DIEGO RIVERA

Details
DIEGO RIVERA

Niña en Azul y Blanco

signed and dated 1939 lower right--oil on canvas
50 x 36in. (127 x 91.5cm.)

Painted in 1939
Provenance
Max Epstein Collection, Chicago by descent to the present owner
Literature
A. Souza, Los Niños Mexicanos pintados por Diego Rivera, Artes de Mexico, Universidad Nacional de Mexico, 1959, no. 13 (illustrated)
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Departamento de Artes Plásticas, Diego Rivera 50 Años de Su Labor Artística, Exposición de Homenaje Nacional, No. 776 (illustrated but not exhibited)
Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Catálogo General de Obra de Caballete, p. 198 , No. 1509 (illustrated)

Lot Essay

Among the many subjects which engaged Diego Rivera's passionate and brilliant talent, none is perhaps a more touching and profound expression of his love for Mexico than his children's potraits. They range from infants at their mother's breast to little boys and girls, children of servants and of his friends', proudly showing their toys and wearing the colorful dress of Mexico.

In his essay Children of Mexico as painted by Diego Rivera Antonio Souza remarks: "Also, in 1939, we see a tiny marketwife, her shawl draped over a great basket in which a fringed kerchief hides the contents; and in her left hand holds a knotted bundle, perhaps of tortillas, or perhaps of nopal leaves.

They are all looking, the little Mexican children, at the large and paunchy painter who is drawing them, at Diego who has given them candy or is telling them a story, who does not want them to get tired, and who sees the little Mexican child open his deer's eyes wide in astonishment at the thousand colors of the studio, listens to the quiet within and to the movements of the brush which he, better than anyone else, could use to sing of our native flowers." (Souza, op. cit., p.8)