迭戈·里维拉

After the Mexican Revolution the new government wanted a public art that could tell the nation's story to people who could not read, so through the 1920s it handed painters the walls of ministries and schools. Diego Rivera, back from years of study in Europe, became the giant of that movement, covering vast surfaces with Aztec markets, conquest, labour, and uprising, painting straight onto wet plaster in the old Italian fresco technique.

His politics carried him into a famous collision. In 1933 the Rockefeller family hired him to paint a mural in the lobby of Rockefeller Center in New York, on the hopeful theme of humanity choosing its future. Rivera worked a clear portrait of Lenin, the Soviet leader, into the crowd. Asked to paint it out, he refused, and the family had the whole unfinished fresco boarded over and then chipped off the wall in early 1934.

He took his answer home. Working from photographs, he repainted the composition in Mexico City under a new title, Man, Controller of the Universe, and it still hangs there. Across these same years he was married to the painter Frida Kahlo, whom he wed in 1929, divorced in 1939, and married again the following year.