DIEGO RIVERA (1886 1957) Retrato de una mujer

Sale 2696 - Lot 70

Price Realized: $ 15,000

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000

DIEGO RIVERA (1886 - 1957)
Retrato de una mujer.

Charcoal and pastel on blue-gray Ingres paper, 1921. 477x310 mm; 18¾x12¼ inches. Signed and dated in pencil, lower right.

Provenance
Malcolm Bradley, Richmond, Virginia.
Collection of Bradley W. Giles, Cathedral City, California.

Note
We wish to thank Professor Luis–Martín Lozano for his kind assistance in the research and cataloguing of this work by Diego Rivera.

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Additional Details

Diego Rivera had left for Europe in 1907 and returned briefly to Mexico in 1910, only to return the following year to Paris. He stayed in France until 1921, returning to Mexico from the Port of Saint Nazaire in Nantes -never to return again- in June of that same year. He arrived in Mexico City by August of 1921, invited by the Dean of the University, José Vasconcelos, to participate in the cultural and artistic movement that was taking place in the post-revolution era under President Álvaro Obregón. By October, Vasconcelos was appointed to be the Secretary of the new Ministry of Public Education, where he expanded his projects and programs. Rivera began working as an illustrator for the University Department of Fine Arts before moving on to work with Vasconcelos at the Ministry of Education. By November of 1921, Rivera was working on his first sketches for his mural, La Creación, with which he began his career as a muralist.

There are very few examples, like the present drawing, of Rivera's work in Mexico from 1921. Aside from the illustrations he planned for the Ministry of Education and the University, only portraits have survived of his early Mexican period, including of his fellow artists David Alfaro Siqueiros and Xavier Guerrero. These portraits combine strong Mexican influences and echoes of artistic references from European artists, such as Cézanne, Modigliani, and antique Roman frescoes from Pompeii.

It is in the Portrait of Miss Palma Guillén, in the collection of the Frida Kahlo Museum, where Rivera begins to embrace his new Mexican identity. Palma Guillen Sánchez (later Nicolau) was a prominent teacher and educational scholar who in early 1918 was one of a few women to earn a university degree. She met Rivera when she was invited by José Vasconcelos to join him at the Ministry of Education. In this half-length portrait, Rivera portrays her as a young, finely dressed woman with a modern bob, but wearing an indigenous Mexican beaded necklace.

In the present Portrait of a Woman of the same year, the subject is also dressed in a modern fashion, but wears a Mexican rebozo (shawl) and long coral earrings. Both of these portraits of women serve as examples of how Rivera carefully moved away from European and Western trends, into the cultural reality of Mexico and its people. This drawing was executed on blue gray Ingres paper which Rivera brought with him from France and that appears in many of his early sketches for murals in the 1920's such as La Creación; and the signature is consistent with other contemporaneous early drawings by Rivera. Because of its very early execution, there are no sale records that could state how or to whom it was sold, though it was most likely made for the unidentified portrait sitter.