Rebel with a cause. A revolutionary spirit in modern art

Diego Rivera (1886 -1957) is a loud presence on the art historical stage. With devout political principles and a turbulent romantic history, he was at once husband and paladin of Frida Kahlo, advocate and adversary of Stalin's Soviet Union, and liberator and traitor of Leon Trotsky.

Vibrant, graphic, and often monumental, Rivera's paintings carry the same live political and passionate charge as his personal biography. Fusing European influences such as Cubism with socialist ideology and an exaltation of Mexico's indigenous and popular heritage, he created a new iconography for art history and for his country. He became one of the most important figures in the Mexican mural movement and won international acclaim for his public wall paintings, in which he presented a utopian yet accessible vision of a post-revolutionary Mexico. In 1931, Rivera was the subject of MoMA s second ever monographic exhibition.

This book explores the unique blend of influence and ideology which secure Rivera's place as both a unique and a universal painter, bound to the particular turbulent experience of early 20th century Mexico, and yet preoccupied with subjects such as revolution and class inequity which continue to speak to us today. 

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:

- a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
- a concise biography
- approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Diego in Detail. The most comprehensive study of Rivera’s work ever realized

Latin American folk hero, husband of Frida Kahlo, devout Communist, and Mexico’s most important artist: the oeuvre of Diego Rivera is finally done justice in this monograph constituting the most comprehensive study of his work ever made. More than a half-century after his death, Rivera’s story, complete mural works, and recently discovered pieces are brought to life alongside private photos and drawings.

A veritable folk hero in Latin America and Mexico’s most important artist — along with his wife, painter Frida Kahlo — Diego Rivera (1886–1957) led a passionate life devoted to art and communism. After spending the 1910s in Europe, where he surrounded himself with other artists and embraced the Cubist movement, he returned to Mexico and began to paint the large-scale murals for which he is most famous. In his murals, he addressed social and political issues relating to the working class, earning him prophetic status among the peasants of Mexico. He was invited to create works abroad, most notably in the United States, where he stirred up controversy by depicting Lenin in his mural for the Rockefeller Center in New York City (the mural was destroyed before it was finished). Rivera’s most remarkable work is his 1932 Detroit Industry, a group of 27 frescos at the Detroit Institute of Art in Michigan.

This volume features numerous large-scale details of the murals, allowing their various components and subtleties to be closely examined. In addition to the murals is a vast selection of paintings, vintage photos, documents, and drawings from public and private collections around the world, many of which the whereabouts were previously unknown to scholars and whose inclusion here is thanks to the most intense research performed on Rivera’s work since his death. Texts include an illustrated biography and essays by prominent art historians offering interpretations of each mural. One could not ask for a more comprehensive study of Rivera’s oeuvre; finally, his work is the subject of the sweeping retrospective it deserves.

About the Authors:

Luis-Martín Lozano is art historian and curator of modern and contemporary art. He is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to research Rivera’s and Kahlo’s oeuvre in California. Lozano has taught and lectured extensively on the subject of Mexican art and has written more than 50 essays about Mexican modernism as well as monographic essays about Diego Rivera, María Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo and many others. Since 2001 he has been director of the Museo de Arte Moderno de México.

Diego Rivera's grandson Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera has worked as editor of the magazines Punto Cero en Literatura, El Faro revista de literatura y arte and M'hija, together with Carlos Jaurena. He founded Kahlo-Coronel Fotogalería, Mexico’s first private photo-gallery, in 1987. His collection of Mexican popular pottery is the world’s most extensive, including more than 15,000 pieces from the 16th century to the present day. He has curated more than 100 exhibitions for art galleries, museums, and biennials and has written 71 publications.

“I was aware of Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, long before I encountered the many other “Diego Riveras” that roamed the world between the beginning of the twentieth century and the late 1950s. […] While his easel paintings and drawings constitute a large body of both his early and late work, his unique murals explode off walls in virtuoso performances of mind-staggering organisation. On those walls the man, his legend and myths, his technical talent, his intense story-telling focus and self-indulgent ideological convictions all come together.”
(Gerry Souter)

Gerry Souter, the author of the remarkable Frida Kahlo, overcomes his huge admiration for Diego Rivera to give the artist a human dimension, found in his political choices, his love affairs and his belief that “this truth was Mexico, the language of his thoughts, the blood in his veins, the azure sky above his resting place.”

About the author
Gerry Souter earned his degree at The Art Institute of Chicago and then went on to do further studies in art at the University of Chicago. Himself an artist, Souter has exhibited his paintings and photographs at The Art Institute of Chicago, the Phoenix Art Museum and a number of other galleries. A professional author, he has written more than twenty books since 1997, with great success. His continuing studies in Art History and Architecture, the sharpness of his writing, and his visual experience add a dynamic aspect to the study of the lives of artists and the description of their works, keeping the reader captivated, page after page.

They met in 1928, Frida Kahlo was then 21 years old and Diego Rivera was twice her age. He was already an international reference, she only aspired to become one.
An intense artistic creation, along with pain and suffering, was generated by this tormented union, in particular for Frida. Constantly in the shadow of her husband, bearing his unfaithfulness and her jealousy, Frida exorcised the pain on canvas, and won progressively the public’s interest. On both continents, America and Europe, these commited artists proclaimed their freedom and left behind them the traces of their exceptional talent.
In this book, Gerry Souter brings together both biographies and underlines with passion the link which existed between the two greatest mexican artists of the 20th century.