Portrait of Marian Despres

Early in his career, Diego Rivera championed Cubism and other avant-garde ideas in Paris. After returning to Mexico from his European travels, however, he abandoned these formalist practices and developed instead a visual language of realism and socially conscious imagery. Driven by his commitment to Marxist ideology and extolling the virtues of working class people, Rivera sought to convey the dignity of farmers and factory laborers in much of his easel and mural painting. He drew from the artistic traditions of Mexico’s indigenous cultures, and a complex history and cosmology of native cultures before the 16th-century Spanish conquest of Mexico, treating his subjects—often peasants and scenes from daily life—with the solemnity and plasticity of ancient, mythic peoples and sources.

Though better known today for leading the modern Mexican mural movement, Diego Rivera frequently turned to easel painting and drawings during his long career. While many of Rivera’s drawings served as studies for his wall paintings, others were intended from the first as independent compositions. Such intimate works, including this richly finished portrait in pastel, reveal better than the large fresco paintings the artist’s consummate skills as a draftsman. The donors of this drawing—the longtime Hyde Park residents Marian Despres and her lawyer husband Leon—traveled in 1937 to Mexico City in order to deliver a suitcase of clothing to the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). Earlier that year, Trotsky had gone into exile from Communist Russia because of his extremist views on socialist revolution and was granted asylum in Mexico. It was during this trip when Mr. and Mrs. Despres met Trotsky’s acclaimed friends—the activist artist Rivera and his wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), in whose combined home and studio Trotsky was temporarily residing. Perhaps drawn to Mrs. Despres’s dedication to social causes and doubtless attracted to her sculptural features, Rivera invited her to sit for this portrait.