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Lot Essay
When Diego Rivera returned to Mexico in 1921 after a fourteen-year sojourn in Europe, he launched the most definitive period of his artistic production as a painter. This was not only the result of his many al fresco murals executed throughout public buildings, but rather, he also set his aspirations towards becoming a modern painter committed to the ideals of social justice and equality for all those dispossessed people, such as those in Mexico that had undergone a social revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century. The substantive shift that occurred between Europe and Mexico was rooted in his understanding of the ultimate mission that art could play in the transformation of a modern society. When he lived in Paris, his concerns regarding his work were certainly linked to concepts and theories related to art. But from the moment he became immersed in the post-revolutionary Mexican cultural renaissance, Rivera recognized that art was part of an ideology, and that under a Marxist ideal, he was on the road to altering people’s lives and reclaiming their dignity as human beings. Diego Rivera’s many works such as his murals depicting historical narratives, as well as the numerous easel paintings he executed up until 1957, can be understood under these idealistic principles.
An important group of works were the portraits of young children that are part of the tradition of nineteenth-century portraiture, a genre he and his wife Frida Kahlo valued and personally collected. Often these enchanting paintings by popular masters such as José María Estrada and Hermenegildo Bustos, professed a certain pleasure in representing their innocence as a metaphor for the children’s spontaneity untouched by the demands of modern life. These works move the viewer much the way the naif paintings of Henri Rousseau, whose works were so admired by Picasso, as by Rivera throughout his time in Paris. This is precisely one of the qualities apparent in Retrato de Inesita Martínez, depicted at the age of three, seated on the floor on a mat made of petate palm as if she were a Mexican popular crafts doll. Rivera renders her as a Mexican girl with brown little hands and bare feet, with intelligent, inquisitive eyes in an arresting gaze. Everything about her alludes to her race’s dignity—her blue dress, her well-combed hair, and her flirty pink bow evoking the cherry atop a sweet dessert or cupcake. For Diego Rivera, these children, like Inesita, represented tomorrow’s promise for a Mexican society in which the pursuit of happiness was a social right.
Professor Luis-Martín Lozano, art historian, Mexico City
An important group of works were the portraits of young children that are part of the tradition of nineteenth-century portraiture, a genre he and his wife Frida Kahlo valued and personally collected. Often these enchanting paintings by popular masters such as José María Estrada and Hermenegildo Bustos, professed a certain pleasure in representing their innocence as a metaphor for the children’s spontaneity untouched by the demands of modern life. These works move the viewer much the way the naif paintings of Henri Rousseau, whose works were so admired by Picasso, as by Rivera throughout his time in Paris. This is precisely one of the qualities apparent in Retrato de Inesita Martínez, depicted at the age of three, seated on the floor on a mat made of petate palm as if she were a Mexican popular crafts doll. Rivera renders her as a Mexican girl with brown little hands and bare feet, with intelligent, inquisitive eyes in an arresting gaze. Everything about her alludes to her race’s dignity—her blue dress, her well-combed hair, and her flirty pink bow evoking the cherry atop a sweet dessert or cupcake. For Diego Rivera, these children, like Inesita, represented tomorrow’s promise for a Mexican society in which the pursuit of happiness was a social right.
Professor Luis-Martín Lozano, art historian, Mexico City