Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

Galería Mexicana Emma Hurtado, Mexico City
A Private New York Collection
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Latin American Art, November 16, 2004, lot 30, illustrated in color

Painted at the end of Diego Rivera's life in 1956, Pescadores de Acapulco attests to the compelling beauty of late painting styles by great artists. Like Titian, Michelangelo, Goya, Matisse and Turner before him, Rivera found, at the end of his life, the possibility of an art filled with immense serenity. Washed away were the decades spent at the forefront of Mexican Muralism, the political turmoils, the intrigues, the women, the critics, the countless commissions. 

It was a different beginning for Rivera in 1955. After the loss of his beloved Frida and a fatal diagnosis, he maintained the fighting spirit of a legend, travelling to Russia seeking treatment for his condition and marrying his last wife, Emma Hurtado on July 29, 1955. On Rivera's return to Mexico, Dolores Olmedo, a good friend, placed her house in Acapulco on the Pacific coast at his disposal, and here he spent the next few months in recuperation. "Besides some mosaic decoration in stone with Pre-Columbian themes for his hostess's house, he painted a large number of sunsets and small-sized oils in extraordinary colors, views from the terrace onto Acapulco Bay." 

The present painting belongs to this extraordinary group of works rarely published and until recently hardly discussed by scholars. Whimsical and dynamic, they embody a lightness of being—a true testament to a life well lived. 

Andrea Kettenmann, Diego Rivera 1886-1957, A Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Art, Cologne, 1997, p. 89