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
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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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.
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.
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.
