How do you folks feel about the work of Diego Rivera?

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

Any fans?

Man his murals are INSANE!

I'm off in afew to the library to do some drawing (copying from the masters). I am structuring my week based on my classes in art school except sans teachers - very liberating:)
Anyway - today is Diego Rivera day!




(I might get a bit of reading in - Andre Breton's Nadja!)

[NWHarkness]

1. Loved Diego since I was a kid

Grew up wandering around the Rivera Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts, with my jaw hanging open...

[NWHarkness]

4. More DIA images here

http://www.dia.org/rivera/infoidx.htm

[Bluebear]

5. Wow did you bring back childhood memories for me!

I feeel like I am back on a field trip to DIA!

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

6. I'd KILL to see that stuff in person - maybe one day!

That's what I'm going to work on tonight!

[Lisa0825]

9. I DID see it in person! Really amazing works!!!

[NWHarkness]

10. Come visit sometime!

The DIA still has the original sketches stored away somewhere in the basement. They displayed them a few years ago- these gigantic rolls of paper, about classroom blackboard size, with Rivera's original designs, if I recall correctly, in charcoal. Maybe if you contacted them and said you were studying Rivera, you could get in to see them.

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

13. Now you're talking!

I will look into it!

Thanks!

[TlalocW]

2. Love his stuff

But one of my degrees is in Spanish so it's required. ;) Actually, I really do love his stuff.

I took my last Spanish class through a program from my college in Mexico and got to see a lot of his stuff close up. Of course, you walk into a KFC in Mexico City (which of course has colonial Spanish architecture on the outside), you run a good chance of running into a mural on the inside. :) So I saw a lot of Rivera's murals. There are always peddlers nearby that will sell you postcards of them with explanations for all the imagery in his works.

Interesting note: One of my Spanish professors met Rivera in the 50s when she was studying Spanish. She had gone to Mexico with an affluent friend who didn't bother to learn to conjugate her verbs ("You to go to the store. You to stay here."), but no one cared because she could make herself understood and was a party girl. Anyway, she signed up for an art class that Rivera was teaching and convinced my professor to do so as well telling her, "This guy's works will be seen as incredibly important when he dies." My professor had never heard of him and didn't know anything about art, but she went anyway but didn't paint. Rivera kept coming up to her offering to buy her art supplies if she wasn't able to afford them herself. :)

TlalocW

[SarahB]

3. His murals are so...so...so....

BIG!!!
But very good. :D

[kanrok]

7. Much, much better than Geraldo, IMHO

[iconoclastic cat]

8. I dig his art, but why did he have to go looking for Capone's vault?

He just embarrassed himself with that.



(/joke)

[MuseRider]

11. I saw

his murals in Mexico City. Amazing to be so close.

[NWHarkness]

12. And one of the greatest arguments for public art

[Zomby Woof]

14. brilliant

I got to visit his birthplace in Guanajuato, Mexico, when I studied there in the summer of '90.