Documents of Latin American and Latino Art

This article by Diego Rivera denounces the “reactionary” agents of Delahuertismo who were the true architects of the conspiracy to infiltrate Masonic lodges at the beginning of 1924 in order to murder the governor of Yucatan, Felipe Carrillo [...]

This document is a didactic-political text directed toward the working class organized around identification of its enemies. These include the fake socialist parties (equated with the Italian fascists). And also the intellectuals unable to understand [...]

This issue contains more than 400 engravings by José Guadalupe Posada, with a preface by Diego Rivera, in which he redefines the engraver as a “worker,” “warrior of leaflets,” the “greatest artist” produced by the people, and the [...]

To Diego Rivera, discrimination against Indians is the greatest collective crime of the descendants of the Spanish colonists on the continent. If this situation is not corrected, Latin America will be set on a path to extinction. In this essay, as [...]

In this article written for The Architectural Forum, a New York City publication, in January 1934, the muralist Diego Rivera made public his point of view about the necessary link between architecture and painting. The purpose of the link was to [...]

Rivera claims that societal conditions influence a society’s cultural expression, and insists that making art is an integral part of the social fabric. Speaking from an essentially Marxist platform, he explains that art will disappear in future [...]

Bertram Wolfe, Diego Rivera’s biographer, states that the period from the late 1930s through the early 1940s was a solitary, confusing time for the painter due to the fact that his name was appearing constantly in newspaper headlines as the [...]

Diego Rivera writes a long letter to the Seminario de Cultura Mexicana [Mexican Cultural Seminary] in which he challenges the statements made by the Spanish writer José Bergamín about landscape painter José María Velasco and José Clemente Orozco [...]

Diego Rivera briefly reviews what he sees in the artists of the period and discusses the various trends in artistic expression in Mexico at the time, indicating his preference for murals with a nationalist theme. He claims that painters and the [...]

In the spirit of the post-revolutionary mood, Manuel Amabilis [an influential Mexican architect] encourages Mexican artists to commit to a collective mission to transform their country. He believes that Mexico faces the dawn of a new day in which a [...]

Two years after returning from Europe, Diego Rivera finds that much has changed, especially as regards what is being taught at the Open-Air Schools, where he detects an “Impressionist” trend. He is subtle in his critique of various groups. Rivera [...]

Diego Rivera reaches out to photography, including it as one more technique within the field of plastic creation. In his view, it was photography that liberated painting from the need to express an objective reality. He also equates the technical [...]

Diego Rivera describes the liberties he took when painting his mural La Creación [Creation], which expressed man’s relationship with the elements as a means of telling the prime history of Mankind. Rivera explains how he adapted his work to the [...]

Diego Rivera believed that art materialized when primitive communities began to show signs of humanity; pre-Columbian, African and European art are proof of this. Those ancestral works already contained all the elements needed to function as [...]

To Diego Rivera, the crisis the world is going through leading up to World War II is a problem to be analyzed scientifically. The painter believes that Western culture is based on slavery, and presents a phenomenon that he calls “el cesarismo [...]

Diego Rivera, the chairman of the Comité Ejecutivo del Bloque Obrero y Campesino Nacional (BOyC) [Executive Committee of the National Workers’ and Peasants’ Block], submits a request to El Machete to publish a statement on March 4, 1929. In the [...]

Diego Rivera begins his article on how children draw in Mexico by saying that he hates the instruction provided by the Academy, which starts by teaching children how to draw illustrations, then sculpture, and finally the nude model. Rivera criticizes [...]

Diego Rivera enumerates his reasons for believing that the Estadio Olímpico [Olympic Stadium] of the Ciudad Universitaria [UNAM Campus] is the most salient example of the struggle for Mexican independence. To construct such a building, the most [...]

This article summarizes the conflict between students at the Facultad de Arquitectura [School of Architecture] and those at the Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas [ECAP, Central School of Visual Arts] at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México [...]

On the occasion of Frances Toor’s death, Diego Rivera, who was a friend and collaborator of Toor’s, dedicated an article in remembrance of the fundamental role that the American writer and editor played in the dissemination of Mexican art, in [...]

Diego Rivera lays the groundwork for his article about Frida Kahlo by tracing a path through the history of the founding cultures of the Pre-Hispanic and Spanish periods and the nineteenth-century. In his opinion, Mexico’s social evolution can be [...]

Diego Rivera maintains that the crisis in Mexican painting is an invention. It may be a crisis invented by the literati so they will have a pretext for writing their books, or perhaps created by critics so they will have material to send to their [...]

In this interview, Diego Rivera begins by defining art and explaining its importance to society. In his opinion, “art is better in a society where there are no class divisions.” According to him, “art is able to stimulate very specific [...]

In this article, Diego Rivera affirms that he does not know Alvarado Rubio, an employee of the Embassy of Guatemala during the regime of dictator Carlos Castillo Armas, and that it is from there that the lies published in Impacto begin. Rivera also [...]

The Río Lerma embankment project gave Diego Rivera, as he acknowledges in this article, the chance to combine painting with sculpture by making both coexist under water, an environment that would endow his forms and figures with movement. This [...]

Irradiador magazine—subtitled, “Avant-garde magazine: an international project devoted to the new aesthetic, directed by Manuel Maples Arce & Fermín Revueltas”—was published in Mexico City in 1923. El restorán [The Restaurant], a [...]

Diego Rivera painted two different murals at the National School of Agronomy in Chapingo [now named Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, located near the Mexico City airport]. One was in the school’s offices, where Rivera explains that he was able to [...]

Diego Rivera discusses the exhibition at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, and subtly conveys his disappointment with the event. He believes it is a mistake to imitate what is being done in Europe. Rivera thinks it is dangerous to encourage a “ [...]

Diego Rivera, author of this essay, conducts a political analysis of the role that workers and peasants played as allies of the government in the struggle against the “reaction;” that is, a coup d’état carried out against the government that [...]

Diego Rivera’s visual arts discourse echoes the ideas of José Vasconcelos in his mural La Creación [Creation], in which he expresses, within an abstract theme, a clear allusion to race through selected representative elements. These include the [...]

Diego Rivera champions the collective genius given to the Mexicans, which has been the source of hundreds of thousands of works, made by the individuals that make up the Mexican people. The temporary nature of this artwork has characterized it since [...]

Diego Rivera considered pulquería painting [illustrations in agave sap bars] to be an example of the kind of popular art which—in his opinion and the opinion of other painters—helped to distinguish and differentiate the new genre of Mexican art [...]

Diego Rivera addresses certain architectural issues that complicated the installation of his murals at the Ministry of Public Education building (SEP), obliging him to resort to geometric solutions on some of the floors. He provides a somewhat [...]

Diego Rivera writes a biography of Mardonio Magaña, who arrived in Mexico City at age 52. Magaña started to carve wood and stone while he worked as a waiter at La Casa del Artista, a branch establishment, part of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas [...]

Furthering his theories about popular art, and referring to the paintings on the walls of certain pulquerías [agave sap bars] in Mexico City, Diego Rivera once again discusses the art of the proletariat. He restates his contempt for bourgeois [...]

Diego Rivera had an ongoing interest in popular art, which he began referring to as “Mexican popular art,” moving on from the ideas expressed in the previous article on retablos (see "Los Retablos: verdadera actual y única expresión pictórica [...]

In this brief, moralizing article, Diego Rivera expresses his opinion about the art of José Clemente Orozco on the occasion of the latter’s death. In his painting, Orozco clearly defined the positives and negatives he saw in his country. And, he [...]

In 1945 Diego Rivera wrote an article in which he looked back approvingly at the Open-Air Schools that were founded in the 1920s. He disagrees with David Alfaro Siqueiros (who attended one of them), and José Clemente Orozco, who spoke disdainfully [...]

In this document, Diego Rivera discusses the details of his conflict with David Alfaro Siqueiros; that is, the international campaign orchestrated by the Stalinist leadership to discredit Rivera for his Trotskyite militancy and for his financial [...]

On these scant three sheets of paper, Diego Rivera explores a wide range of ideas on the subject of art. This document is important because of the depth of Rivera’s ruminations on aesthetic emotions, color, form, texture, touch, feelings, and [...]

In this review of Mexican architecture, the painter Diego Rivera criticizes the aesthetic taste that gave rise to the abominable architecture of the Porfiriato (the Porfirio Díaz regime, before 1910) and to most of the architectural work of the post [...]

This article by Diego Rivera discusses the position of the artist in the Soviet Union. For Rivera, the most salient aspect of Soviet artistic production was the theater, which works for the masses and, in turn, the masses consume it. Western or [...]

In this long article, Diego Rivera summarizes his beliefs on what revolutionary art ought to be within the context of modern art, and offers a historic journey through the 19th century, underscoring the work of Daumier, Courbet, and Paul Cézanne. [...]

After outlining Mexican history from Independence in 1821 through Juárez Reformation and the Porfiriato [Porfirio Díaz regime], Diego Rivera asks why a day of national mourning should be observed on November 20th, the symbolic first day of the [...]

Diego Rivera insists that what he painted on his transportable mural—titled Gloriosa Victoria [Glorious Victory] and inspired by recent events in Guatemala—was an accurate representation, based on facts provided by reliable sources. Rivera [...]