Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in 1886 and dead in 1957, who covered public buildings with murals of Mexican history, workers and revolution. He is the giant of Mexican muralism and the husband of Frida Kahlo, whom he married twice. In the United States he is known for one wall in particular: the Rockefeller Center mural, chiseled off in 1934 because of a portrait of Lenin.
Most people meet Rivera through Frida, and she filled a large part of his life. But he was already a painter whole countries argued about, and in 1933 he lost one of the biggest commissions of his career over a single face.
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Rivera was hired to paint the lobby wall of the new RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York. Nelson Rockefeller and his mother Abby had pushed for him, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. agreed reluctantly. Picasso and Matisse had been the first choices. Rivera titled his design Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.
The sketch the Rockefellers approved had no Lenin in it. In the spring of 1933 his face appeared on the wall, after a New York newspaper attacked the mural as propaganda. Nelson Rockefeller wrote to Rivera that the portrait "might very seriously offend a great many people" and asked him to replace it with "the face of some unknown man."
Rivera refused. Rather than mutilate the design, he wrote, he would prefer its physical destruction. On 10 May 1933 the managers of Rockefeller Center ordered the work stopped. They paid him in full and hung a canvas over the unfinished wall. What became of the wall itself came later.
What You'll Discover
Why a painter left Mexico for Paris.
What he painted on Mexico's public walls.
What split him from Frida.
What Detroit thought of his murals.
What became of the Rockefeller wall.
Where he wanted to be buried.