The Woman at the Well

In 1907, Diego Rivera went to Europe, on a scholarship granted to him by Teodoro Dehesa, the then Governor of Veracruz, to continue the art studies that he had begun in 1897. In order to show what he had learned, he returned to Mexico in September of 1910 so as to show his work at the National Fine Arts School, returning in 1911 to Paris and settling in Montparnasse, where he was visited by friends and fellow artists, including Mexicans such as Ángel Zárraga and Martín Luis Guzmán, who updated him on the political situation in México. Zapata-style Landscape, whose original title was The Guerrilla, constitutes the culminating application of European avant-garde trends to a Mexican topic -namely, the period of the Mexican Revolution and the struggle of the revolutionary leader, Emiliano Zapata, to defend his peoples lands and way of life. The composition is in a synthetic- Cubist style, with the peculiarity that, in the foreground, it incorporates objects relating to the Mexican Revolution- namely, a rifle, a belt, a gourd, a hat and a sarape whose red stripes add color to the work. The Mexican flavor of the painting is strengthened by the stylized volcanoes in the background, suggestive of the Valley of Mexico. It should be pointed out that, in 1915, when this work was executed, the First World War was raging in a Europe whose people were living through very difficult times, circumstances that directly affected Rivera, whose oeuvre reflected the very critical and difficult phase of his life through which he was passing. Perhaps this is why the present work was painted on the back of a canvas that had already been used on the other side, which the artist covered with a layer of paint so that he could reuse it. When Zapata-style Landscape was being restored in 1976, the staff of the National Center for the Conservation and Registration of Mexico's Artistic Heritage, noticing that the canvas was painted on both sides, set about restoring and recovering the lost work, finally fashioning a double-sided frame that enabled both paintings to be seen at the same time. The canvas entitled The Woman at the Well, which bears the painter's signature and the date, 1913, shows the artist's early incursions into Cubism. Rivera broke up his forms into geometrical elements, thus departing from a single perspective via his handling of the space in which the protagonist, a woman raising water from a well, is depicted from various angles. The painting entitled Zapatastyle Landscape (along with the hidden piece entitled The Woman at the Well) was bought by the Parisian collector, Léonce Rosemberg. In 1930 it was in the possession of Marte R. Gómez, whose collection was acquired by the National Fine Arts Institute in 1973. This double work has formed part of the MUNAL collection since 1982.