Sueño (Sleep)

Rivera’s first series of prints was exhibited in the group show, Mexican Graphic Art, at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in May 1932. The gallery’s director, Carl Zigrosser, encouraged Rivera to create lithographs based on details from his murals, which had been on display in a retrospective exhibition of his work at the city’s Museum of Modern Art in 1931. Sleep re-creates a detail from the lower-left section of a fresco titled "The Night of the Poor", included in Rivera’s large-scale mural project at the Secretariat of Public Education, in Mexico City, which he completed in 1928. In the lithograph, a harmonious composition of curved lines unifies the piled-up bodies of young peasants who appear to have fallen asleep amidst sombreros and sacks. Evoking a feeling of exhaustion arising from physical labor, Rivera’s depiction of enlarged, empty hands and bare feet renders the vulnerable bodies of women and children simultaneously strong and disenfranchised.

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