Diego Rivera

It is probably true that all of us believe that we are modern: Ramses and Socrates and Helen of Troy no doubt considered themselves modern in their time. This is no doubt one of the reasons that it can be so difficult to define exactly what Modernism is in art: We are constantly conflating it with what is contemporary, but by now post-modern. This paper examines one of the defining painters of Modernism, the Mexican painter and muralist Diego Rivera. By an analysis of three of his paintings, we can come to a greater appreciation of his own work as well as a broader understanding of both Modernism and Primitivism, another school that Rivera worked within.

Before beginning to look at these three paintings, it may be helpful to provide a sort of baseline definition for Modernism. The concept of Modernism within the realm of art - like that of other styles and movements including Romanticism, Realism and Postmodernism - cannot be fully understand in isolation. Modernism can only be understood within the specific historical and cultural context of its evolution and development - just as is true of other stylistic schools. It arose from something, not nothing, and gave way to other specific ways of seeing.

While the exact beginnings and ends of all artistic schools and the boundaries of their stylistic concerns are in truth much fuzzier than the neat categories in text books would have us believe, Modernism is in fact a much harder artistic style to define than either Romanticism

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driving forces of Modernism. There are a number of different definitions of Primitivist art; the one that is most relevant here is the borrowing by Western, formally trained artists of the motifs and styles of non-Western societies. Rivera played with this idea in that as a Mexican artist he was himself both Western and non-Western, connected to both the First World and the colonial world. Diego used elements of traditional Mexican art as a way - in a seeming mixture of the tacit and the intentional - of marking his work with authenticity, with the ancient, an essential marker of Modernism, as Lucas (1975) argues. Rivera's use of Primitivist tropes allowed Rivera to straddle the distance between his own European training and his Mexican ethnicity; it also allowed him to exploit this difference. Rivera created bilingual paintings, speaking both to the past with his Primitivist evocations of Mayan and Aztec symbols and to the future with his Socialist references and his Cubism. For example, in his Allegory of California, the perspective is both highly modern in terms of composition and the use of overlapping perspective and yet also evocative of the vertically murals on Mayan temples. The female figure that dominates the image is

Category: Arts - D