2009

Dedicated to the slain revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) and the campesinos, or peasant farm workers, who followed him, this fresco is a copy of a detail from a larger mural cycle Rivera made in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a few years earlier. It is one of eight "portable" frescoes Rivera produced expressly for his solo exhibition at MoMA in 1931. In a studio the Museum provided him above its galleries, he worked around the clock for a month to produce paintings that, unlike traditional frescoes, were intended to be transportable. Although the concept of the portable fresco was in many ways flawed (Agrarian Leader Zapata weighs over one thousand pounds and is too fragile to travel), the works demonstrate Rivera's mastery of the medium and were a critical and popular success. During its five-week run, the exhibition broke Museum attendance records and led to important public commissions from the Ford and Rockefeller families.

Rivera was the best-known and most prolific artist of the Mexican mural renaissance, which began in the 1920s in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Through government-sponsored public murals, he and other Mexican artists sought to communicate and foster national pride, and in the process they captured the public imagination in the United States as well. Rivera described the movement’s utopian ideals, stating, "For the first time in the history of monumental painting, Mexican muralism ended the focus on gods, kings, and heads of state" and "made the masses the hero of monumental art."