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Diego Rivera Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez) was a cubist painter and muralist living in Mexico.

Diego is perhaps best known by the world public for painting a vast mural in the 1930s featuring early communist leaders juxtaposed with the Founding Fathers of the United States in the lobby of the Rockefeller Building. That work was quickly destroyed by angry Rockefeller staffpeople before it could be completed in that location; see the movie

Rivera was of Jewish Converso heritage and Catholic upbringing, but a professed atheist and communist for most, if not all, of his life. He is said to be regarded in Latin America today as a folk hero. From a common-law marriage to the artist Angelina Beloff he had a son, Diego Jr., who did not survive infancy, and from a relationship with the Russian emigrée painter Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) he also had a daughter, Marika Rivera. His marriage to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was childless after a miscarriage, but he nevertheless spent a rocky lifetime relationship with her.

On his arrival in Europe in 1907 Rivera initially went to study in Barcelona, Spain, and from there proceeded to Paris, France, to live and work with the great gathering of artists in Montparnasse, especially at La Ruche, where his friend Amedeo Modigliani painted his portrait in 1914.[1] The circle of close friends that included further Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Modigliani's wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Leopold Zborowski, and Moise Kisling, was captured for posterity by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) in her painting "Homage to Friends from Montparnasse" (1962).[2]

Paris in those years was witnessing the emergence of cubism in paintings by such eminent painters as Picasso, Braque and Cezanne. From 1913 to 1918 Rivera himself enthusiastically embraced this new school of art, as his masterly cubist paintings from this time demonstrate. His paintings began to attract attention; and he was able to display them at several exhibitions.

In his undisciplined and increasingly violent private life Rivera fathered many children from brief affairs, abandoning all of them. In 1915, whilst still married in common-law marriage to the artist Angelina Beloff, who in 1916 bore him his only son, Diego Jr. who, he himself relationship with the Russian emigrée cubist painter Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna), who herself on 13 November 1919 bore him a daughter, named Marika.[3]

In 1920 Rivera left France and, travelling via Italy, returned in 1921 to Mexico, where he continued his prolific career as an artist. Having been born in Guanajuato, he now became involved in the new Mexican mural movement. With such Mexican artists as José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo, and the French artist Jean Charlot, he began to experiment with fresco painting on large walls. Rivera soon developed his own of large, simplified figures and bold colours. He had also become interested in left-wing politics. Thus when he painted his first mural, he presented ethnic Mexican subjects in a political context. Many of his murals deal symbolically with Mexican society and thought after the country's 1910 Revolution. His art, in a fashion similar to the stellae of the Maya tell stories. One mural “En el Arsenal” 'in the arsenal' [4] which shows to the left Vittorio Vidale, Tina Modotti (holding an ammunition belt), and Julio Antonio Mella (with hatDiego Rivera is said by some to elucidate the political murder of Mella. Rivera's radical political beliefs, his attacks on the church, and clergy, as well as his flirtations with trotskyites and left wing assassins made him a controversial figure even in communist circles. Some of Rivera's best murals are in the National Palace in Mexico City and at the National Agricultural School in Chapingo, near Texcoco.

In the autumn of 1927 Rivera, accepting an invitation to take part in the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution, arrived in Moscow, Russia; but in 1928 he was expelled by the authorities because of his involvement in anti-Soviet politics and returned to Mexico. His mural "In the Arsenal" is interpreted by some as evidence of Vittorio Vidale's murder of Julio Antonio Mella, his involvement with Tina Modotti, and to relate to his expulsion from the Mexican Communist Party.

Rivera then painted several significant works in the United States. From 1930 to 1933 he completed a number of frescoes in the United States, mostly consisting of industrial life.

Perhaps his finest surviving work in the United States are the 27 fresco panels entitled , begun in 1933 for the Rockefeller Center in New York City, was removed after a furor erupted in the press because at the time there was a fear of a violent revolution and his work contained a portrait of Lenin. As a result of the negative publicity, a further commission to paint a mural for an exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair was cancelled. In December 1933, an angry and humiliated Rivera returned to Mexico. He repainted the work in 1934 in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. This repainting was called . Nevertheless, in 1940 Rivera returned to the United States to paint ten murals for the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.

Several marriages and love affairs later Rivera was introduced to Frida Kahlo, a Communist, who herself went on to become a famous and noted Mexican painter in the later stages of her life. They married for the first time in 1929, when he was 42 years old and she was 22; but owing to his infidelity and violent temper they divorced in 1940, only to re-marry later that year, although their marriage was never to be conventional. Despite her serious earlier accident, Kahlo conceived, but then suffered a miscarriage; and their marriage remained childless.

After Kahlo's demise in 1954 Rivera married once more, this time to publisher Emma Hurtado (1955).

Having joined the International Communist League, Rivera became friends with Soviet exile Leon Trotsky, who for a while moved into his home in Mexico. But they had a falling out and, shortly after he left Rivera's home, Trotsky was assassinated. Some suspected that Rivera was involved in the murder, though it is proven to have been highly unlikely. Following Trotsky's death, Rivera and Kahlo both became Anti-Revisionists

Not quite a year after receiving national homage on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of his birthday, Diego Rivera died on November 24, 1957 in his San Ángel studio from heart failure. He is interred in the Panteón de Dolores in Mexico City.

"Diego Rivera: Master Cubist" (12th painting in sequence: "Motherhood – Angelina and the Child Diego" (1916) depicting his common-law wife with their baby son.)Painting by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) depicting on the very left herself, Diego Rivera and their daughter Marika, and on the right their mutual friends from Montparnasse, namely (top left to right:) Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani and his wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, the gallery owner Leopold Zborowski, and (bottom right corner:) Moise Kisling.