Diego Rivera

4 5.1

A Mexican painter famous for large murals with socialist themes

proper noun

: Diego Rivera

San Francisco's enthusiasm for murals goes back to at least the '30s when the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera painted here.
Diego Rivera the muralist
Mexican Diego Rivera

Examples

In these opening shots, the film plugs into an already familiar canon—the legitimate, naturalized, or "authentic" representation of the Indian as established by Diego Rivera.

Academic text (1993)
We recognize that the style and depiction were selected in homage to the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera, and as such, we respect your creative gesture.

Academic text (2011)
In the process, Avila Camacho had to negotiate a cultural canon of national identity centering on rural life established by figures like Jose Vasconcelos and Diego Rivera.

Academic text (1993)
A group tours Mexican artist Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry" murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
The DIA is a classical, white-frosted cake of a building that harbors Diego Rivera's dynamic, colorful murals of the auto assembly lines.

Surface Forms

Diego Rivera main

Morphology

Diego + Rivera

This is a proper name rather than a compositional phrase: knowing the components 'Diego' and 'Rivera' (both personal name elements, not lexical items with descriptive senses) does not allow a B1 learner to infer the meaning 'Mexican painter'. Proper names are essentially arbitrary and do not transparently encode occupation or biographical details, so the expression is opaque to learners who have not seen it before.

Etymology

Diego Rivera was a Mexican painter famous for huge wall paintings called 'murals' that showed working people and Mexico's history, so imagine him covering whole buildings with scenes everyone could see. That's why his name stands for a famous artist known for big, public paintings about ordinary life.