Diego Rivera (December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957), (full name Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez) was a cubist painter and muralist living in Mexico.

Diego is perhaps best known by the world public for painting a vast mural in the 1930s featuring early communist leaders juxtaposed with the Founding Fathers of the United States in the lobby of the Rockefeller Building. That work was quickly destroyed by angry Rockefeller staff people before it could be completed in that location; see the movie Cradle Will Rock for a reenactment.

Background

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Rivera, born in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico, was of Jewish Converso heritage and Catholic upbringing, but a professed atheist and communist for most, if not all, of his life. He is said to be regarded in Latin America today as a folk hero. From a common-law marriage to the artist Angelina Beloff he had a son, Diego Jr., who did not survive infancy, and from a relationship with the Russian emigrée painter Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) he also had a daughter, Marika Rivera. His marriage to the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was childless after a miscarriage, but he nevertheless spent a rocky lifetime relationship with her.

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Volume 21, number 2: Emerging Themes, Emerging Voices
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Volume 21, number 2: Collapsing Boundaries
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Volume 21, number 2: Copley's Cargo
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In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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