Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection features a vibrant circle of artists prominent in the years following the Mexican Revolution. In 1920, after ten years of bloody civil war, Mexico emerged as a constitutional republic. The revolution overturned a dictatorship and battled inequalities of wealth, power, and land ownership. Political leaders sought to establish a modern national identity. Mexicanidad, a political and populist movement that developed following the revolution, blended agrarian and Indigenous traditions with the anti-colonialist sentiment that fought for independence from Spain one hundred years earlier. As key members of the revolutionary movement, artists captured this vision in murals, paintings, prints, and photographs. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were at the center of this effort.
Diego Rivera
Mexican, 1886–1957
Calla Lily Vendor, 1943
Oil on Masonite
The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of 20th-Century Mexican Art and the Vergel Foundation
Paintings such as Calla Lily Vendor embody the revolutionary and modernist ideals that flourished in Mexico between 1920 and the 1950s. The women wear the traditional quexquémitl, a poncho-like garment that signifies the Indigenous cultures. The robust blossoms suggest the bounty of the earth and connect the figures to a rural way of life.
[Artwork Description: Two Indigenous Mexican women with brown skin and long dark hair separated into two braids and connected in the middle of their backs sit on their knees, their bare feet tucked underneath them with their arms around a large basket of about 60 bright white calla lilies with yellow centers and thin dark green stems. The woman on the left wears a long black skirt with a white border along the waist and a tan huipil with a bottom border of red and white vertical stripes. The woman on the right wears a long black skirt and a tan huipil with a white and red striped border and then large white tassels hanging from the edge. A figure hides behind the other side of the calla lily basket with only a brown hat visible. The background is black and the flowers are in a brown and tan woven basket with burnt orange fabric tied around the basket.]