Diego Rivera the Artist As Term Paper

When the work was near completion a reporter came to the cite to interview Rivera and took many scenes from the work as examples of a dangerously revolutionary idea, despite Rivera's impassioned explanation and led the public to believe that Rivera had duped Rockefeller and the American people.

A said that, as long as the Soviet Union was in existence, Nazi fascism could never be sure of its survival. Therefore, the Soviet Union must expect to be attacked by this reactionary enemy. If the United States wished to preserve its democratic forms, it would ally itself with Russia against fascism. Since Lenin was the pre-eminent founder of the Soviet Union and also the first and most altruistic theorist of modern communism, I used him as the center of the inevitable alliance between the Russian and the American. In doing this, I said, I was quite aware that I was going against public opinion Having heard me out, the reporter, smiling politely, remarked that, apart from being a remarkable painter, I was also an excellent humorist.

Rockefeller asked Rivera to remove the face of Lenin and instead paint a picture of an unknown man, and Rivera promptly told the man that he would rather destroy the whole of the work than remove such a large part of its message, though this is not the story told by the Rockefeller biographers or the Rockefeller foundation, but it is none the less the artists conception of events.

Within his surviving works there is also a sense of his politic and manner in which he chose to change the world, though interestingly probably the most controversial of his works was never shown to the public. A modern interpretation of his works claims that his murals "They were 'the visual component of [the] need to create that Mexican citizen necessary for the survival of the post-Revolutionary state,' the 'official intrusion into political consciousness and social life' (195). "

They served, as he would have liked them to, to engender ideals in the public of Mexico, though the communist revolution of Rivera's hoping never occurred the public spaces that he became a part of are mostly preserved. He can boast huge murals on the walls of several public buildings in Mexico, the education department and the agriculture school at Chapingo being the most famous.

His ideas were radical and his beliefs were often countered, even by his own beloved communist party but his work is a legacy of the establishment of public spaces as places where art and ideas can come together to attempt to rework society into a better place.

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