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50 free Diego Rivera trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Diego Rivera painted walls the size of buildings, joined and got thrown out of the Communist Party, sheltered Leon Trotsky, married Frida Kahlo twice, and lost the most famous mural commission in America because he would not paint out Lenin. He also claimed, probably falsely, to have eaten human flesh. Few artists give a quiz writer this much to work with. This set follows him from Guanajuato to Paris, where Modigliani painted his portrait and Cubism briefly claimed him, back to Mexico and the government mural program of the 1920s, then to San Francisco, Detroit and New York. You'll be asked about the Detroit Industry frescoes and who paid for them, about Man at the Crossroads and the photographs that let him repaint it, about the Calavera Catrina in the Alameda mural, and about the volcanic-stone museum he built for his pre-Hispanic collection. Easy questions cover his wives and his most famous walls; the hard ones cover patrons, assistants and dates. Fifty questions, every answer sourced.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Mexican city was Diego Rivera born in 1886?
Guanajuato
His twin brother Carlos died at two; Diego started drawing a year later and his parents covered the walls in chalkboards.
Q 02How many wives did Rivera have?
Four
A fellow artist, a novelist, Frida Kahlo and finally his agent; his only son died at the age of two.
Q 03Rivera's first wife, Angelina Beloff, came from which empire?
Russia
Elena Poniatowska's 1978 novel Dear Diego, with Love, Quiela is built from Beloff's letters to him.
Q 04Rivera's second wife, Guadalupe Marín, worked as a model and what else?
A novelist
Her semi-autobiographical novel La Única appeared in 1938; she appears as a fertile goddess in his Chapingo chapel mural.
Q 05How old was Rivera when he married the 22-year-old Kahlo in 1929?
42
Her parents called it a marriage between an elephant and a dove.
Q 06Whom did Rivera marry in 1955, a year after Kahlo's death?
Emma Hurtado
She had been his agent since 1946; he died two years later and was buried at the Panteón de Dolores.
Q 07From what age did Rivera study at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City?
Ten
The governor of Veracruz later sponsored his move to Europe in 1907, starting in Madrid.
Q 08Which Italian friend painted Rivera's portrait in Paris in 1914?
Amedeo Modigliani
Their Montparnasse circle included Chaïm Soutine, Max Jacob and Ilya Ehrenburg.
Q 09Which style did Rivera enthusiastically embrace from 1913 to 1917?
Cubism
Around 1917 Cézanne's work pulled him toward Post-Impressionism and simple forms in vivid colour.
Q 10Rivera's autobiography makes what widely doubted claim about his youth in 1904?
He practised cannibalism
He said he and friends bought cadavers from the morgue; biographers treat it as an elaborate lie.
Q 11Which minister of education brought Rivera home for the government mural program in 1921?
José Vasconcelos
The program also enlisted Orozco, Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo and the French artist Jean Charlot.
Q 12What was the title of Rivera's first significant mural, painted in 1922?
Creation
He painted it in encaustic at the National Preparatory School while carrying a pistol against right-wing students.
Q 13How many frescoes was Rivera's cycle at the Secretariat of Public Education intended to have?
124
Begun in September 1922 and finished in 1928, it shows large simplified figures with a clear Aztec influence.
Q 21Which San Francisco architect commissioned Rivera in 1930 and again in 1940?
Timothy L. Pflueger
The first job was a $2,500 mural for the City Club of the Stock Exchange; tennis star Helen Wills modelled for it.
Q 22How many fresco panels make up Detroit Industry?
27
They fill an inner court of the Detroit Institute of Arts and became a National Historic Landmark in 2014.
Q 23Who contributed $20,000 to make the Detroit commission possible?
Edsel Ford
Some historians think he stoked the resulting controversy to publicize the work.
Q 14Which political organization did Rivera join in 1922?
The Mexican Communist Party
He even sat on its Central Committee, before being expelled in 1929 for suspected Trotskyite sympathies.
Q 15The photographer shown holding an ammunition belt in Rivera's mural In the Arsenal is who?
Tina Modotti
Kahlo appears on the left handing out munitions; Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella faces Modotti.
Q 16Rivera's chapel mural Fertile Land is at an agricultural university in which town?
Chapingo
It shows Zapata's corpse fertilizing a maize field and Lupe Marín as a nude goddess.
Q 17Which exiled revolutionary lived with Rivera and Kahlo for several months?
Leon Trotsky
The couple petitioned the Mexican government for his asylum and lent him La Casa Azul in Coyoacán.
Q 18Where did Rivera paint The History of Mexico between 1929 and 1935?
The National Palace stairwell
Its three walls run from Aztec times through conquest and revolution to a Marxist future; some panels are 70 metres wide.
Q 19Rivera travelled to Moscow in 1927 to mark which anniversary?
The October Revolution
He was commissioned to paint the Red Army Club but was ordered out of the country in 1928.
Q 20Which American patron and MoMA founding director did Rivera meet in the Soviet Union?
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
MoMA gave Rivera a retrospective in November 1931, only its second solo show.
Q 24The main Detroit panels show workers at which Ford plant?
River Rouge
Rivera began by researching the complex itself, then the largest integrated factory in the world.
Q 25Which Detroit panel caused offence by casting a doctor and nurse as Joseph and Mary?
The vaccination scene
In the 1950s a sign in the courtyard defended the murals' merit while calling his politics 'detestable'.
Q 26Who commissioned Rivera to paint the Detroit Industry murals in 1932?
Wilhelm Valentiner
As director of the Detroit Institute of Arts he asked for 27 frescoes on the industries of the city.
Q 27Kahlo's 1932 painting Henry Ford Hospital records what event during their Detroit stay?
Her miscarriage
She shows herself weeping with an exposed heart, an image borrowed from the legend of La Llorona.
Q 28Man at the Crossroads was commissioned in 1933 for the lobby of which New York tower?
The RCA Building
It is now 30 Rockefeller Plaza; Nelson Rockefeller had first wanted Matisse and Picasso for the flanking walls.
Q 29Whose portrait did Rivera refuse to remove from Man at the Crossroads?
Vladimir Lenin
He added it after a newspaper called the unfinished work 'anti-capitalist propaganda'.
Q 30Which assistant photographed Man at the Crossroads before it was destroyed?
Lucienne Bloch
Her black-and-white photographs are the only record of the original and let Rivera repaint it in Mexico.