?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
DIEGO RIVERA Excavando Piedra.
Brush and India ink on handmade paper, 1941. 280x396 mm; 11x15⅝ inches. Signed and dated in ink, upper left recto.
Provenance: Artist's studio, Mexico City; Central de Publicaciones, Mexico City; Gimbel Brothers, New York, 1942; private collection, Pennsylvania.
We wish to thank Professor Luis–Martín Lozano, Mexico City, for his kind assistance in the research and cataloguing of this work by Diego Rivera.
Rivera (1886-1957) had immense respect for tradesmen and laborers, even moving to include them in his Sindicato Revolucionario de Oberas Técnicos y Plásticos (later the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters, Sculptors, and Allied Trades), which he formed with other artists in the early 1920s. In the credo for the organization, the group proclaimed that the artist profession is not above trade labor ("did they not all work with their hands?"), and that all members of the "workers' world" should be united by art, recalling the age of the guild system. This unity with the proletariat was brought on by the political environment and the nascent modern industry in Mexico, but also may have come about from the labor-intensive process of fresco painting. This medium forced the painter to work alongside plasterers and other laborers with the shared goal of bringing art to the masses.
The current ink drawing recalls Gustave Courbet's (1819-1877) large oil painting Les Casseurs de pierres, or The Stone Breakers which was exhibited at the 1850 Paris Salon with much public criticism and disdain. This debut of a realistic portrait of everyday hard labor was generally deemed unsuitable for "high art," but by the time Excavando piedra was created, Courbet's work was undisputedly considered one of the great masterpieces of the previous century and signaled a turning point in art and in the broader zeitgeist. Though Les Casseurs de pierres was destroyed during World War II, Courbet's second, smaller version of the work survives in the collection of the Oskar Reinhart Foundation, Winterthur, Switzerland.
