Portrait of a Young Artist: Rivera’s Paris Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock

Robert Delauney, Eiffel Tower, c 1909, oil on canvas, 38 x 27 3_4 (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

By SHANA NYS DAMBROT April 9, 2025

A smashing exhibition at the stately and thoughtfully modernized AMFA takes a compelling curatorial approach to art history and the lives of artists, examining the origin story of one of 20th century art’s most iconic figures in a rich assembly with depth, scope, and flair. The exhibition’s tagline is “Before fame and Frida, there was Paris,” and on that premise, the museum not only pulls extensively from its own collection but builds around its pride and joy—the 1914 masterpiece Dos Mujeres by Diego Rivera—as its cornerstone, but builds out to evoke the fuller artistic milieu of Rivera’s 1907-21 Paris sojourn. Thus Dos Mujeres is not only available for expanded academic contextualization, but the fulsome development of Rivera’s sense of self as a maturing artist is revealed through the community of his early European influences. Across a series of his own experimentations with the Parisian avant-garde’s visual styles (and politics) of the day—some more successful than others, but all entirely fascinating and salient—Rivera dances through dalliances with cubism, futurism, pointillism, impressionism, orientalism, portraiture, romance, continental art history, and a gentler, pre-war view of populist and communist thinking.

Diego Rivera, Dos Mujeres, 1914, oil on canvas, 77 3_4 x 63 1_2 in (AMFA Collection)
 

This scholarly “prequel” infuses Rivera’s early career with a living sense of era, place, and the real-time evolution of his thoughts, lending a fascinating context to everything that came later. Most folks pick up his story after he returned to Mexico from France and Spain, without much thinking about what happened while he was abroad. This exhibition corrects that omission, demonstrating how what happened in Paris both broadened his vision stylistically and opened his eyes politically, ultimately teaching him the value of telling his country’s and his people’s stories in new ways that truly belonged to them. His skills at all the manners he sampled in Paris, furthermore, prove that what came later was entirely intentional, and how thoughtfully those choices carried their meaning into what became his stratospheric future. Not unlike a jazz musician who learns the rules so as to break them better, Rivera returned to Mexico and realized that his own country’s artistic legacies belonged in the modern conversation, too—an epiphany that proved every bit as foundational to his evolution as a champion for its artistic and political value as was Frida herself. But that was still years away, and in 1914, Paris was still everything.

Georges Braque, Maison sur la colline, 1907, oil on canvas, (Harriet and Warren Stephens Collection) photo by SND
 

Rivera's Paris circles, and his time in Spain, made his world of influences a bigger, more colorful and heady place. This included his first wife Angelina Beloff (the talented Russian-born painter who is responsible for Diego’s European adventure), several canonical Impressionists young and old, and various beguiling bohemians lost to the peripherals of popular history—all of whom are represented in a beautifully designed exhibition that reflects the theatricality of the situation. Walking through AMFA’s expansive installation, it’s easy to imagine yourself as a young artist, first time in Europe, in Paris at the height of its avant-garde appeal, beyond eager to soak it all up. And suddenly there they were. Along with the everpresent ghosts of Cezanne and Seurat, there were Claude Monet, Georges Braque, Robert and Sonia Delauney, Amedeo Modigliani, and Eugene Atget with his camera, maybe Gertrude Stein kicking around—all very much alive. And literally Pablo Picasso, even larger than life, plus all their entourages, muses, mourners, acolytes, and the city views and cafes, studios, and salons where you’re suddenly being invited into the never-ending conversation. It must have been dazzling, and it’s clear from this show that Rivera made the most of it.

Paul Cezanne, Ferma a Montgeroult, 1898 (Photo by SND)
 

To begin in the middle, the AMFA’s 1914 masterwork Dos Mujeres is a double portrait of Rivera’s wife Angelina Beloff (seen standing), and their friend and fellow artist, Alma Dolores Bastián (nicknamed Moucha, seated). She and her husband lived in the same building as Rivera and Beloff, in the same 26 Rue du Départ apartment that functioned as his studio. And her studio too, probably, as captivatingly demonstrated by the inclusion of her 1914 oil painting Nature morte a la bombonne—a jaunty, angular symphony of a still life, with a green-spectrum palette and a deft, Cubist-flavored navigation of classical light-through-beveled-glass phenomenology, optical patterning, and the puckish rebellion of a casually bright yellow cigarette pack.

As Rivera’s brief career in learning by mimicking progressed, Dos Mujeres announced itself with its own ambitions, and it was exhibited the same year at the Société des Artistes Indépendants where it caused a stir, with one critic moved to crown Rivera the “Champion of Cubism.” I wonder how Picasso felt about that, and as if by way of answer, the AMFA installation has a large, muscular Cubist flex by Picasso giving the Rivera a constant stare down—and not for nothing, but a lyrical, vigorously rendered pictorial landscape by Georges Braque also hangs nearby, enjoying the drama while it dreams of a sherbet-hued countryside.

Picasso, Man with a Pipe
 

Beyond the novelistic appeal of the whole curation and ideation, the exhibition’s premise created a platform to showcase mysterious gems beyond the marquee names, energetic treasures better understood in context, and specific voices of more than the white men who mostly make it into the canon, although there are still plenty! Expanding across race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class in a way that enriches the proceedings on yet another level, the first character to greet visitors is the brightly beckoning triumph of rosy non-binary exoticism that is Eduardo Chicarro y Aguera’s four foot square 1927 oil painting Fatima. Though technically made after Rivera’s departure, the work in style, subject, and gesture gives life to the exuberance of the moment. Nearby, the thrillingly operatic, Baroque folk maximalism of Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa’s floridly gestural answer to the polite luxury of Las Meninas, his 1910 oil painting Girls of Burriana (Falleras), depicts an appealing tumble of pattern and decoration that is overflowing with life, texture, and color. The prevalence of portraits of the artists themselves, rendered by their own hands or by one another’s, further enhances the energy of community and the influence of discourse in artistic development for Rivera and indeed for everyone, as well as giving another level to—literally the faces of—these most salient of art historical movements.

Angelina Beloff, Nature morte a la bombonne, 1914, oil on canvas, 24 3_4 x 20 3_4 (Private Collection, Mexico)
 

Not for nothing, but this wide-horizon ethos is also reflected in the AMFA’s permanent collection and rotations thereof. During my visit, its upbeat current iteration gave pride of place to ceramics and other post-traditional craft, a mammoth Louise Nevelson, a unicorn of an annotated Judy Chicago print portfolio, a stellar portrait and text obelisk by Raven Half Moon, a sweetheart of a Barbara Hepworth, a richly textured emotional portrait by Delita Martin, a riot of pattern and salty cat attitude by Lisa Krannichfeld, a blown-glass tondo by the de la Torre brothers—alongside a Durer print, some Old Masters finery, a delight-filled floral still life by Odilon Redon, and an unusually hearty interior scene by Edouard Vuillard.

Rivera's Paris (Courtesy of AMFA)
 

AMFA has secured loans from 12 American museums and several private collections, including an early very washy Impressionist landscape by Rivera (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); as well as a smaller but quite lively Cubist portrait (Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas); and several later drawings when Rivera returned to naturalism after his flirtation with manifesto-inflected stylizations, such as portraits of his wife, Angelina Beloff (1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and of Jean Cocteau (1918, Henry Ransom Center, UT Austin). Among major examples by artists who influenced Rivera—by the exuberant colorist Darío de Regoyos y Valdés (Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas); a truly monumental painting by Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa (The Hispanic Museum and Library, New York); a vibrant portrait of the artist Jean Metzinger by Robert Delaunay (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)—there are two works by Jacques Lipchitz (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), who traveled to Spain with Rivera in 1914 to escape the war.

Diego Rivera, Still Life with Bread Knife, 1915, oil on canvas, 27 3_4 x 31 5_8 (Columbus Museum of Art)
 

And in fact I would have loved further insight into Rivera’s experiences around WWI. It’s not like Spain was free of conflict at the time, either. It’s interesting he didn’t go back to Mexico at this time, and I’d like to know more about that. Specifically, why didn't he take these accumulated styles home with him in sophisticated triumph? Around when he left Europe, he seemed to dip back into convention before he did his pivot to the iconic style. Was he disillusioned by the war? Or traumatized? Or in some ways inspired, motivated further to take up the causes that came to define his career? But that’s a job for Netflix, not for AMFA’s curators, and this exhibition does its work more than admirably. And anyway, we’ll always have Paris. WM

Portrait of a Young Artist: Rivera’s Paris
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock
arkmfa.org/art/exhibitions/riveras-paris.
February 7 – May 18, 2025