Two paintings by Diego Rivera, including his 1915 Cubist masterpiece, have joined “Picasso & Rivera: Conversations Across Time,” an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that opened in December. Four feet tall, the canvas creates an inescapable bodily correspondence between the revolutionary Cubist figure being depicted and its observant viewer. Agrarian reform was a crucial aim of the Mexican Revolution that was unfolding while Rivera was abroad. Nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting sought to fuse national identity with the land, just like similar imagery in other North American and European art. Rivera’s Cubist masterpiece, painted when he was just 29, brilliantly fuses the land, revolution and the peasantry — with Zapata as its modern emblem.

Source: Los Angeles Times February 07, 2017 17:17 UTC