THE COLLECTION
Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886–1957)
Agrarian Leader Zapata
- Date:
- 1931
- Medium:
- Fresco on reinforced cement in galvanized-steel framework
- Dimensions:
- 7' 9 3/4" x 6' 2" (238.1 x 188 cm)
- Credit Line:
- Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund
- MoMA Number:
- 1631.1940
Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art
November 13, 2011–May 14, 2012
Emiliano Zapata, a champion of agrarian reform and a key protagonist in the Mexican Revolution, here leads a band of peasant rebels armed with provisional weapons, including farming tools. With the bridle of a majestic white horse in his hand, Zapata stands triumphantly beside the dead body of a hacienda owner. Though Mexican and U.S. newspapers regularly vilified the revolutionary leader as a treacherous bandit, Rivera immortalized Zapata as a hero and glorified the victory of the Revolution in an image of violent but just vengeance.
Rivera's depiction also departs from portrayals of the rebel propagated by Zapata himself. An expert horseman, Zapata consistently presented himself as a charro, a cowboy whose flamboyant dress—tight pants and a vest with silver ornamentation—signaled an elevated class status in Mexico. Rivera’s vision of Zapata as a humble peasant offers a sympathetic portrait of a folk hero tirelessly devoted to agrarian reform.
Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art
, November 13, 2011-May 14, 2012Curator, Leah Dickerman: This panel pays homage to one of the greatest heroes of the recent Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata. Zapata was a revolutionary leader who led peasants fighting for agrarian reform in the factional battles of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution began in 1910. It started as an effort to overthrow the dictatorial president Porfirio Diaz, but it soon developed into this complex, multi-factional battle that lasted more than a decade and killed over a million Mexican citizens.
Our eye is drawn to the noble white steed. And it's easy not to notice immediately that there's a dead body at the feet of Zapata. He's standing on the blade of a fallen enemy. And I think that that helps one remember how violent these images are. They're really about a visceral struggle for who controls, who owns all of these murals are about the assertion of power over other individuals as a kind of allegory for broader social power relationships.
Despite Rivera's many assertions that he had revolutionary credentials, he didnt participate in the fighting at all. In fact, he spent almost all of the period of the Revolution in Europe, primarily working in Montparnasse, the artistic community in Paris.
David Rockefeller, Jr.: To make his murals, Rivera used traditional Italian fresco-making techniques but applied them in innovative new ways.
Conservator, Anny Aviram: Fresco comes from the Latin word fresh. Fresco is a process of building up layers of plaster onto the walls. In the case of the Rivera panels for the exhibition in 1931, he had his assistants apply the plaster layers the trusillatio, which is the scratch coat. And then the arriccio coat, which is called a brown coat. This is applied to the trusillatio and left a little bit rough so the top layer adheres easier.
David Rockefeller, Jr.: These first two layers of the fresco were prepared weeks ahead of time by Rivera's assistants. Meanwhile, Rivera created large-scale drawings of the murals.
Anny Aviram: To transfer the drawing to the arriccio layer you make little holes in the outline of the drawing with a little wheel and put it on the wet plaster. Along the perforated lines, with a cotton cloth bag containing black pigment, you will leave a fine dotted line as a guide for the artist to be able to draw on it. That's called pouncing. You can clearly see it in the knot of the shirt of Zapata. Then his assistants will apply the intonaco, which is the smoothest layer of all, the one thats going to receive the paint. So then, Rivera comes and starts underlining over the dotted lines. Then he starts painting, with a speed.
David Rockefeller, Jr.: Because plaster dries quickly, Rivera worked on the mural in sections. Each one is called a giornata, an Italian word that refers to a day's work.
Anny Aviram: In the case of Agrarian Leader Zapata, we have identified three visible giornatas. One that runs across Zapatas shoulder and around the top of the horse, the second one runs down the center of the fresco, including Zapata's body, and the third one includes the life-size white horse.
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. 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."
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 173
In the 1920s, after the end of the Mexican Revolution, Rivera was among the painters who developed an art of public murals to celebrate Mexico's indigenous culture, and to teach the nation's people about both their own history and the new government's dreams for their future. Rivera had lived in Paris, and knew modernist painting well. He had also visited Italy to study Renaissance frescoes, since Mexican artists and politicians recognized the value of this mural form as a medium of education and inspiration. Returning to Mexico in 1921, Rivera began a remarkable series of frescoes—paintings made on moist plaster, so that the pigments fuse with the plaster as it dries.
Agrarian Leader Zapata, which Rivera created for his exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1931, replicates part of a fresco he had painted in 1930 in the Palace of Cortés, Cuernavaca. Emiliano Zapata had been a hero of the Mexican Revolution. (He was killed in 1919, a victim of the Revolution's internal struggles.) Rivera shows him wearing the local costume of the Cuernavaca region, and carrying a sugarcane-cutter's machete. His followers, too, bear the rough tools of peasant soldiers. Yet the rider sent to oppose this ragged army lies in the dirt, and Zapata has seized his horse—whose shape Rivera borrowed from a work by the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Paolo Uccello.
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