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Diego Rivera fictionalised his life so much that even his birth date is a myth. His mother María, his aunt Cesárea and the town hall records list his arrival at 7.30 on the evening of December 8th, 1886. That is the very auspicious day of the feast of the Immaculate Conception. However, in the Guanajuato ecclesiastical registry, baptism documentation states that little Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez and his twin brother actually appeared on December 13th. The latter, Carlos, died a year and a half later while the puny Diego, suffering from rickets and a weak constitution, became the ward of his Tarascan Indian nurse, Antonia, who lived in the Sierra Mountains. There, according to Diego, she gave him herbal medicine and practiced sacred rites while he drank goat’s milk fresh from the udders and lived wild in the woods with all manner of creatures.

Landscape

1896–1897

Oil on canvas, 70 × 55 cm

Guadalupe Rivera de Irtube Collection

Whatever the truth concerning his birth and early childhood, Diego inherited a crisp analytical intellect through a convoluted blending of bloodlines, being of Mexican, Spanish, Indian, African, Italian, Jewish, Russian and Portuguese descent.

Landscape with a Lake

c. 1900

Oil on canvas, 53 × 73 cm

Daniel Yankelewitz B. Collection, San Jose

The young Diego was a pampered son. He could read by the age of four and had begun drawing on the walls. When they moved to Mexico City it opened up a world of wonders to him. The city rose on a high plateau atop an ancient lake-bed at the foot of twin snow-capped volcanoes, Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl. After the dusty rural roads and flat-roofed houses of Guanajuato, the paved thoroughfares of the capital with its elegant French architecture and the Paseo de Reforma rivalling the best of Europe’s boulevards overwhelmed Diego.

Self-Portrait

1906

Oil on canvas, 55 × 54 cm

Collection of the Government of the State of Sinaloa

Mexico

At eight he was enrolled in the Colegio del Padre Antonio. He remained there for three months, tried the Colegio Católico Carpentier and then departed to the Liceo Católico Hispano-Mexicano.

Having driven the French out of Mexico in 1867, the president, Díaz, spent the next few years of his administration wiping out the democracy of Benito Juárez and re-establishing French and international cultures as examples of progress and civilisation for the Mexican people. The downside of this cultural importation was the denigration of native society, arts, language and political representation. The poor were left to die, while the rich and the middle class were courted because they had money and appreciated being able to keep it.

Landscape with a Mill, Damme Landscape

1909

Oil on canvas, 50 × 60.5 cm

Ing. Juan Pablo Gómez Rivera Collection

Mexico City

In the same year that Díaz and Juárez were chasing the French out of Mexico, a book was published, Capital – A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, which represented a lifetime study of the political economy of the working class in a scientific manner. This work avoided the usual rabble-rousing demands of repressed workers, substituting well-thought-out deductions that established the basic socialist premises of its author, Karl Marx. If there was ever an autocratic government ripe for a strong undercurrent of revolution supported by intellectual pillars of socialist ideology, it was Mexico. The Díaz government’s cultural and economic philosophy devolved strictly around the concept of creating wealth before addressing the issues of the poor, who were, unfortunately for the Mexican científicos who set the policy, not dying off fast enough to offset their birth rate.

Notre-Dame, Paris

1909

Oil on canvas, 144 × 113 cm

Private collection, Mexico City

By the age of ten Diego had experienced the results of Mexico’s autocracy. Making the most of his gift of drawing and endlessly sketching concerned his parents now. Diego liked to draw soldiers, so his father considered a military career, but the boy also spent much of his spare time at the railway station to draw the trains – so what about a job as a train driver? Subject matter aside, Diego’s mother defied her husband’s wishes that the boy enter the Colegio Militar and sent him instead to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts for evening school classes.

Portrait of Angelina Beloff

1909

Oil on canvas, 59 × 45 cm

Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz

Veracruz

Diego struggled with this day and night school education for a year until at the age of eleven in 1898 he received a scholarship to move his studies full time to the San Carlos Academy. While the school was considered the best in Mexico, its curriculum was bound by dusty European artistic dogma compounded by the societal engineering of the government científicos that mandated strength over weakness in all life experiences.

By 1906, Rivera had completed eight years of study at San Carlos and graduated with honours, appearing in his final student show with twenty-six works. His efforts had paid off with an excellent reputation among the government people he had to impress to keep grant money coming in. This was accomplished, but the money for study in Europe did not arrive for six months, allowing young Diego to live the life of a bohemian artist among his school chums.

The Old Ones

1912

Oil on canvas, 210 × 184 cm

Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City

This gang of “intellectuals, artists and architects” – El Grupo Bohemio – who had struggled to finish college, worked hard at exploring a dissolute lifestyle.

During this time he also came into contact with the curious character Gerardo Murillo, a faculty member and anarchist political agitator against Díaz. Murillo chose the name “Dr Atl” while living in Mexico. In Indian dialect, Atl is the name of the fourth sun – Nahui Atl – and means Water Sun, but Murillo was actually a rabble-rousing criollo, the same as the rest of the governing class.

Portrait of a Spaniard (Hermán Alsina)

1912

Oil on canvas, 200 × 166 cm

Private collection