Of the several masters of Mexican mural painting in the early twentieth century, Rivera is at once the most famous and the most notorious. Some of his fame and notoriety came during his life from his Communist politics; later, he was posthumously vilified for bullying his infirm wife, the painter Frida Kahlo (1907–54), who became a feminist heroine in the 1970s.
Returning to his native Mexico in 1921, after fifteen years in Europe during which he studied Italian fresco paintings,...