Diego Rivera (1886 to 1957) was the Mexican painter who covered public walls with the history of his country, and the most surprising fact about him is that he wrote, in his own autobiography, that he once ate human flesh.
He painted giant murals in Mexico City, Detroit and New York, and one of them was smashed to pieces on the orders of the Rockefeller Center that had hired him.
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The confession is in print. It comes from his autobiography, and it has been repeated ever since as proof of how far he would go. Later writers have mostly treated it as suspect, and I would not bet on it.
Rivera built a legend around himself, and the cannibal story is the part of it that travels best.
Next to the tales he told about himself, what really happened to him sounds more improbable. All of it is documented, and almost every episode starts with a wall someone paid him to paint.
Did Rivera really eat human flesh?
That is what he says. The account is in My Art, My Life, the autobiography he gave to Gladys March, where he places the episode in Mexico in 1904 and describes pooling money with others to buy cadavers from a city morgue.
Later writers have called the account factually suspect, even an elaborate lie. A story that shocking costs nothing to tell and cannot be checked, which suits a man who liked to be talked about.
Whatever happened in a Mexican morgue in 1904, the Rivera who reached Detroit in 1932 needed no embellishment.
What You'll Discover
What Detroit's clergy demanded.
What was in the oil drums.
Who he took into his house.
The sign he refused to remove.