Exactly a year ago, Diego Rivera’s monumental fresco “Pan American Unity” arrived at SFMOMA with the kind of celebratory reception that governments usually reserve for visiting monarchs.
Through more than 150 works of art, “Diego Rivera’s America” narrates Rivera’s evolution as an artist, when he had to navigate the tension between what he felt inside and what he displayed on canvases that still resonate with signs of struggle.
“Collectors didn’t necessarily want an image of workers being abused or the Communist revolution, so in the first half of the show it seems Rivera isn’t interested in Communism — and he actually was,” Oles said in an interview at the exhibit preview. While “Diego Rivera’s America” heralds Rivera as a ground-breaking artist who put human rights at the forefront of his work, the exhibit is critical of Rivera’s 1920s paintings of semi-nude women bathers from Tehuantepec, saying that Rivera resorted to an “eroticization” that was similar to Paul Gauguin’s portraits of Tahitian girls and women from the late 1800s and early 1900s. So Rivera had artistic blind spots.