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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Professor Luis-Martín Lozano for his assistance cataloguing this work.
After pursuing a successful international career as a vanguard painter in Europe, Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) returned to his homeland in June of 1921. Shortly after he joined the Secretary of Public Education, José Vasconcelos, and became part of the group of artists busily undertaking murals throughout Mexico City’s public buildings as part of a cultural policy which sought to revise concepts about identity and national integration, in the aftermath of two decades of armed conflict that had destroyed the nation.
Rivera was certainly not the only painter of murals but he was the one who achieved greater international acclaim and, I believe, better assumed the task of aligning himself with the values of the Mexican people. His vision of a modern Mexico sought the integration of the less fortunate members of society far removed from opportunities, particularly the indigenous population. From the 1920s onward, Rivera’s artistic vision focused on constructing an iconography that would embody lo mexicano, while at the same time, act as a modern artistic language.
Even before leaving for the Soviet Union in 1927, Rivera had been working on compositions of indigenous mothers and their children, but towards the decade’s end, these anonymous beings—some clealy influenced by pre-hispanic masks—evolved into portraits of children within his close circle who were to inspire him and infuse his work with renewed vitality and inspiration. The children painted by Rivera between 1928-1945 constitute a distinct theme within his easel portraits. He endows these children, sons and daughters of the most vulnerable of society’s women, with individual personality; those women who could not read or write, and who had no opportunities for getting ahead but who nevertheless, were the caring and loving product of a race that believed in a more promising future with justice and equality.
Painted as small dolls, coquetish and fragile, these small children—boys and girls—were executed with great skill by Rivera who endows them with infinite tenderness in his fierce wish to recover the dignity of the Mexican people during a period of national reconstruction in the post-revolutionary period. La Niña con vestido rosa (The Little Girl in Pink Dress) embodies both the spirit and conceptual qualities the artist sought, and furthermore the artist’s technique emulates the fresh approach he employed in his murals with diaphanous and transparent colors, and rich tonalities which ultimately reveal Rivera’s extraordinary prowess as painter, draughtsman, and supreme master of color.
Professor Luis-Martín Lozano
After pursuing a successful international career as a vanguard painter in Europe, Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957) returned to his homeland in June of 1921. Shortly after he joined the Secretary of Public Education, José Vasconcelos, and became part of the group of artists busily undertaking murals throughout Mexico City’s public buildings as part of a cultural policy which sought to revise concepts about identity and national integration, in the aftermath of two decades of armed conflict that had destroyed the nation.
Rivera was certainly not the only painter of murals but he was the one who achieved greater international acclaim and, I believe, better assumed the task of aligning himself with the values of the Mexican people. His vision of a modern Mexico sought the integration of the less fortunate members of society far removed from opportunities, particularly the indigenous population. From the 1920s onward, Rivera’s artistic vision focused on constructing an iconography that would embody lo mexicano, while at the same time, act as a modern artistic language.
Even before leaving for the Soviet Union in 1927, Rivera had been working on compositions of indigenous mothers and their children, but towards the decade’s end, these anonymous beings—some clealy influenced by pre-hispanic masks—evolved into portraits of children within his close circle who were to inspire him and infuse his work with renewed vitality and inspiration. The children painted by Rivera between 1928-1945 constitute a distinct theme within his easel portraits. He endows these children, sons and daughters of the most vulnerable of society’s women, with individual personality; those women who could not read or write, and who had no opportunities for getting ahead but who nevertheless, were the caring and loving product of a race that believed in a more promising future with justice and equality.
Painted as small dolls, coquetish and fragile, these small children—boys and girls—were executed with great skill by Rivera who endows them with infinite tenderness in his fierce wish to recover the dignity of the Mexican people during a period of national reconstruction in the post-revolutionary period. La Niña con vestido rosa (The Little Girl in Pink Dress) embodies both the spirit and conceptual qualities the artist sought, and furthermore the artist’s technique emulates the fresh approach he employed in his murals with diaphanous and transparent colors, and rich tonalities which ultimately reveal Rivera’s extraordinary prowess as painter, draughtsman, and supreme master of color.
Professor Luis-Martín Lozano