Diego y Frida obra

Mural Diego Rivera

Vista en acapulco de la casa de William_Spratling

Diego Rivera

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Spratling

Viva la Vida Frida Kahlo

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Diego Rivera, Catálogo General de Obra de Caballete, Mexico City, 1989, p. 31, no. 179, illustrated

CATALOGUE NOTE

Diego Rivera is perceived as being a master of figuration and one of the leading lights of the Mexican Muralist movement, but it is often forgotten that he was one of the earliest pioneers of abstraction, both in Europe and Latin America.

Rivera left Mexico in 1907 at the age of 21 for Madrid and then moved to Paris in 1909. Once in Paris he began by sharing a studio with Marie Blanchard. He soon became a very active part of the Montparnasse art scene, counting amongst his friends fellow Spanish speakers Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris. Close friendships also developed with Amadeo Modigliani, Jacques Lipchitz and Ilya Ehrenberg as attested by the portraits they did of each other.

While in Paris, Rivera had a dazzling cubist period from 1912 through 1917. Naturaleza Muerta en Óvalo is one of the works from this period where Rivera experimented with trompe l'oeil techniques as did Picasso and Gris to obtain the faux texture of cork in the brown areas around the oval form containing the still life. The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. held a wonderful exhibition of Rivera's cubist works in 2004.

Bertram Wolfe, Rivera's friend and biographer noted "during 1915 and much of 1916 he (Rivera) carried his experiments with the technical resources of his craft even further, painting with wax instead of oil, on pressed cork using plaster stucco and contrast of textures . He did still lives of bottles and fruits, all rounded curves and circles of color".i

Naturaleza Muerta en Óvalo (Still Life with Oval) was originally in the collection of Enrique Freyman, the Mexican cultural attaché in Paris in the 1910's who was one of Rivera's most fervent admirers and whose collection of twenty seven paintings by Rivera were sold in these rooms in a memorable 1959 sale.

[i] Wolfe, Bertram D., The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera, New York: Cooper Square Press (1963)