Diego Rivera

(1886 - 1957)

Born in Guanajuato, the artist Diego Rivera began painting murals, which usually depicted Mexican history and culture as well as his political hopes for laborers in his country and across the globe, in the early 1920s. In 1933 he was commissioned to paint a fresco for the 30 Rockefeller Plaza lobby in Manhattan; it was destroyed by Nelson Rockefeller when Rivera refused to remove an image of Lenin from the work. E.B. White wrote a poem about the incident that ends by ventriloquizing Rockefeller: “But I know what I like to a large degree, / Though art I hate to hamper; / For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks / You painted a radical. I say shucks, / I never could rent the offices— / The capitalistic offices.”