Cheminée (Chimney)

This work belongs to a period in which Diego Rivera explored the aesthetic assumptions of Cubism. From 1907 to 1921, the artist lived in Europe, dividing his time between Spain, France and Italy as part of a formative trip and prior to his consolidation as one of the foremost figures in Mexican muralism. This urban view, with its iron cantilever bridges and structures, power lines, industrialised-city chimneys and iron-and-glass roofs, underscores the representation of motifs that characterise this avant-garde territory constituting the modern city. Among the plastic resources ascribed to Diego Rivera’s fleeting passage through Cubist experiments are: the rupture of the traditional concept of painting adhering to the linear perspective of Renaissance; the relationship and juxtaposition of architectural planes in the landscape that break from pictorial illusion, deconstructing space; plays with light and shadow, ordered geometrically to break the two-dimensionality of the image; and the break-up of the horizon via a structure of lines making angles and appearing to refract the view.



Suset Sánchez Sánchez