The Life and Times of Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera is one of, if not the most, famous artist to ever come out of South America. His influence can be seen not only to his own country, but also all over the world. Rivera was born on December 13, 1886, the date of one of many Mexican religious festivals, in Guanajuato. He was the first in a set of twins. His twin brother’s name was José Carlos and he died at the age of one and a half. As a matter of fact, his whole name was actually Diego Mariade la Concepcion Juan Nepolmuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodriguez. Fortunately, in later years Rivera did not have to use all of his names when he signed his artwork. On his early pieces he used the name Diego Mariade Rivera to distinguish himself from his father, though shortened it to simply Diego Rivera later on.
From a very early age, Rivera showed signs of tremendous artistic talent. In 1889, well before his third birthday, he drew a surprisingly accurate
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By 1913, he was one of the leaders of the new artistic movements called cubism. Most of the previous forms of artwork before cubism expressed the world in a rather realistic way. The subjects of the piece of artwork, whether it was a person, an animal, or a bowl of fruit, were generally quite easy to recognize. Led by artists Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Diego Rivera and a number of other painters who worked in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century challenged all of that. Cubist painting often depicted common objects in exaggerated geometric form. For example, a human face might take the form of a triangle or a cone. This head might also be separated from the body, placed away from the shoulders. In addition, the head possibly could be shown, as it appeared from the side while the rest of the body faced frontward. From the years 1913 to 1917, Rivera completed about two hundred paintings in the cubist