Autorretrato (Self Portrait)

"Autorretrato" is perhaps Rivera’s most celebrated and accomplished lithograph. It was part of a series of five prints included in the group show, "Mexican Graphic Art", at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in May 1932. Throughout his life, Rivera produced self-portraits in a variety of mediums, including several drawings in pencil such as the one he dedicated to Carl Zigrosser, the director of the Weyhe Gallery and a collector of graphic art, in 1918. The modeling of form and naturalistic details seen here depart from the simpler outlines of his mural compositions, revealing the artist’s versatility and his mastery of the lithographic medium. Rivera’s fascination with the material process of lithography, which he acknowledged in correspondence with Zigrosser, is evident in his experimental use of different tone stones to create gray and yellow backgrounds and in the later development of a method he called “lithomontage.” This method is exemplified in a print from a year later, for which Rivera used the same stone as in this self-portrait to create an image of three superimposed heads.

Text credit: Produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and Patricia Ortega-Miranda.