Rivera Biography: Party Comrades in Marriage

As Diego was becoming a famous international artist, his social and political life was every bit as colorful as his professional one.

Diego Rivera was a Marxist idealist, like many young intellectuals of the early 20th Century, so it was natural that he should choose friends who shared his beliefs. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 had transitioned Marxism into Communism so Diego formally joined the Mexican Communist Party at the end of 1922. His first wife whom he married in 1923 was also a Communist who was introduced to him by another young Communist female friend of his.

Guadalupe Marin, nicknamed Lupe, shared more with Diego than just his political beliefs. She was an exotic beauty possessed with wild emotions. Unfortunately her violent jealousy of Diego was even more than his passionate nature could eventually bear. On more than one occasion, she tore up his drawings in a fit of rage when Diego paid the slightest attention to other women. In the beginning, there is no doubt, that Diego provoked Lupe for his own amusement. Even jealous of his love for Pre-Columbian sculpture, in a moment of high drama, she ground up a prized statue and fed it to him in his soup. As time wore on, however, he grew tired of it and later said, "Lupe was a beautiful, spirited animal, but her jealousy and possessiveness gave our life together a wearying, hectic intensity."

They had two daughters Lupe, born in 1924 and Ruth, born in 1926.

Throughout the 1920's, their house became the meeting place for all the young and rebellious liberals of Mexico City. They spent long nights planning the importation of the Marxist-Leninist ideology into Mexico. These young intellectuals, many who had fought in the war, felt the Mexican Revolution did not have the ideology it so desperately needed to create a nation of equality and justice for all. They, like many young intellectual Communists in the United States, trusted the propaganda being broadcast to the world from the Soviet Union. They actually believed writers and artists were living and working in a thriving socialistic utopia. Because he was older and had knowledge of Russian, he was elected to the Communist Executive Committee. In reality, he never had time to contribute to the cause other than as a figurehead at parades, the part he best like to play. His art was always his only master.

The third reward to follow after fame and money for a man like Diego Rivera was beautiful women. He was commissioned to paint a nude mural in Chapingo for which he used not only Lupe as a model but also Tina Modotti, an elegant Italian woman with a modern day's attitude toward sexual promiscuity. Diego had never painted his female portraitures nude before but after Chapingo his portrayal of women, even if fully clothed, would forever be voluptuous. When Lupe saw herself painted in the mural at nine months pregnant and saw Tina painted as a sultry beauty, she knew she had been betrayed, both personally and artistically. As Lupe railed at Diego, he was scheming on how to get away.

Next: Revolutionary Celebration in Soviet Union