Diego Rivera

Emiliano Zapata, a champion of agrarian reform and a key protagonist in the Mexican Revolution, here leads a band of peasant rebels armed with provisional weapons, including farming tools. With the bridle of a majestic white horse in his hand, Zapata stands triumphantly beside the dead body of a hacienda owner. Though Mexican and U.S. newspapers regularly vilified the revolutionary leader as a treacherous bandit, Rivera immortalized Zapata as a hero and glorified the victory of the Revolution in an image of violent but just vengeance.

Rivera's depiction also departs from portrayals of the rebel propagated by Zapata himself. An expert horseman, Zapata consistently presented himself as a charro, a cowboy whose flamboyant dress—tight pants and a vest with silver ornamentation—signaled an elevated class status in Mexico. Rivera’s vision of Zapata as a humble peasant offers a sympathetic portrait of a folk hero tirelessly devoted to agrarian reform.

In the 1920s, after the Mexican Revolution, Rivera was among the painters who developed an art of public murals to celebrate Mexico’s indigenous culture and to teach the nation’s people about their history and the new government’s dreams for their future. Rivera had lived in Paris and knew modernist painting well. He had also visited Italy to study Renaissance frescoes, a mural form that Mexican artists and politicians recognized as a valuable medium of education and inspiration. Returning to Mexico in 1921, Rivera began a remarkable series of frescoes—paintings made on moist plaster, so that the pigments fuse with the plaster as it dries.

In 1931 MoMA hosted a major exhibition of Rivera’s work. Unable to transport his murals, the Museum instead brought the artist to New York six weeks before the show’s opening and provided him with a makeshift studio in the gallery. Agrarian Leader Zapata, one of five “portable murals” made on this occasion, replicates part of a fresco he had painted in 1930 in the Palace of Cortés, Cuernavaca. Emiliano Zapata had been a leader of the Mexican Revolution. (He was killed in 1919, a victim of the revolution’s internal struggles.) Rivera painted him wearing the local costume of the Cuernavaca region and carrying a sugarcane-cutter’s machete. Though Mexican and US newspapers regularly vilified Zapata as a treacherous bandit, Rivera immortalized him as a hero and glorified the revolution in an image of violent but just vengeance.