Rivera painted walls. Big ones. The murals at the National Palace in Mexico City cover over a thousand square feet and depict the entire history of Mexico from the Aztecs to the Revolution. He worked on scaffolding, in fresco, for years at a stretch. The scale was political: he wanted art that belonged to the public, not to collectors.

He studied at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City and spent fourteen years in Europe (1907-1921), absorbing Cubism in Paris and working alongside Picasso, Modigliani, and Mondrian. He returned to Mexico and found his subject: the history, labour, and people of his country, painted in a style that combined Renaissance fresco technique with pre-Columbian imagery and Marxist ideology.

The Detroit Industry Murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts (1932-33) are twenty-seven panels depicting the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant. The workers are heroic. The machinery is beautiful. Henry Ford's son Edsel commissioned them. The business community wanted them destroyed. They survived.

He married Frida Kahlo in 1929. They divorced in 1939. They remarried in 1940. The relationship was mutually unfaithful, politically intense, and artistically productive for both of them. Rivera said Kahlo was the better painter. Whether he believed this or was performing generosity is an open question.

He accepted a commission from Nelson Rockefeller for a mural in Rockefeller Center in 1933 and included a portrait of Lenin. Rockefeller asked him to remove it. Rivera refused. The mural was destroyed. Rivera repainted it in Mexico City. He died in 1957, at seventy.