Diego Rivera, known for his immense mural paintings on public buildings in Mexico, created this smaller, portable mural for his first one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1931. It is based on one of a series of sixteen murals that he painted on the walls of the Palacio de Cortés (Palace of Cortés) in Cuernavaca, located in the southern state of Morelos. In the portable mural, which weighs more than 1,000 pounds and measures approximately six by eight feet, Rivera added the figures of children in the foreground and left out men pulling a cart at gunpoint from the background. Both versions of Sugar Cane show the harsh reality of Mexico’s colonial era when Spanish rulers forced Mexicans into hard labor on sugar plantations.
When Rivera made the portable Sugar Cane, he was at the peak of his powers as an artist and an international celebrity. He wanted
to show capitalist North America images of class struggle in Mexico. He also wanted to display the Italian fresco techniques that he had adapted in Mexico. Fresco means “fresh” in Italian. Ground pigments are mixed with water, then quickly applied to fresh plaster spread on a wall before the plaster dries. Mural making requires several stages and the work of many skilled artisans—a collective process that suited Rivera’s socialist ideals.
