Portrait Of Marevna Analysis

In 1923, Manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors is published in El Machete, stating a centralized motive behind and trajectory for the ‘Mexican Mural Renaissance’ of the 1920s. Signed by Diego Rivera and several of his contemporaries, the manifesto exhibits how the creators rally behind the indigenous peasants and working class, rejecting the bourgeois and heavily-saturated European influence within Mexico. Essentially, these creators argued for collectivist and political artistry, in opposition to individualist and solely decorative pieces. When taking Rivera’s participation in the aforementioned manifesto and his influence in the social realism movement, his Portrait of Marevna c. 1915 is vulnerable to the assumption of being an outlier to Rivera’s more well-known style and to the reduction of being merely evidence of experimentation. Though Portrait of Marevna cannot be linked at first glance to the politically charged, indigenismo-influenced work he created during the Mexican Mural Movement of the 1920s, inklings of this era are present within the portrait’s construction. This paper explores how Portrait of Marevna
For example, portraiture is inherently an individualist medium, differing greatly from collectivist murals. Moreover, cubism is a European invention and the subject matter is devoid of the political flare that brightens Rivera’s social-realist murals. Though these claims ring true, the progress and alignment with the politics of Rivera’s later years evident in Portrait of Marevna are parallels of sublety. Portrait of Marevna does not fully subscribe to the criteria laid out by the El Machete manifesto, however, it provides the groundwork for it to blossom into something as prosperous and promising as the calla lilies in Rivera’s Flower