After a brilliant student career at the prestigious Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA) in Mexico City, Diego Rivera searched vigorously for an opportunity to travel Europe to perfect his artistic skills. Despite a few setbacks, Rivera succeeded, and upon arriving in Spain, in 1907 great opportunities unfolded before him, spurring him to grow significantly as a painter. Over the subsequent fourteen years that Rivera spent in Europe, he was immersed within Paris’ avant-garde circles and experienced fundamental intellectual and conceptual growth in his painting. He returned to Mexico in 1921 with unparalleled knowledge of avant-garde philosophies, surpassing that of any other Mexican artist of his t.mes .

Nevertheless, the country that Rivera returned to in 1921 had radically changed as a result of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, and the vibrant cultural atmosphere of the post-revolutionary Mexican Renaissance also created new challenges for him as an artist, some of which Rivera explored in the 1920s. Rivera’s main endeavor upon finishing his first encaustic mural for the Bolívar Amphitheater at the Antiguo Colegio de Ildefonso in Mexico City in 1927 was to undertake extensive travels across the home country that he had not known since the beginning of the century, before he left for Europe. What Rivera discovered during his travels astonished him as an artist, and the wealth of material he explored during this t.mes fueled his artistic production and guided his career trajectory for three decades to come. This process of rediscovering interest in Mexico’s cultural history compelled Rivera to alter his methods of engagement with the modernism. He began to adapt the plastic language he discovered in Europe to a country in which he came to believe that art must be inclusive and accessible for all, particularly the illiterate and least-protected members of Mexican society. Rivera came to acknowledge Mexico’s cultural and ethnic diversity beyond the official nationalistic rhetoric of the government in power; he discovered the vast landscape and its extraordinarily diverse people, their habits and customs, the origins and the continuity of this culture with its pre-Columbian ancestors, which Rivera maintained was at once a feature of survival and a discourse of indomitable cultural resistance against invaders. In this way, the painter began to build a truly Mexican plastic language founded within the prerogative of modern art, and, concurrently, began to visually explain the mechanisms of history from a Marxist ideological perspective, as his murals of the 1920s demonstrate.

Situating his artistic work in modernity, visually and conceptually, was exceedingly important for Rivera; the ultimate aim of his artistic project was to contribute meaningfully to the reconstruction of a nation that owed social justice to thousands of its citizens. From this perspective, the thematic issues that are repeated in his easel paintings and murals can be understood to complement one another in their mission. Luna sobre el mercado is a painting that corresponds very closely with some of the fresco murals that Rivera painted for the Secretariat of Public Education (see fig. 1), depicting how the women of the isthmus of Tehuantepec play the primary role in the economic lives of their families: they come and go from the market, bring and sell merchandise, manage community resources, grant credit and maintain the social order. Rivera employs his modernist visual language to depict these women as cultural archetypes, emphasizing the vibrance of their skirts adjusted tightly around their bodies, their huipiles embroidered with bright geometric bands, their carefully braided hair and the architectural petticoats of the skirts, distancing himself from the narrative and the picturesque.

Rivera’s understanding of the discourse of modern art from his years spent in the European avant-garde is also clearly visible here. There is the mannerist color palette of Luna sobre el mercado, whose orange and green tones are reminiscent of the religious paintings of El Greco, and the paired chromatic tonalities in the sky and landscape which clearly demonstrate his knowledge of Sonia Delaunay’s orphic compositions (see fig. 2). Visible also is the influence of Egyptian sculpture (which Rivera studied in Italy between 1920-21), including the hieratism and stylized modeling of the stylized, dark-skinned figures that advance within the landscape. Last but not least, one must regard Rivera’s rendering of the faces of the figures, which strongly resemble pre-Columbian masks, just as the Cubists had done with African masks.

Professor Luis-Martín Lozano
Art Historian