Title: Diego Rivera – MMoCA
Headings: El sueño (La noche de los pobres)/Sleep (The night of the poor)
The Art
El sueño (La noche de los pobres)/Sleep (The night of the poor)
The Artist
Key Ideas
Discussion Questions

Content: He absorbed a variety of influences from old masters to then-contemporary trends in Cubism and Post-Impressionism. During this period, he formed relationships with key figures in avant-garde and modernist circles. Beginning in 1910, Mexico experienced a violent revolution and civil war that sought to achieve social and racial equality for the landless indigenous working class. In 1920, José Vasconcelos, the newly-appointed Mexican Minister of Education, presented Rivera with a grant to fund a seventeen-month stay in Italy where he studied Etruscan, Byzantine, and Renaissance art. His exposure to Italian frescoes would prove to be influential to his later contribution to Mexico’s own mural tradition. In 1921, Rivera returned to Mexico for the first time since his departure in 1907. The post-revolutionary Mexican government was enacting a series of reforms to promote and solidify its nationalist and socialist ideals, and Vasconcelos recognized the power of murals for this purpose. He developed a government-sponsored public art program that commissioned artists to paint murals in government buildings throughout Mexico. Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco were among the most prominent of these artists and, together, became known as Los tres grandes (The Three Great Ones) for their contributions to Mexican art during this period. The public mural program promoted what was known as Mexican Modernism;