Flower Festival of Santa Anita by Diego Rivera in the Museum of Modern Art, March 2010

Diego Rivera
Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita
October 13, 1931

Medium: Encaustic on canvas

Dimensions: 6' 6 1/2" x 64" (199.3 x 162.5 cm)

Credit: Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

Object number: 23.1936

Department: Painting and Sculpture


Rivera spent the tumultuous years of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) painting and traveling abroad in Europe. Upon returning to his native country in 1921, he exalted indigenous Mexican people and traditions, making them a central subject of his work. As he later recalled, "My homecoming aroused an aesthetic rejoicing in me which is impossible to describe. . . . Everywhere I saw a potential masterpiece—in the crowds, the markets, the festivals, the marching battalions, the workers in the workshops, the fields—in every shining face, every radiant child." This painting, depicting a flower festival held on Good Friday in a town then called Santa Anita, was included in a solo exhibition of Rivera's work at MoMA in 1931. Only the second artist (after Henri Matisse) to receive this honor, Rivera was, at the time, an international celebrity: the New York Sun hailed him as "the most talked about artist on this side of the Atlantic."--- Gallery label from 2009.


Text from: www.moma.org/collection/works/78492