Portrait of Marevna
Diego Rivera
DIEGO RIVER, 1915. OIL ON CANVAS.
Swept up by the fashions of the day, like so many artists, Diego Rivera found himself in Paris painting as a Cubist did. After years of training in his native Mexico, he travelled around Europe, taking in the avant-garde artistic movements of the day before settling in France’s capital as a young and unknown artist, befriending Amedeo Modigliani, Piet Mondrian, and Juan Gris. It would be nearly a decade before Rivera would return to Mexico, become a figurehead of the nation’s art scene, launch the Mural movement across the world and flying a flag for Central America across the art world. He would, on his return, renounce Cubism as a movement too slight and frivolous for the serious times he was living in, but before then he showed such an easy mastery of the movement, one can imagine a whole different artistic life for him. In this portrait of his then lover Marevna Vorobëv-Stebelska, he is able to capture a likeness, an essence, and play with a sense of perspective in wonderful harmony. Rivera’s talents found their apex in his large scale murals that spoke to the traditions of his country, but his early forays into more foreign movements show the breadth of his abilities and the depth of his genius.