ART SUNDAY - DIEGO RIVERA 1

“Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: The thing you cannot explain.” - Georges Braque

For Art Sunday today, the art of Diego Rivera. A great Mexican artist and the partner of the equally great artist, Frida Kahlo. He was born on December 8, 1886, Guanajuato, Mexico and died on November 25, 1957, Mexico City. He was a Mexican painter whose bold, large-scale murals stimulated a revival of fresco painting in Latin America. A government scholarship enabled Rivera to study art at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City from age 10, and a grant from the governor of Veracruz enabled him to continue his studies in Europe in 1907.

He studied in Spain and in 1909 settled in Paris, where he became a friend of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and other leading modern painters. About 1917 he abandoned the Cubist style in his own work and moved closer to the Post-Impressionism of Paul Cézanne, adopting a style ivolving simplified forms and bold areas of flat colour.

Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 after meeting with fellow Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. Both sought to create a new national art on revolutionary themes that would decorate public buildings in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. On returning to Mexico, Rivera painted his first important mural, Creation, for the Bolívar Auditorium of the National Preparatory School in Mexico City.

This is the "Day of Flowers" of 1925. The calla lillies were a great favourite of his and used in many of his paintings.