The Rivera family eventually moved to Mexico City and found themselves in impoverished circumstances, but after a few years they moved to a nicer part of the city and began to live the life of the middle-class of early 20th century Mexico. Diego attends the Academy of San Carlos, an art academy that had strict ties and traditions to European art and culture, as much of the ruling class and institutions of Mexico did before the revolution of 1910. Diego found the academy system to constraining, but found much to learn from the instructor Jose M. Velasco and his fellow students who were much older than him.

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Diego Rivera at the San Carlos Academy with his teacher Antonio Fabres Costa and fellow students in the painting class 1902

The Academy of San Carlos had a long and troubling history as being the champion of European art and culture in Mexico. Diego’s time at the academy was short but its bitter influence stayed long on his mind and he did not return to the academy except for a short time when he was placed as its director later in his life, but that directorship too was short lived because of differing politics between Diego and the teaching staff. Diego has written in his autobiography that he had at this time also come under the influence of Jose Guadalupe Posada, the famous Mexican illustrator of cheap novels and sheet music, as a young man in pre-Revolutionary Mexico City. Posada created illustrations that were printed on cheap paper and sold for a penny, his work represented the popular culture of the people and the mean streets of Mexico City at the turn of the last century. Jose Guadalupe Posada is most famous for his Calaveras the animated skeleton illustrations that satirized Mexican Society.

La Catrina by Jose Guadalupe Posada

But the question arises if Rivera ever actually met Posada as a young man or just said that he had for the artistic connection to the older artist, but the point remains that Posada’s art influenced the later work of Rivera as well as that of many influential Mexican artists of 20th century. Posada has influenced many Mexican and Chicano artist with his images of death and urban life for this entire century, and will continue to be appropriated for years to come. Diego pays tribute to the importance of Posada to his artmaking by including him in the center of his mural “Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park” (1947-48) standing next to the “Catrina”, the skeleton society woman of turn of the century Mexico City.

Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park (detail)