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拍品专文
It is seldom discussed how the great Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera (1886–1957), was an accomplished landscape painter at the onset of his artistic career. He received an excellent formal training at the former Academia de San Carlos, and studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes under the guidance of the distinguished master José María Velasco, alongside the accomplished landscapists Félix Parra and the more progressive Germán Gedovius, trained at the Royal Academy of Munich, who introduced the young artist to the symbolic possibilities of the Mexican landscape.
Diego Rivera was the favored pupil of his formative school, earning numerous awards, scholarships, and honorary diplomas, which enabled him to continue his studies in Europe. He began in Spain, in the studio of master Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera, a celebrated painter of the Belle Époque establishment and a great admirer of Joaquín Sorolla. Although Rivera had already shown signs of an emerging modernity in Mexico through his engagement with Impressionism, in Madrid he returned to a more realist mode of painting, executed with greater technical assurance and centered on the regionalist subjects then in vogue in Spain. Rivera soon became Chicharro’s most promising student, and showcased the progress of his painting at the first exhibition of his disciples in November 1907. There, the Mexican artist revealed his command of landscape painting, his mastery of Symbolist atmospheres, and the artistic advances he had achieved that summer alongside his teacher on the Cantabrian coast of the Gulf of Vizcaya, in the Basque region of Spain. In its review of this early exhibition, the press noted that he exhibited: “a street in a village of Vizcaya, a stretch of the rugged Cantabrian coast, Oars at Rest in a small fishing port, and two half-length figures of fishermen.”
Through Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera’s friendship with Ricardo de Madrazo, Diego Rivera spent the summer of 1907 in Lekeitio, where he painted the landscape Cuando los remos descansan, a work well-documented by experts, yet unseen for nearly a century, over eighty years, since it was acquired by an American collector from New Orleans in the late 1930s. It is an exceptional work, praised by the Spanish press when it was first shown in Madrid, which most likely motivated Rivera to include it in the selection of paintings from his European tour when he had his first solo exhibition in Mexico in November 1910, during the Centennial celebrations of Independence. The oil painting reveals the degree of pictorial sophistication that Diego Rivera had absorbed from the finest currents of early twentieth-century Spanish modernism, with its affinity for romantic regionalist subjects, views of villages and provincial life untouched by modernity, suspended in a kind of timeless refuge. Rivera masterfully accentuates this effect through the reflections of the seaside houses mirrored upon the still waters of the Gulf of Vizcaya, where their idyllic stillness is quietly reflected across the calm surface of the sea.
Professor Luis-Martín Lozano, Art Historian
Diego Rivera was the favored pupil of his formative school, earning numerous awards, scholarships, and honorary diplomas, which enabled him to continue his studies in Europe. He began in Spain, in the studio of master Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera, a celebrated painter of the Belle Époque establishment and a great admirer of Joaquín Sorolla. Although Rivera had already shown signs of an emerging modernity in Mexico through his engagement with Impressionism, in Madrid he returned to a more realist mode of painting, executed with greater technical assurance and centered on the regionalist subjects then in vogue in Spain. Rivera soon became Chicharro’s most promising student, and showcased the progress of his painting at the first exhibition of his disciples in November 1907. There, the Mexican artist revealed his command of landscape painting, his mastery of Symbolist atmospheres, and the artistic advances he had achieved that summer alongside his teacher on the Cantabrian coast of the Gulf of Vizcaya, in the Basque region of Spain. In its review of this early exhibition, the press noted that he exhibited: “a street in a village of Vizcaya, a stretch of the rugged Cantabrian coast, Oars at Rest in a small fishing port, and two half-length figures of fishermen.”
Through Eduardo Chicharro y Agüera’s friendship with Ricardo de Madrazo, Diego Rivera spent the summer of 1907 in Lekeitio, where he painted the landscape Cuando los remos descansan, a work well-documented by experts, yet unseen for nearly a century, over eighty years, since it was acquired by an American collector from New Orleans in the late 1930s. It is an exceptional work, praised by the Spanish press when it was first shown in Madrid, which most likely motivated Rivera to include it in the selection of paintings from his European tour when he had his first solo exhibition in Mexico in November 1910, during the Centennial celebrations of Independence. The oil painting reveals the degree of pictorial sophistication that Diego Rivera had absorbed from the finest currents of early twentieth-century Spanish modernism, with its affinity for romantic regionalist subjects, views of villages and provincial life untouched by modernity, suspended in a kind of timeless refuge. Rivera masterfully accentuates this effect through the reflections of the seaside houses mirrored upon the still waters of the Gulf of Vizcaya, where their idyllic stillness is quietly reflected across the calm surface of the sea.
Professor Luis-Martín Lozano, Art Historian