Diego Rivera’s Complex Personality: Was He Really the Villain of Frida Kahlo’s Life?

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Rivera's psychological contradictions were just as obvious in his political life. A lifelong Marxist who helped found the Mexican Communist Party, Rivera spent his career negotiating an ideological contradiction: he preached the proletarian revolution while accepting enormous financial checks from American tycoons. His famous 1933 clash with Nelson Rockefeller over the mural Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center crystallized his stubbornness. When ordered to remove the face of Vladimir Lenin from the fresco, Rivera flatly refused. The mural was subsequently chiseled off the wall and destroyed, but Rivera returned to Mexico and repainted the exact same composition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, adding a portrait of John D. Rockefeller Jr. drinking martinis beneath syphilis microbes.

He was repeatedly expelled from and reinstated into the Mexican Communist Party, alternately deemed a dangerous Trotskyite sympathizer and a bourgeois exhibitionist. When Leon Trotsky fled Stalinist assassins, it was Rivera who used his political connections to convince Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas to grant the Russian revolutionary political asylum. Diego provided the Trotskys with armed security at Kahlo's family home, the Casa Azul. Yet Rivera's mercurial temperament soon led to personal and political disagreements with Trotsky, ending in an acrimonious split shortly before Trotsky’s assassination in 1940.