Diego Rivera’s ‘Flower Day’ Celebrates the Struggle of Post-Revolutionary Mexico—Here Are Three Things You Might Not Know About It

Mexican artist Diego Rivera casts a
long shadow on the history of 20th-century art, capturing the
energy of post-revolutionary Mexico with a style that improbably
fused four influences: Aztec culture, Cubism, Renaissance frescos,
and socialist realism. 

Among his many stylized pictures of
working people, flower vendors are among his most famous subjects.
Flower Day (Día de
Flores) from 1925 was his first-ever depiction of a
theme that reappeared often in his work throughout the 1930s and
‘40s.

At first glance, Flower
Day reads as a quaint depiction of Mexican street life: an
Indigenous woman with a basket of calla lilies strapped to her back
stands at the center of the canvas, eyes downcast; two women kneel
before her. Yet this famous image has many interesting
layers.

Here are three facts about Diego
Rivera’s Flower Day that might change the way see
it.

1) Rivera’s Artwork Would
Change How People Thought of Art as
Work 

Flower Day holds an important place in Rivera’s rise to
international art stardom: it was the first major painting by the
artist to enter a public collection in the United States. It was,
in effect, his calling card north of the border.

The work was acquired by the Los Angeles Museum of History,
Science, and Art (the parent institution of LACMA) after winning
first prize in the museum’s influential First Pan-American
Exhibition of Oil Paintings in 1925. “It turned out to be an
important event for the art world of Los Angeles,” remarks the
museum, “and also for the museum’s collection.”

From this launchpad, Rivera attained incredible influence.
During a series of trips to the US between 1930 and 1940, he would
complete large-scale frescos in Detroit, New York, and San
Francisco (SFMOMA is planning a sprawling
winter 2021 exhibition devoted to Rivera that will include his
famed Pan American Unity mural). He was treated as a
celebrity, feted by the powerful, and courted as a spokesperson for
radical causes. He was the second-ever artist to have a show
at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Some left-wing critics would knock Rivera’s flower vendor
paintings as trading in sentimental folkloric stereotypes of
Mexico. But, on the strength of his success, he would help inspire
a movement towards public art in the Depression-era United States
during the New Deal.

There’s a straight line between Flower Day‘s
celebration of the labor behind an aesthetic object—flowers—and the
new status of art in the United States, where it had previously
been considered pretty dandified. Rivera helped give art a new
symbolism, both as connected to working people and as a form of
dignified work itself, epitomized by his 1931 mural at the San
Francisco Art Institute, The Making of a Fresco Showing the
Building of a City.

2) He Was a Real
Renaissance Man

During his years traveling and studying in Europe during the
Mexican Revolution, Rivera immersed himself in Modern art circles.
For a time, he even adopted a Cubist style. But it was the majesty
and scope of Renaissance murals seized his imagination, inspiring
him as one of the “Tres Grandes” of Mexican Muralism.

A staunch atheist who once called religion “collective
neurosis,” Rivera was not interested in the religious content of
Renaissance art, but in how it conveyed didactic narratives to the
masses. Even in the smaller, traditionally scaled Flower
Day, we see Rivera quietly reworking religious tableaux
to elevate the everyday person.

Compositionally, Flower Day has similarities to
Renaissance altarpieces. Compare it to the central panel of this
crucifixion by a Renaissance artist Rivera adored, Paolo
Uccello.

The figures flanking the central flower seller in Rivera’s work
clearly echo the figures flanking the suffering Christ—which makes
you see that the strap at the center of Flower Day
clearly mirrors a cross, conveying a message about the nobility of
the suffering worker.

Perhaps in the repeating pattern of blossoms around the woman’s
head there is even an echo of the repeating gold-haloed heads
arrayed around a central figure in an early Renaissance altarpiece
like Duccio’s Maestà Altarpiece.

Rivera employed these religious allusions in other depictions of
flower sellers. In the equally famous Flower Carrier
(1935), a man struggles to get on his feet under the weight of an
enormous basket of flowers strapped to his back.

Compare it to the classic iconography of Christ Carrying
the Cross.

3) It May Celebrate the Salt
of the Earth—But Those Lilies Are a Modern
Motif 

Though Flower Day‘s calla lily symbolism has been
interpreted as celebrating indigenous labor and customs following
the Mexican Revolution, it’s worth noting that the calla lily is
not an indigenous Mexican plant—it comes from Southern
Africa. Its introduction is a product of colonization.

With its elegant petals and prominent stamen, the calla lily
became the quintessential Art Deco and modernist flower. “In the
early 20th century, the calla lily enjoyed a heightened popularity,
particularly in the 1920s and ’30s, as dozens of painters and
photographers of varying reputations and approaches to image-making
made it the subject of their work,” reports one book on Georgia
O’Keeffe (an artist who would later encourage
Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo).

Innumerable famous images of the flower from the era emerged
from the likes of O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley,
Edward Steichen,
Imogen Cunningham, and
Tina Modotti, almost
always focused on its stylish form or its sexual symbolism.

Rivera himself used the flowers that way in 1943’s Portrait
of Natasha Zakólkowa Gelman.

As for Rivera’s 1925 flower vendor, you might think of it as not
just a commentary on the conditions of the Mexican masses, but as
an international dialogue with his Modernist contemporaries, given
their use of the theme: what looked like the height of desirability
and luxury, it says, was built on the backs of others.

The post Diego Rivera’s ‘Flower Day’ Celebrates the Struggle
of Post-Revolutionary Mexico—Here Are Three Things You Might Not
Know About It appeared first on artnet News.