The Question:

Is it important to me as a contemporary Chicano Artist if the Mexican Artist Diego Rivera is explained or placed within the context of early European Modernism or is the fact that he has traditionally been described as one of the three most important artist of Mexican art history after 1921 enough to satisfy my concept of his importance in world art history? Diego Rivera spent most of the years 1907-1921 living in Europe, creating artwork and a history that has largely been ignored by standard art texts. There was a retrospective of his work Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution in 1999. I saw the retrospective in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This retrospective is said to have had an agenda, and that agenda is the returning of Rivera’s name back to its rightful place next to Picasso’s and Braque’s in the Pantheon of Western Art History in relation to the early modernist painting style known as Cubism. I questioned if this was important to me as a Chicano artist and if I had a need to explore in detail this expatriate period of his life for the purpose of finding out his proper place and value to the development of Cubism. What I am interested in as a Chicano Artist and cultural descendant of Diego Rivera is if his placement into the context of Western Art History as an important innovator of an early European art movement, Cubism, is relevant to my art making and self-perception as a Chicano Artist working in California at the begining of the 21st century or not.