Unfinished Composition of a Seated Woman

Early in his career, Diego Rivera was closely involved with Cubism and other avant-garde art circles in Paris. After returning to Mexico, he abandoned these formalist practices and developed instead a realist idiom and a socially concerned iconography driven by his commitment to Marxist ideology.

In much of his easel and mural painting, he sought to convey the dignity of working class people. Drawing on the artistic traditions of Mexico’s indigenous cultures and the complex history and cosmology of native cultures before the sixteenth-century Spanish Conquest of Mexico, he treated his subjects—often peasants and scenes from daily life—with the solemnity and plasticity of ancient, mythic subjects.