Diego Rivera is best known for his large dramatic murals, and perhaps for his marriage to Frida Kahlo. What’s less known is that from 1913 to 1917 he painted a series of cubist portraits. Twenty-three of these paintings, along with some sketches and illustrations, will be on display at the Meadows Museum in Dallas Texas, from June 21 through September 20, 2009.
From the museum’s announcement:
“This focused exhibition and study will explore Rivera’s artistic production during the formative years he spent in literary and art circles in Paris during World War I, providing a new perspective on this lesser known and crucial period of the Mexican artist’s career.”
“The exhibition was inspired by a key piece from the Meadows permanent collection, the Portrait of Ilya Ehrenburg (1915). Algur Meadows purchased this portrait of a Russian writer for the museum in 1968. It is one of the only paintings by a non-Spanish artist he bought for the museum, and it remains one of only a handful of Cubist portraits by Rivera in an American collection. The painting demonstrates Rivera’s attentiveness to Cubism, especially in its second, synthetic phase in which the use of flatly colored and clearly defined shapes and varied textures combine to emphasize the two-dimensional perception of the image.”
Learn more about the exhibit here.
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