But this article deals only with the 10 years he spends in Europe, from (1911-1921), and before he joins the communist party or meets Frida Khalo. The discovery of how I became aware of Rivera is important to how I became aware of my Chicano self and important to what I have to say at the end about Rivera’s time spent living in Europe. Over 23 years ago when I was taking my first art class at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic High School in San Bernardino, California I became aware of Diego Rivera and the fact that he had created paintings that depicted the history and people of Mexico with the kind of fantastic representational skill I so admired in artists. My Spanish teacher had met Pablo Picasso years ago on one of her vacations to the French Riviera and told us all about the great Spanish painter, so I knew about him, but I had little time or interest in Modern Art I could hardly handle Picasso’s distortions of his Cubism or late work, but his Blue and Rose periods were acceptable to my young and untrained eye. But Diego Rivera was a giant in my mind, and besides he was a Mexican and so was I, Picasso was only a far removed Spaniard. Rivera’s artwork was representational, monumental and historical everything a teenage mind will accept as good art, at least a teenage mind of the late 1970’s. There was little I could find about Rivera. The art text books in the school library had nothing about him or any art from Mexico at all. The city library was more help and I was able to find books that had illustrations of his work and descriptions of his life, they even mentioned Frida Khalo who was an artist and his wife. But what was very interesting was the discovery that he had spent many years during the Mexican Revolution in Europe, but there was no more said about this time spent in Europe other than the fact that he had seen Renaissance frescoes in Italy and brought that knowledge back with him to Mexico, and that this knowledge of Renaissance fresco painting had inspired him to create his large murals.