Dignity and power: Diego Rivera’s portrait of Columba Domínguez

In this video, Sotheby’s Latin American Art director Anna di Stasi discusses Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s oil-on-canvas painting, ‘Retrato de Columba Domínguez de Fernández’, completed in 1950.

Born December 8, 1886 in Guanajuato, Rivera became one of his native country’s most acclaimed painters, and his large fresco works helped bring about the Mexican Muralist movement. He was famously married to an equally prominent Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo.

When Rivera repatriated to Mexico in 1921 (from Paris, where he had moved in 1909), he joined a cultural mission to discover the country’s southeast. There, he became fascinated with the isthmus of Tehuantepec and the culture of the “Tehuanas” – an indigenous matriarchal society that would become an iconographic constant in his work.

By 1950, Rivera had painted several portraits of Mexico’s leading actresses; and here, in the almost life-sized portrait of Columba Domínguez discussed in the video, Rivera elevates the figure of the Mexican woman, proud and strong, depicting Domínguez as a Tehuana. Executed in beautiful detail, the portrait carefully renders the traditional dress, hairstyle and presence of this community, a splendid vision of rural Mexico.

Having passed away in 1957, Rivera’s works today are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo Diego Rivera in Mexico City, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, among others.

View the original video here.

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