Mexican Social Realist Muralist, 1886-1957,Mexican muralist. After study in Mexico City and Spain, he settled in Paris from 1909 to 1919. He briefly espoused Cubism but abandoned it c. 1917 for a visual language of simplified forms and bold areas of colour. He returned to Mexico in 1921, seeking to create a new national art on revolutionary themes in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. He painted many public murals, the most ambitious of which is in the National Palace (1929 ?C 57). From 1930 to 1934 he worked in the U.S. His mural for New York's Rockefeller Center aroused a storm of controversy and was ultimately destroyed because it contained the figure of Vladimir Ilich Lenin; he later reproduced it at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. With Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rivera created a revival of fresco painting that became Mexico's most significant contribution to 20th-century art. His large-scale didactic murals contain scenes of Mexican history, culture, and industry, with Indians, peasants, conquistadores, and factory workers drawn as simplified figures in crowded, shallow spaces. Rivera was twice married to Frida Kahlo.   Related Paintings of Diego Rivera :. | Mathematician | Portrait of Lucy | the flower seller | Landscape of Spanish | Worker |
Related Artists:
J.P. Lemke

LEDESMA, Blas de
Spanish painter documented 1602-1614 in Granada,Spanish painter. He is known to have worked in Granada from 1602, and in 1614 he designed a stucco vault decoration for the Alhambra. Archival sources testify to his renown as a painter of decorative fresco grotesques (untraced) and still-lifes. His activity as a still-life painter remains debatable, partly because he has been confused with Blas de Prado and also because of Torres Marten's controversial attributions. Ledesma's only unanimously accepted autograph painting is Still-life with Cherries and Flowers (Atlanta, GA, High Mus. A.), signed in Granada. A highly decorative painting, it shows none of the sophistication of still-lifes by Juan Senchez Cot?n, in Granada from 1603. It is painted meticulously and drily. Depicting a severely drawn, rather flat basket on a narrow ledge flanked by flowers behind it, the rigorously symmetrical composition is relieved only by soft lighting and the studied disarray of some fallen cherries. Two other unsigned and poorly preserved still-lifes of analogous subject-matter have been attributed to Ledesma
GUERCINO
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1591-1666 best known as Guercino or Il Guercino, was an Italian Baroque painter from the region of Emilia, and active in Rome and Bologna. Guercino is Italian for squinter, a nickname that was given to him because he was cross-eyed. He is especially noted for his many superb drawings. Guercino was born at Cento, a village between Bologna and Ferrara. By the age of 17 he was associated with Benedetto Gennari, a painter of the Bolognese School. By 1615 he moved to Bologna, where his work earned the praise of an elder Ludovico Carracci. He painted two large canvases, Elijah Fed by Ravens and Samson Seized by Philistines, in what appears to be a stark naturalist Caravaggesque style (although it is unlikely he had been able to see any of the Roman Caravaggios first-hand). They were painted for Cardinal Serra, Papal Legate to Ferrara. The Arcadian Shepherds (Et in Arcadia ego) was painted in 1618 contemporary with The Flaying of Marsyas by Apollo in Palazzo Pitti. His first style, he often claimed, was influenced by a canvas of Carracci in Cento. Some of his later pieces approach rather to the manner of his great contemporary Guido Reni, and are painted with more lightness and clearness. Guercino was esteemed very highly in his lifetime. He was then recommended by Marchese Enzo Bentivoglio to the Bolognese Ludovisi Pope, Pope Gregory XV. His two years (1621-23) spent in Rome were very productive. From this stay date his frescoes of Aurora at the casino of the Villa Ludovisi and the ceiling in San Crisogono (1622) of San Chrysogonus in Glory; his portrait of Pope Gregory (now in the Getty Museum, and, what is considered his masterpiece, The Burial of Saint Petronilla or St. Petronilla Altarpiece, for the Vatican (now in the Museo Capitolini). The Franciscan order of Reggio in 1655 paid him 300 ducats for the altarpiece of Saint Luke Displaying a Painting of the Madonna and Child (now in Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City). The Corsini also paid him 300 ducats for the Flagellation of Christ painted in 1657.