Cubism

Diego Rivera in his Paris studio in the Rue du Depart, 1915

By the time Rivera and Picasso met in 1914 they both had been working within the context of Cubism for many years, Picasso as a founder and developer of this movement and Rivera as an artists who developed an interest in the style and learned to work within its space altering parameters. It is suggested that somehow Rivera was an important developer of Cubism and that Picasso borrowed ideas from Rivera’s work and incorporated them into his own work. If we look at the development of their work we will see that stylistically Rivera was a step behind the work of Picasso and that the devices that are said to be taken by Picasso from the 1915 painting Zapatista Landscape can be found in Picasso’s work of as far back as 1913. By the time Rivera returns to Paris in 1911 Picasso was already involved with Synthetic Cubism having moved away from Analytical Cubism, but the paintings of Rivera from 1911-14 still retain many of the devices of Analytical Cubism. Rivera’s work of this time 1911-1916 has many references to many artist of the period including Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris, who was a friend and inspiration to Rivera. It is a true fact about artists in general and this is that we all borrow ideas from one another, that is how we learn and grow within our work. During this time many new ideas about art were developing and the discussion about Cubism was heated and varied among it practitioners. The very fact that Rivera was in Paris at this time (1912-1916) working within the small circle of Cubist painters and sharing ideas within this group makes him important to the development of this movement, but this is the work of a young Mexican Artist who had many more years to produce artwork and for anyone to focus on early youthful Eurocentric work and glance over later mature Mexican work is a disservice to the Latin community in general and Rivera specifically. Rivera himself said that he had gone to Europe because of a kind of inferiority complex about his relationship to European art and what he experienced in Europe and his exploration of early European Modernism led him to a love of his own country and a kind of art that was for the people, a socialist art style, his Social Realism that would influence American artists decades later. His development as a communist is also his development away from art styles that had nothing to do with the people or the land, cubism was for the intellectual and his later mural work was for the worker. His Cubist paintings were for his own intellectual enjoyment but his work after 1921 in Mexico was for the people to learn from, something he had learned from Renaissance fresco paintings in churches, but after 1921 the churches were Mexican Government buildings and the faithful were the communist workers.