Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Latin American Art, Part I, November 21, 1995, lot 23, illustrated in color

Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts; Mexico City, Museo de Arte Moderno, INBA, February 14, 1999-March 19, 2000, Diego Rivera: Art & Revolution, p. 311, illustrated in color, no. 120, p. 375, illustrated in color, p. 413

Hans F. Secker, Diego Rivera, Dresden, Verlag Der Kunst, 1957, p. 266, no. 238, illustrated
Diego Rivera: Catálogo General de Obra de Caballete, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico, 1989, no. 2084, p. 271, illustrated

Diego Rivera created this painting in his studio on the corner of Altavista and Palmas, in the San Angel neighborhood of Mexico City.  The studio was built by the painter and architect Juan O’Gorman in 1931, along with the Frida Kahlo house, where Diego’s daughter Guadalupe Rivera Marin lived in 1954… In contrast to similar compositions (cultivated by Rivera in 1921), this work, painted with virtuosistic chromatism at the age of 67, accumulated several elements that take on a biographic or symbolic value.

- Raquel Tibol, 1995 

In Maternidad painted in 1954 near the end of the artist’s life, a small child cradles a ball imprinted with the continental formations of the globe while other children nearby amuse themselves with toys and a small bird.  The sentimental image is energized by the artist’s own personal history: the child who holds the world in his hands is Rivera’s grandson and namesake.  The toys scattered throughout the room are the native handicrafts of Rivera’s home state in central Mexico.  Mexican art historian Raquel Tibol has pointed out that, “Their placement in the painting within the small grandson’s world represented a way of evoking his own childhood in the mountainous city of Guanajuato.  The globe of the earth held between the boy’s arms and the white dove picking at the seeds of grain offered by his female companions constitute a clear reference to the yearnings for peace expressed by Rivera at that time.” The child is at once the artist and his heir in a circle of continuity like the globe of a world yearning for peace.

The painting also invokes the spirit of Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, who died in 1954 after prolonged suffering and illness. Christina Burrus notes,  “Discovering perhaps at the end of her life the full sense of her German first name – Friede means peace—she committed herself to working for peace.” As always, she poured out her personal experiences on the canvas.  Kahlo’s paintings from this period frequently ring with calls for peace and social justice.  In particular, the dove of peace appears again and again these last works.  It is featured most notably perhaps in Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick, in which a corseted Frida casts aside her crutches to stand upright and strong with only the aid of her political convictions.  Behind and above her hover the dove and the globe of the earth—the same icons Diego employed in Maternidad.