The Rivals - Diego Rivera Painting

Those monumental works, however, represent only the tip of an artistic iceberg—though the chilly metaphor seems somewhat ill-placed. For reasons that relate to geographic proximity, but also to a shared political and economic history, Mexican art was everywhere in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, and not just works by the three most famous muralists, Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, and Miguel Covarrubias are among many who lived and worked there in the same period. Museum exhibitions of Mexico’s ancient, colonial, and modern art crossed the country; hundreds of books and articles were published, intended for scholarly and popular audiences alike; leading commercial art dealers—from Alfred Stendahl in Los Angeles to Erhard Weyhe and Pierre Matisse in New York—presented Mexican work in their galleries; and collectors—not just wealthy patrons like Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Stephen C. Clark, but songwriter Cole Porter, actors Edward G. Robinson and Paulette Goddard, and photographer Carl Van Vechten—snapped up key paintings, sometimes from the easel before they were even dry.

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the Mexican mural movement in Mexican art.