Juchitán River
Diego Rivera (1886 to 1957) · 1956
Along the wall of the entrance hall runs a long mosaic in which women of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec bathe in a river, wash clothes and carry fruit, their dark hair loose and their skirts bright against the green water. This is Río Juchitán, one of the last works of Diego Rivera, made in 1956, the year before he died. Rivera had visited Tehuantepec in the 1920s and fell in love with the region, its markets and above all its women, famous for their independence and their embroidered dress. He painted them again and again, and here he returned to them at the end of his life, not in fresco but in stone.
Rivera was experimenting in his final years with mosaics of natural stone, using pebbles and coloured rocks of different textures rather than the glass tesserae of traditional mosaic. Look at how the figures are built from pieces of stone in earth colours, ochre, green and grey, and how the outlines are formed by the gaps between them. The composition is a frieze, reading from left to right, with the river as a horizontal band that ties the scenes together. The bodies are simplified into rounded volumes, in the style Rivera had developed for his murals, and the faces are calm and strong. It was designed for a house and was later moved and reassembled here.
The mosaic came to the Museo Soumaya from a private setting and now stands in the vestibule, where it faces Rodin's Gates of Hell across the hall, so that Mexican modernism and French sculpture greet each other. Rivera's murals in the National Palace and elsewhere are famous, but his mosaics are rare and this is among the finest. It matters as a late testament from the most famous Mexican artist of the twentieth century, and as a celebration of the women of Juchitán, who remain a symbol of Mexican identity. The memorable detail is the fruit basket balanced on a woman's head, a motif Rivera used all his life.
Did You Know? Rivera made this mosaic in 1956, the year before his death, using natural stones rather than glass.
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