Rivera Biography: Child Artist

Many diverse and opposing "facts" have been written about this artist, including major historical discrepancies scripted in his own autobiographical writings. There are more myths about him thought to be true than the truth itself, and Diego, the spellbinding storyteller, was behind most of this spun life.

Diego Rivera was not your ordinary human mortal in terms of physical size, imagination, creativity and, most of all talent. He was determined to create his own legend so people would be sure to know just how great he intended to live, think and paint. What did he probably consider to be his three most important assets?

Large, Large, and Large.

He lived large, he dreamed large and he painted large!

The first glimpse we see of Diego’s mythmaking enhancements on his life story begins with the subject of his birth name. He and his twin brother, Jose Carlos Maria Barrientos Rivera, were born on December 8, 1886. His parents gave him the birth name of Jose Diego Rivera but he always insisted that his full name at birth was Diego Maria de la Concepcion Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barriento Acosta y Rodriguez. His twin died eighteen months later. It would seem we have the beginning of a legend in the making.

Diego was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, an old silver mining town founded in 1559. The town is built on the slopes of the Sierra Madre and the P’urhepecha translation of the town’s name is “hill of frogs.” Perhaps that is why the frog became a personalized signature in several of Diego’s paintings of himself as a boy, such as the one seen climbing out of his coat pocket in his last great masterpiece, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, Museo Mural Diego Rivera, Mexico City.

Diego started to draw at the age of three, as he has said about himself, "Just as soon as I could get my short little fat fingers around a pencil, I was drawing on everything. So I wouldn't destroy the entire house, my father hung canvas over the walls and floor in my room and I just never stopped drawing." He started to read at four and had an endless curiosity about the inner workings of every gadget he could get his hands on, forever taking them apart and putting them back together again.

His father, Diego Rivera, was a criollo, a person born in Mexico but descended from European ancestry. His family was one of the wealthy early 18th Century aristocrats of Guanajuato but by the time Diego was born, the silver had played out and they lived a rather shabby, yet, genteel lifestyle. Nonetheless, his father had a decent library, was a schoolteacher at the time of Diego's birth and would later become employed in governmental administration positions in Mexico City.

Senior was a political liberal and secular Freemason. He was very aware and greatly concerned about the rural poverty that left eighty-five percent of all Mexicans illiterate. Diego spent a great deal of time with his father and these shared feelings were the source of Rivera's enormous compassion for the impoverished masses of Mexican Indians. Later in life, in all his Mexican art, he would portray them with dignity and grace. He honored them as descendants of the mighty Mayans and Aztecs.

His mother, Maria del Pilar Barrientos, was a mestizo, part European, and part Indian, a devout Catholic, such as ninety-five percent of the Mexicans at that time. Her family was considered respectable middle class. She was also one of the few mestizo women to be educated and went later to the state school of obstetrics and worked as a midwife. Diego claimed his family was dirt poor and his mother could neither read nor write. This was pure storytelling probably done to create an image of "a poor disadvantaged boy, heroically struggling, destined to conquer the world."

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