Early in the Depression, Diego Rivera was commissioned by Edsel Ford to create a series of murals in the gallery of the Detroit Institute of Arts, giant frescos whose theme would be America's industrial might. This volume studies the astonishing results and gives us a remarkably close look at Diego and his wife, Frida Kahlo. Rivera's Detroit Industry murals are one of this country's greatest treasures. In addition to providing full coverage and analysis of the murals, this volume includes chapters on the murals' planning and antecedents, Rivera's working methods (which can be read as a primer on frescos), Diego and Frida's lives for their nine months in Detroit, and the public's dramatic response to the strong socialist/communist themes in the works.

A celebration of a renowned artist and political activist.

In a career that spanned sixty years, Diego Rivera produced some of the most distinctive and socially powerful works in modern art. Rivera was, in a real sense, a twentieth-century renaissance man. He was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, book illustrator, one of the first collectors of pre-Columbian art, and a political activist.

In both the United States and Mexico, Rivera's monumental frescos gave life to revolutionary themes, often offending critics as well as the public. In New York's Rockefeller Center, for instance, his murals were destroyed because of public outrage over their strongly pro-communist content. Throughout his mature works, on this continent and abroad, Rivera was a champion of the oppressed.

This volume celebrates the 100th anniversary of the artist's birth. Its 200 color plates and 325 black-and-white photographs illustrate Rivera's life and work from his early years at the Mexican Academy of San Carlos and studies in Spain, his subsequent eleven-year sojourn in Paris and brief involvement with Cubism in the first part of this century, to his efforts to establish a truly Mexican style in the murals for which he is most famous. Accompanying Rivera's work are essays by noted scholars reevaluating his place in the history of modern art.

This book was originally published to coincide with the first major North American retrospective ever mounted of the artist, at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, where Rivera's finest works in the United States—the Detroit Industry Frescos-—emain as vivid today as when they were completed fifty years ago.