Diego Rivera(1886-1957)

Acquired from the artist
The Collection of Kenneth Franzheim, Texas
The Collection of Osceola Heard Davenport, Texas
Thence by descent to the Collection of Frances Billups, Texas 
Sale: Sotheby’s, New York, Latin American Art, November 21, 1988, lot 57, illustrated in color 
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, February 10–April 27, 1986; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, June 2–August 10, 1986; Mexico, D. F., Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, September 29, 1986–January 3, 1987; Madrid, Salas Pablo Ruiz Picasso, February 17–April 26, 1987; West Berlin, Staatliche Kunsthalle, July 23–September 15, 1987; London, Hayward Gallery, October 29, 1987–January 10, 1988; Diego Rivera, A Retrospective, p. 110, fig. 245, illustrated in color 

Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Diego Rivera: Catálogo General de Obra de Caballete, Mexico, 1989, p. 216, no. 2016, illustrated

This work is in beautiful condition. It is unlined and unvarnished. There is no weakness to the paint layer. There do not appear to be any retouches. The work should be hung as-is. (This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.)
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Diego Rivera (1886-1957), the preeminent figure of Mexican Muralism, was also a consummate portrait painter. While Rivera explored this genre of painting from his early years of academic study in Mexico, he consolidated a personal style only after a formative period in Europe where he assimilated the Parisian avant-garde. His first European portraits show his gradual study of diverse influences, first of his Spanish mentor Eduardo Chicharro, followed by regional interpretations of modernism. A little later, studying El Greco's work in Toledo, Rivera presented ambitious portraits at The Salon d'Automne in Paris. Soon thereafter, between the years of 1913 and 1917, he produced notable cubist portraits in which he demonstrated a mastery of spatial relationships and an original approach to color. Around 1915, he began to explore, through drawing, a formal recovery of line under the influence of the French academic paladin, the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). Rivera’s adoption of Neo-Classicism mirrored that of Pablo Picasso’s who like him, had converged in Paris at the same time.

This retour à l'ordre was definitive in the artistic trajectory of Diego Rivera. Above all, the influence of Ingres and Paul Cézanne made him renounce Cubism resulting in some of the most beautiful portraits of his European period which culminated in 1921, upon his return to Mexico. Although Rivera understood, as perhaps no other Mexican painter of his time, the importance of pre-Columbian art and of promoting Mexico’s popular and vernacular art traditions, his painting never rejected the great lessons learned from the past. Rivera was able to model a pictorial style that embodies the quintessence of Mexicanidad while simultaneously exerting modernist qualities largely embedded in the trends of European modern art. The present painting, an extraordinary portrait by Diego Rivera of Chilean actress Matilde Palou, confirms the Mexican master never abandoned his great mentors of European art.

Arriving in Mexico in the early 1930s, Matilde Palou rose to prominence as a leading lady of the film industry at a time of great expansion known as the "Golden Age of national cinema.“ Matilde Palou not only possessed great stage presence, as this portrait makes evident, but she had ample dramatic skills developed during her years of training in the theater and the zarzuela; a talent which led her to play powerful supporting roles in unforgettable Latin American films such as: Cuando los padres se quedan solos (When parents are left behind) and El dolor de los hijos (The pain of children), both produced in 1949; to work under renowned Spanish filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, as the jealous and vengeful Doña Carmen in Susana, the impure and perverse, filmed in 1951, the same year that Diego Rivera painted her portrait. This painting, seldom viewed in public, once belonged to renowned American architect Kenneth Franzheim who was a notable patron of Texan art and whom Rivera painted a year earlier in 1950.

Diego Rivera conceived this wonderful portrait by studying two sketches cataloged by the National Institute of Fine Arts. The first drawing identifies the vernacular source of the portrait as the traditional costume of Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico bordering Guatemala. The original model in the drawing was most likely not the Chilean actress given her indigenous features. The unidentified figure wears a dress from the region of Chapa de Corzo; its characteristic semicircular neckline blouse and wide satin skirt with flights of tulle holans are finely embroidered with multicolored silk yarns and one of the most beautiful national emblems in Mexican costume design. Notwithstanding its authentic character, the bourgeois environment of the fireplace and the Art Deco bracelet on her left wrist reveal a more cosmopolitan inspiration, one that does not escape the eye of the attentive spectator.

When Diego Rivera envisioned this fantastic portrait he found inspiration in Madame Moitessier painted just a century earlier by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, arguably the most talented portraitist of the nineteenth-century. Matilde Palou's idealized, furtive look and sensuality is no less serene and haughty than that of Marie-Clotilde de Moitessier's painted by Ingres. Both women were portrayed with translucent white skin, shapely shoulders and arms, and elegant hands adorned with rings, fine golden bracelets and precious stones which together are meant to appeal to the enjoyment of the senses. Likewise, both dresses present a lavish brocade of flowers. Rivera has allowed himself to design an elaborate headdress which is only discernible in Ingres’s portrait through the mirror. Artistic license was also taken in the Mexican silk rebozo knotted around Matilde Palou's waist to emphasize the visual appetite for her glowing body.

In addition to the dialogue between the two painters, both works allude to portraits of their time. Madame Moitessier embodies the bourgeoisie opulence that reigned during the French Empire of Napoleon III while Matilde Palou illustrates pride in the Mexican identity. During these years of postwar nationalism Mexico had opened its borders once again to foreign investment and economic development, propitiating an ideological referent that internationalized Mexican cinema of the 1940s. Rivera not only glosses over Ingres' work—paying tribute to the great figure of the nineteenth-century who so enriched his own work as a painter in Paris but also reflects a new model for Mexican modernity.

Undoubtedly, the validity of this masterpiece by Diego Rivera in the genre of  twentieth-century modern portraiture has not lost its relevance. Now more than ever, within the framework of nationalist protectionism against the realities of a globalized world, it is a testament to the pride of the Mexican people. 

Profesor Luis-Martín Lozano, Art Historian
March 2017