Have your parents ever scolded you for scribbling on the walls? You may be surprised to know that some artists are famous just for painting on walls. Art that is created directly on a wall is called a mural. Artists have been painting murals since ancient times.
In India, there are beautiful murals on the cave walls of Ajanta and Ellora, and in many temples and palaces all over the country. In Europe, artists such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci created beautiful murals that people still visit and admire. In modern times, Mexican artists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquireos, and Jose Clemente Orozco made murals popular again. Of the three, Diego Rivera is the most famous.
A protege
Diego was born in 1886 in a small town in Mexico. He started drawing on the walls of his house at the age of three. His father covered his bedroom walls with canvas and encouraged him to draw on them with chalk.
Diego went to art school in Mexico City. When he was older, he went to Paris. He was amazed by the work of French artist Cezanne and loved the Cubism of Pablo Picasso. He travelled to Spain, Holland, Great Britain and other parts of Europe and started to paint in the Cubist style. When he returned to Mexico, the government asked him to create murals on the outside walls of several public buildings.
Rivera loved painting murals because he believed art should be available to both poor and rich people, and enjoyed by everyone. His beautiful paintings made him famous and he was invited to paint murals in the United States. He painted in San Francisco, and New York. He also painted 27 murals for the Detroit Institute of the Arts.
Rivera’s murals were large with colourful pictures of the Mexican people, farmers, labourers, Mexican culture, and history. He used a method called “fresco painting”, which means he painted directly on wet plaster on the wall. Sometimes he mixed sand or sawdust with the paint to give the picture a rough feel.
Some of the murals upset people because Rivera painted what he believed. He was a supporter of Communism, which is a type of government where everything is shared equally. A Communist government owns and controls most property, farming, factories, and transportation. Many people were against Communism, especially in the United States. One of his murals had the words “God does not exist”, which upset so many people that it had to be removed. Another painting was destroyed because it included an image of Lenin, who was a Russian Communist leader.
Rivera didn’t care what other people thought and continued to paint about the subjects that he cared about. During his life, he married four times. One of his wives was the famous Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Diego Rivera died in 1957 at the age of seventy one. You can view a gallery of his murals and paintings on Wikipedia.
