The Flower Carrier is a 1935 painting by Diego Rivera, now in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A man in white kneels under a basket of flowers far wider than his shoulders, and a woman steadies the load. It is usually read as a picture of the poor crushed by a luxury they can never afford.
Rivera painted it in oil and tempera on a Masonite panel nearly square, 48 inches by 47 3/4.
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Crushed is the word everyone uses for this picture. It is not the word the museum uses. SFMOMA's own audio story says Rivera "wasn't painting a specific person, he was celebrating a way of life," and the artist Rupert Garcia, who speaks in it, describes the work as being about "the dignity of being a flower carrier, or a flower vendor."
Rivera's own political camp never agreed on what a flower seller was worth. Some left-wing critics dismissed his flower vendors as sentimental, folkloric stereotypes of Mexico, a charge that sits oddly beside the idea that he painted them as victims. I think both readings are in the picture, and the details show which one he leaned toward.
Who is the man with no face?
Nobody in particular. Rivera never gave him a name, and the museum says that was deliberate: the narrator of its audio story notes that both faces are hard to see, and that this was intentional.
Diego Rivera had come home to Mexico in 1921, when the government wanted nationalistic murals and he wanted to build a Mexican style of his own. From then on he painted Indigenous Mexicans in their daily work. The journalist Judith Dobrzynski says he gave them dignity rather than pity.
The man here wears white clothes and a yellow hat. His head is down, and so is the woman's, so the picture offers a back, a hat and a basket. The flowers get all the color, bright pink and blue, and what the woman behind him is doing changes the scene.
What You'll Discover
What the woman is doing.
Who disliked Rivera's flower sellers.
What it really cost.