Diego Rivera (1886-1957)

oil on canvas

Weyhe Gallery, New York
Barbara Storke, San Francisco
Private Collection, San Francisco
Private Collection, New York

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Diego Rivera, December, 1931-January, 1932, no. 10
Mexico City, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes/Museo Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Diego Rivera: 50 años de su labor artística, 1949, no. 106

B.D. Wolfe, Diego Rivera His Life and Times, Alfred Knoff, New York, 1939, p. 36, illustrated
Hans F. Secker, Diego Rivera, Dresden, 1957, no. 24, illustrated
Florence Arquin, Diego Rivera - The Shaping of an Artist 1889-1921, University of Oklahoma Press, Oklahoma, p. 95, no. 63, illustrated
Diego Rivera: Catálogo General de Obra de Caballete, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 1989, p. 43, no. 273, illustrated

Past conservation to this picture has not been particularly good nonetheless the condition of the painting is very healthy. The canvas has been glued to masonite and while the surface of paint layer is more or less stable, the cracking is quite raised and very slight instability seems to have developed in the top lip of the aqueduct in the upper center. There are some sloppy retouches which are attempting to reduce the cracking in the sky, however the crack is still very visible. If the support were to be changed, the board removed and the picture lined, the cracking would be eliminated to the point where retouches would no longer be necessary. There is also a small group of losses beneath the signature in the lower left which have been retouched and a few tiny dots at the base of the tree trunk on the far right. However, apart from this there appears to be no other restoration. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend that the conservation be re-examined. (This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.)
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By the fall of 1917, Diego Rivera had abandoned cubism and initiated a series of artistic experiments based on the work of Paul Cézanne. Rivera also remained quite fascinated by the mathematical theories of Jules Henri Poincaré that offered him the possibility of exploring the representation of a fourth dimension in painting. Rivera was particularly interested in the possibility of capturing the idea of dynamic movement, much like centrifugal perspective, the former would allow him to arrange all of his compositional elements within the same spacial and temporal coordinates. In this painting of the acqueduct of the Villa of Arcueill, near Paris, the optic illusion or distortion that is visible in the background is a result of this experimentation. Far from abandoning the lessons of cubism, Rivera remained interested in breaking new ground with regards to the compositional space, an area of concern that he would eventually take to its ultimate consequences after 1921 through his mural paintings.

 

Professor Luis-Martín Lozano