Art in Detail: RIVERA, Diego, Featured Portraits

Art in Detail

RIVERA, Diego

Featured Portraits

RIVERA, DiegoEl Retrato de Linda Christian, Portrait of Linda Christian 1947Oil on canvas, 111.7 x 90.5 cm Private Colleccion

RIVERA, DiegoEl Retrato de Linda Christian, Portrait of Linda Christian (detail)1947Oil on canvas, 111.7 x 90.5 cm Private Colleccion






RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Frida Kahlo 1939Oil on asbestos cement shingle , 35.56 x 24.77 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Frida Kahlo (detail)1939Oil on asbestos cement shingle , 35.56 x 24.77 cm Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles



RIVERA, DiegoSelf-portrait with Broad-Brimmed Hat1907Oil on canvas, 84.5 x 61.5 cmMuseo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City

RIVERA, DiegoSelf-portrait with Broad-Brimmed Hat (detail)1907Oil on canvas, 84.5 x 61.5 cmMuseo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City




RIVERA, DiegoMotherhood Angelina And The Child Diego1916Oil on canvas, 86 x 132 cm Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City

RIVERA, DiegoMotherhood Angelina And The Child Diego (detail)1916Oil on canvas, 86 x 132 cm Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City




RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Marevna 1915Oil on canvas, 145.7 x 112.7 cm Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Marevna (detail)1915Oil on canvas, 145.7 x 112.7 cm Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago



RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Adolfo Best Maugard1913Oil on canvas, 161,5 x h227,5 cm Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Adolfo Best Maugard (detail)1913Oil on canvas, 161,5 x h227,5 cm Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City



RIVERA, DiegoPortrait Of Natasha Zakólkowa Gelman1943Oil on canvas, 153 x 115 cm The Jacque and Natasha Gelman Collection of Mexican Art

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait Of Natasha Zakólkowa Gelman (detail)1943Oil on canvas, 153 x 115 cm The Jacque and Natasha Gelman Collection of Mexican Art



RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Lupe Marin1938Oil on canvas, 122.3 x 171.3 cm Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Lupe Marin (detail)1938Oil on canvas, 122.3 x 171.3 cm Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City




RIVERA, DiegoPortrait Of Ruth Rivera1949Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 199 cm Private Collection

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait Of Ruth Rivera (detail)1949Oil on canvas, 100.5 x 199 cm Private Collection




RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Dolores Olmedo (La Tehuana)1955Oil on canvas, 37,8 x 26,5 cm Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Dolores Olmedo (La Tehuana) (detail)1955Oil on canvas, 37,8 x 26,5 cm Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City




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RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Dolores Olmedo (La Tehuana)

During 1955 Rivera produced a large number of easel paintings, mainly portraits, including this one, also known as The Tehuana, of his friend Dolores Olmedo. Doña Lola is portrayed in the very colorful attire of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, an example of the richness of traditional Mexican textile design.

Tehuana clothing was in vogue during the 1930s and 40s, when the wives and models (or muses) of painters, writers, and musicians wore it to exalt the richness and beauty of traditional Mexican costume. Some of these women made the fashion part of their public personas and wore it proudly: María Izquierdo, Lupe Marín, Dolores Olmedo, María Asúnsolo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and of course Frida Kahlo.

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Frida Kahlo

This is Diego Rivera's only known easel portrait of his wife.

The image is hauntingly similar to Frida Kahlo's own self-portraits. Rivera's work probably dates from the late 1930s, the period of their brief divorce before their remarriage in 1940. The painting was found in Rivera's studio at the time of his death.

RIVERA, DiegoSelf-portrait with Broad-Brimmed Hat

When Diego Rivera arrived to Europe in 1907, he entered the atelier of Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera, who was only thirteen years older than him.. Through Chicharro’s teachings Rivera became acquainted with Spanish modernismo. He spent long hours painting, a habit he would never abandon and one that earned him the praise of his mentor.

Self-Portrait with Broad-Brimmed Hat depicts a young man who was trying to reflect the ambience in which he was immersed. His face shows certain nostalgia, characteristic of Spanish romanticism and fin-de-siècle bohemianism.

The atmosphere is further accented by the bottle and glass of beer on the table. The painter is wearing a soft, broad-brimmed hat that gives its Spanish name (chambergo) to the painting. Leaning slightly to the right, the figure gives occasion for the brushwork and the rendering of light and shadow that Rivera studied at Chicharro’s atelier.

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Lupe Marin

Guadalupe Marin, nicknamed Lupe, she was an exotic beauty possessed with wild emotions. Unfortunately her violent jealousy of Diego was even more than his passionate nature could eventually bear. On more than one occasion, she tore up his drawings in a fit of rage when Diego paid the slightest attention to other women.

In the beginning, there is no doubt, that Diego provoked Lupe for his own amusement. Even jealous of his love for Pre-Columbian sculpture, in a moment of high drama, she ground up a prized statue and fed it to him in his soup. As time wore on, however, he grew tired of it and later said, "Lupe was a beautiful, spirited animal, but her jealousy and possessiveness gave our life together a wearying, hectic intensity." They had two daughters Lupe, born in 1924 and Ruth, born in 1926.

In this magnificent portrait of Lupe Marin from whom he separated the previous decade, Rivera again reveals his profound artistic debt to the European painting tradition.

Utilizing a device deployed by such artists as Diego Velazquez, Manet, and Gauguin he portrays his subject partially in reflection through his depiction of a mirror in the background. The painting's coloration and the subject's expressive hands call to mind another artistic hero, El Greco, while its composition and structure suggest the art of Cézanne.

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait Of Natasha Zakólkowa Gelman

Mexico from Eastern Europe in 1941 and became a movie mogul who produced many films with Mario Moreno, who was best known as the actor Cantinflas. Mr. Gelman and his wife, Natasha Zahalka Gelman, a Czech immigrant from Moravia, became avid art collectors.

The first work by Diego Rivera that Jacques Gelman acquired was a large portrait of his elegant wife, commissioned from Rivera. The glamorous Mrs. Gelman is clad in a white gown and reclines on a divan against a background of large bouquets of calla lilies.

The calla lily, a sensual, sculptural flower - and quintessential example of Mexico's exuberant flora - was celebrated by Rivera many times, particularly in frescoes depicted peasants with indigenous features carrying bundles or offerings of them.

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Adolfo Best Maugard

Diego Rivera was living in Paris at the same time as Adolfo Best Maugard, who had been in Europe, at the behest of the Ministry of Education and Fine Arts, since 1912 for the purpose of making copies of Mexican archeological artifacts that were on exhibition in European museums.

Rivera executed this metaphorically charged portrait, whose two planes display a strong stylistic contrast with each other, in 1913. The static, elongated, elegantly dressed protagonist stands out in the foreground, standing on a sort of red-railed balcony that distances him from, and raises him above the urban scene in the background i.e. the modern Paris of the time, with a train, factories whose chimneys billow forth clouds of smoke that give an impression of movement, urban buildings depicted in a Cubist style, a futuristically rapid train and, behind everything, a wheel of fortune spinning so dizzily that its spokes are blurred.

The aforesaid wheel of fortune, reminiscent of the one built for the 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition, symbolizes technological progress. Rivera succeeded in connecting these two spaces, depicted in different styles, by using perspective to provide a visual link between the protagonist's forefinger and the center of the wheel of fortune, suggesting that man, from a higher plane and acting as a demiurge, directs and promotes progress.

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait Of Ruth Rivera

Having immortalized Lupe Marin and his daughters Guadalupe and Ruth in the gigantic historical mural in the Hotel del Prado, in 1949 Rivera painted the large-sized full-figure Portrait of Ruth Rivera.

The subject stands in the manner of a figure from Classical Antiquity, wearing a white tunic and thonged sandals, in front of a round mirror which reflects her profile in brilliant yellow, strikingly resembling the Maya profiles seen in pre-Columbian sculpture and reliefs.

RIVERA, DiegoMotherhood Angelina And The Child Diego

Motherhood is a modernizing, Cubist treatment on a perennial art historical theme: the Madonna and Child. In this painting, Angelina Beloff, Rivera's common-law wife for twelve years, holds their newborn son, Diego, who died of influenza just months after his birth.

The painting beautifully illustrates Rivera's unique approach to Cubism, which rejected the somber, monochromatic palette deployed by artists such as Picasso or Georges Braque in favor of vivid colors more reminiscent of those used by Fauvism artist like Henri Matisse.

RIVERA, DiegoPortrait of Marevna

Portrait of Marevna depicts Rivera’s mistress, the Russian artist Maria Vorobieff-Stebelska. The couple’s relationship was tempestuous; Rivera later described Marevna as a “she-devil,” and he conveyed a sense of her ferocity in this portrait, particularly in the figure’s distinctive frown and squinting eye.

The portrait exemplifies Rivera’s growing adoption of elements of Synthetic Cubism, in which he constructed images sequentially, building layer upon layer in an additive manner rather than deconstructing forms into fragmented planes.

Rivera emphasized the geometric patterning of the composition through his use of textures, both painterly and illusionistic. The most notable example of his use of texture is the rectangular form with a brocade pattern, which appears to be a collaged piece of fabric or wallpaper, but is in fact a trompe l’oeil facsimile that alludes to Cubist collage techniques.

RIVERA, DiegoEl Retrato de Linda Christian, Portrait of Linda Christian

The most provocative and beautiful portrait ever painted by Diego Rivera never before exhibited and virtually unknown to the general public and scholars alike.

In ‘47 Rivera painted the young actress as a nude figure, but Christian’s mother objected, insisting that the artist cover up her daughter’s bare breasts. A compromise was reached when Rivera painted a delicate but highly transparent lace blouse on the young woman’s torso. Honestly it only heightened the eroticism of the portrait.

Talking heads and so-called art world “experts” have commented that Rivera’s use of the “kissing” hummingbirds was a sexual metaphor. The depiction of the birds supposedly “exploring the internal cavities of flowers,” is said to be a subtle sexual reference.

Almost all periods of Rivera's career include portraits. Besides numerous portrayals of historical figures in the murals, which served primarily political purposes, he began to paint portraits of persons close to him, friends and acquaintances, at a very early stage, during his years in Europe.

In these works he sought to bring out the subjects' fundamental characteristics. Sometimes he emphasized certain parts of the body in an almost expressionist way, as in the extraordinary Portrait of Lupe Marin, depicting his former wife sitting in front of a mirror, a recurring motif in his portraits.

Having immortalized Lupe Marin and his daughters Guadalupe and Ruth in the gigantic historical mural in the Hotel del Prado, in 1949 Rivera painted the large-sized full-figure Portrait of Ruth Rivera. The mythological impact that this painting makes is in sharp contrast to most of Rivera's other female portraits where, as in Portrait of Cuca Bustamante, the subject is frequently shown in brightly coloured Mexican costume or there is a heightened Mexican ambience with exotic flowers and fruit.

In paintings of the latter category, parallels are often drawn between background attributes and the women portrayed: the pose and the white, close-fitting evening dress of Natasha Gelman, for example, wife of a famous and prosperous film-producer, take up the elegant form of the calla lilies providing the prominent background, which at the same time symbolize the nature of the fine woman.

In these works Rivera refrains from his penchant for historical narrative and reveals himself as an extremely sensual painter, letting his feelings and fantasies flow freely into his compositions.

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Art in Detail: RIVERA, Diego, Featured Portraits