Diego Rivera, Italian Sketchbook, 1920-21 - page 13

Charlot’s history of those seminal first years,
The Mexican Mural Renaissance,
1920
1925
, is filled with intimate details and insights that could only be
told by one who was there when it actually happened. Included is a very
frank and amusing account of a critic’s
adverse review of Charlot’s first mural in
the National Preparatory School, “
The
Massacre in the Main Temple
,” and a scathing
commentary on the same mural by his friend
Rivera. Ironically, Charlot’s mural was the
first work of the
20
th century Mexican mural
movement completed in true fresco; Rivera’s
Creation
mural of
1922
23
was executed in
encaustic.
It was in
1945
, when Charlot was in
Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship, re-
searching and writing
The Mexican Mural
Renaissance,
that Angelina gave him this precious Diego Rivera sketchbook,
“in
friendship to Jean Charlot, to better conserve these drawings.
Diego Rivera,
Portrait of Angelina
, oil
on canvas,
1916
13
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