Another LACMA Winner

If art lovers will pardon a term from the world of sports, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is on a heck of a streak. It began last September with an exhibit of Pablo Picasso’s masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art. LACMA then delivered again, in January, with “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs.” This Sunday marks the opening of “Diego Rivera: Art and Revolution,” which many Angelenos consider the icing on the cake.

The retrospective includes a hundred paintings, prints and drawings by the controversial Mexican painter. It’s one that should help aficionados here reassess the work of an artist who, like Picasso and Van Gogh, lived a passionate life that comes to us through his works.

Rivera is most famous for his great murals. He, along with his countrymen David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose Clemente Orozco, filled the walls of public buildings in Mexico after the 1910 revolution with dramatic and sometimes radical reinterpretations of Mexican history. As Mexican poet Octavio Paz noted, these pro-Marxist “revolutionaries,” so committed to destroying the established capitalist order, found no fault with having their magnificent art sponsored by Mexico’s government. Viewers should note that the revolution invoked in the title of the exhibit has less to do with bullets than aesthetics.

Some of the paintings in the exhibit are less known than Rivera’s monumental murals, but they are no less captivating. In chronological order, the show ranges the course of Rivera’s evolution as a painter, from the impressionistic “Path of the Melancholics (La Castaneda)” to the Cubist masterpiece “Zapatista Landscape.” It also includes a remarkable drawing of photographer Tina Modotti, titled “Nude Woman,” and works influenced by Surrealism, like “Symbolic Landscape.”

LACMA should be commended for bringing to Los Angeles a show that will surely be a special point of pride for the region’s large Mexican American and Mexican community. The museum should keep this growing population and the rich variety of Latin American art in mind as it plans future exhibitions.