Museo Casa Diego Rivera

This is, as described in poster below, a museum set up on the initiative in 1971 of one of Diego Rivera's daughters, Guadalupe. It is in the house where her father was born and lived for six years. There is an amount of brushwork over some of the history of Guanajuato. (It is hard to find references also to the fact that the beautiful main building of the university was first established by the Jesuits as a school for disadvantaged children... but then the Jesuits were run out of town, as out of Mexico, as out of christendom.)

That link shows how this fomented early movement towards independence. When rulers start dividing among themselves, the oppressed become aware of frailties and vulnerabilities; when their friends among the mighty are struck down, they rise up.

The Museo Casa Diego Rivera is painted simply as a nice place. It would seem useful, really, to point to the fact that the family was driven out of Guanajuato because the father was a free thinking professor with a social conscience and the boy Diego very much took after his father and was a source of friction too. I am indebted to Israel Torres, our guide on one day while in Guanajuato, for pointing us in this direction, as he noted also that Rivera refused to do the murals in the regional museum in the Granaditas de Alhondiga saying Guanajuato 'stank' both because of the family history and the mine operations in those days. You might begin background reading at this link. This would offer some insight into the origins of Diego Rivera's drive and passion for revolution and social justice... and into his tumultuous personal life. 

...anyway, to the story of our visit!

The famous couple slipped back into social media after greeting us.

It is a rule that photos may not be taken upstairs.

This means that I cannot show you anything of the Diego Rivera works up there. There you will find a number of his cubist works (see here some on a page of the website of the National Gallery of Australia and some more info here) and other things not part of his mural work, including a series of wonderful illustrations for a book on Aztec culture, which for long was not published but was, on information in the gallery, eventually published in Japan... but I can find no trace of this work on the www... A visit to the gallery to see these works is worthwhile.

Downstairs then, two things apart from a good book and poster shop.

[1] A series of rooms with collected furnishings of the period, not actually from the house or family originally.

 [2] A temporary exhibition space.

 

and in the temporary exhibition space

bombing Palestine 2015