Diego Rivera valuation
Mexican muralist who painted walls in Mexico City, Detroit and San Francisco, and easel pictures beside them.
Diego Rivera was born at Guanajuato in 1886 and studied at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City from the age of ten.
What a work by Diego Rivera is worth
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Bio
Diego Rivera was born at Guanajuato in 1886 and studied at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City from the age of ten. A grant from the governor of Veracruz took him to Europe in 1907, first to Madrid and then to Paris, where he married the Russian artist Angelina Beloff and painted Cubist pictures between 1913 and 1917. He returned to Mexico in 1921, and between 1922 and 1953 he painted murals in Mexico City, Chapingo and Cuernavaca, and in San Francisco, Detroit and New York. The Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective in 1931. He married Frida Kahlo in 1929, divorced her in 1939 and married her again in 1940. He died in Mexico City in 1957.
The murals stay on their walls, so what comes to market is easel painting, drawing and watercolour: portraits, flower sellers, Mexican children and market scenes, with some work from the Paris years. Mexico has declared his work an artistic monument, which restricts its permanent export, so where a work is held matters as much as what it is. Forgeries are a recurring problem, and a valuation rests on a documented provenance with exhibition and publication history behind it.
At a glance
- Born
- 8 December 1886, Guanajuato
- Died
- 25 November 1957, Mexico City
- Movements
- Social Realism, Mexican Muralism
More on Wikipedia.
Detroit, Rockefeller Center and the Alameda
In 1932 and 1933 he painted the 27 fresco panels of Detroit Industry in a courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The mural he began at Rockefeller Center in New York in 1933, Man at the Crossroads, included a portrait of Lenin. He refused to remove it, the work was destroyed, and he painted it again at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1934.
Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Park, painted in 1946 and 1947, gave José Guadalupe Posada's Catrina a full figure. For any easel work, the first questions are where it has been shown or published, and whether it has ever been in Mexico.
Vasconcelos, Moscow and San Francisco
Before going home Rivera spent 1920 in Italy studying Renaissance frescoes, and he returned to Mexico in 1921 for the mural programme of the education minister José Vasconcelos. His first significant mural, Creation, painted in encaustic at the National Preparatory School in 1922, was made with a pistol at his side against hostile students; after it he worked only in fresco. The cycle at the Secretariat of Public Education, begun that September and finished in 1928, was planned at 124 frescoes.
In 1927 he went to Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution and met Alfred Barr, later the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art. In San Francisco in 1930 and 1931 he painted a mural for the City Club of the Stock Exchange, with the tennis player Helen Wills as his model, and a fresco now in the Diego Rivera Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute. The 1986 retrospective opened at the Detroit Institute of Arts and travelled to Philadelphia, Mexico City, Berlin and the Hayward Gallery in London.
Best auction results
- The Rivals $9.76m
- Oil on canvas, 1931 · New York · May 2018
- Publicly reported
- From the collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller. The auction record for a Latin American artist until November 2021.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
