted at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City?

Creation, painted in the wax medium of encaustic with gold leaf, cast as its figure of Song a model named Lupe Marín, whom Rivera went on to marry.

Rivera's late mural Glorious Victory attacks a CIA-backed coup that toppled the president of which country in 1954?

Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Árbenz was the victim; Rivera shows the CIA chief Allen Dulles sealing the deal with one hand resting on a bomb that bears President Eisenhower's face.

Which political organization did Rivera join in 1922?

The Mexican Communist Party took him in, then threw him out again seven years later, in 1929, though he went on calling himself a Marxist for the rest of his life.

Which photographer did Rivera paint holding an ammunition belt in his mural In the Arsenal?

Tina Modotti had modelled for his earlier murals, and their affair helped end his marriage to Lupe Marín; in the same mural Frida Kahlo hands out weapons.

Rivera's mural cycle Fertile Land fills a hall at an agricultural university in which town?

Chapingo's murals fill a former hacienda chapel, which Rivera turned into a shrine to the land and its revolution, with buried martyrs of the struggle feeding the corn that grows above them.

Which exiled revolutionary did Rivera and Kahlo take into their home in 1937?

Leon Trotsky won asylum in Mexico with Rivera's help and reportedly had a brief affair with Kahlo; he moved out in 1939 after quarrelling with his host.

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

The National Palace stairwell tells the story across three walls, from ancient Mexico through the conquest to an imagined future, and Rivera kept returning to paint in the palace, on and off, until 1945.

Rivera went to Moscow as an official guest for the tenth anniversary of which event?

The October Revolution's anniversary made him an honoured guest in 1927; he stayed about nine months, teaching and planning a mural, until the authorities ordered him to leave.

Which New York museum, then only two years old, gave Rivera a one-man retrospective in 1931?

The Museum of Modern Art was co-founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, whose family went on to give him his most notorious commission.

Which San Francisco institution's private lunch club commissioned Rivera's 1931 mural Allegory of California?

The Stock Exchange got a two-storey staircase mural, dominated by a giant female figure of California, from a painter better known for attacking capitalism.

Calls to whitewash Rivera's Detroit murals in 1933 brought what?

Crowds flocked to see them; the outcry had come from clergy and a Detroit newspaper, but the museum's patron stood firm and the murals stayed on the walls.

The main panels of Rivera's Detroit Industry murals show workers at which Ford plant?

River Rouge entranced him: before painting a stroke, Rivera toured Ford's giant complex making sketches, more thrilled than appalled by its machinery.

Which panel of Rivera's Detroit murals caused offence by casting a doctor and nurse as Joseph and Mary?

The vaccination scene sets a haloed child among a horse, an ox and sheep, like a Nativity; religious groups demanded its destruction, but the museum refused and it is still in place.

Rivera and Kahlo divorced in 1939 and remarried the following year on which occasion?

His birthday: the simple civil ceremony took place on 8 December 1940, the day Rivera turned 54, and this time the couple stayed married until Kahlo's death in 1954.

Frida Kahlo's painting Henry Ford Hospital records what event from her stay in Detroit with Rivera?

Her miscarriage, as the loss of her pregnancy that July is usually described, produced what is often counted her first great painting, laid out like a Mexican votive picture.

Rivera's Man at the Crossroads was commissioned for the lobby of which New York tower?

The RCA Building, now 30 Rockefeller Plaza, was meant to show Rivera between Matisse and Picasso, but neither could be secured and lesser-known painters took the flanking walls.

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

Vladimir Lenin went in only after a newspaper attacked the unfinished mural as propaganda; asked to paint him out, Rivera replied that he would sooner see the whole work destroyed than mutilated.

Which Mexican film star stands at the centre of Rivera's 1953 mural on the Teatro de los Insurgentes?

Cantinflas appears as a Robin Hood figure passing the wealth of the rich to the poor; an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the design was attacked as blasphemous and left out.

The mural that replaced Rivera's destroyed fresco at Rockefeller Center features which American president?

Abraham Lincoln stands among the builders in Josep Maria Sert's American Progress, which took the wall in 1937; Rivera had offered to add Lincoln to his own mural if the offending portrait could stay.

Rivera's repainted mural in Mexico City shows John D. Rockefeller Jr. doing what?

Drinking in a nightclub with a woman at his side, a jab at a lifelong teetotaller; the repainted version, Man, Controller of the Universe, still hangs in the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

After the Rockefeller Center scandal, Rivera lost a World's Fair mural commission in which city?

Chicago's Century of Progress fair lost its Rivera when General Motors dropped him two days after work stopped in New York; he answered by vowing to repaint the banned mural wherever he was asked.

Rivera's 1915 painting of a rifle, sombrero and sarape honours which leader of the Mexican Revolution?

Emiliano Zapata is conjured in Zapatista Landscape only through his gear; Rivera painted it far from the fighting, in Europe, at the height of the Revolution.

Rivera painted Pan American Unity in front of the public in 1940 at which event?

The Golden Gate International Exposition made him its star attraction: fairgoers on Treasure Island watched him at work, and he went on painting in the emptied hall after the fair had closed.

Which of Charlie Chaplin's leading ladies plants a tree with Rivera in his mural Pan American Unity?

Paulette Goddard holds his hand as they plant the tree together, Rivera's emblem in the mural for the joining of Mexico and the United States, south and north.

Which figure from Mexican popular culture did Rivera turn into a national icon in his Alameda mural?

La Calavera Catrina began as a small satirical print of a skull in a fancy hat; Rivera gave her a full body and a feathered-serpent boa, and she became the face of the Day of the Dead.

What became of Rivera's Alameda mural after he painted the words 'God does not exist' into it?

Kept hidden for years, nine in all, until Rivera took the words out himself, saying he had no need to hide behind another man's sign to declare that he was an atheist.

Rivera's Alameda mural was moved to a museum of its own after what wrecked the hotel that housed it?

An earthquake in 1985 left the Hotel del Prado beyond repair, so the wall carrying the fresco was cut free, moved across the street, and a museum was built around it.

Rivera's Anahuacalli Museum is built from what material?

Volcanic stone came from the lava field the museum stands on, and Rivera had it shaped into a building inspired by the temples of ancient Mexico.

What did Rivera build the Anahuacalli to house?

His pre-Hispanic collection, the 'idols' he sold portraits to buy, outlasted him: Rivera died with the building unfinished, and his daughter Ruth and the architect Juan O'Gorman completed it.

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

Los Tres Grandes, the three greats, were hired to paint public walls for the new government and ended up defining the look of post-revolutionary Mexico for some three decades.

Which fellow muralist of Rivera's led a failed 1940 raid to kill an exiled Soviet revolutionary?

David Alfaro Siqueiros, a committed Stalinist, led the armed raid in which the exile's 14-year-old grandson was shot; the painter was forced into hiding and then into exile.

Which 1999 film directed by Tim Robbins dramatizes the destruction of Rivera's mural Man at the Crossroads?

Cradle Will Rock intercuts the smashing of the mural with the defiant first night of a 1937 labour musical whose federal backing had been pulled, treating both as fights between artists and power.

Who played Rivera in the 2002 film Frida?

Alfred Molina ate, by one account, two of everything to put on the 35 pounds the part needed, and the performance brought him BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild nominations.

Frida Kahlo's Diego and I, which took Rivera's Latin American auction record in 2021, shows him painted where?

On her forehead sits Rivera, above a face in tears; the 1949 portrait is widely read as her pain at his affair with the film star María Félix, and its sale took the record from his painting The Rivals.

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

The Lacuna follows a young man who mixes plaster for Rivera's murals, then cooks for the household and becomes a lifelong friend of Kahlo.

Which printmaker, whose shop stood near the young Rivera's art school, is honoured at the centre of his Alameda mural?

José Guadalupe Posada, an early influence on the schoolboy Rivera, strolls in a black suit and cane at the heart of the mural, close to the painter's portrait of himself as a small boy.

A study trip through which country in 1920 turned Rivera from easel painting toward murals?

Italy's Renaissance wall paintings were the lesson: he spent the trip studying and copying them, then went home in 1921 to paint walls for Mexico's new government.

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

His Jewishness, he wrote, gave him the sympathy with the downtrodden that drove all his work; his mother was said to descend from Jews forced to convert, though he was never raised in the faith.