S01 · E317

Revolutionary with a Paintbox

The Arena season opens with a profile of Diego Rivera , considered to be the most famous painter in the history of Latin America, and also the most notorious. He was a Rabelaisian figure of far-flung proportions, who claimed to have been a confidant of Lenin, the true father of Rommel, and to have tasted human flesh on a number of occasions. He was a maverick, a compendium of contradictions and irrationalities. A self-proclaimed revolutionary, who sought in mural paintings a new public art form to broadcast social change to the people of Mexico, he was also the man who accepted commissions from the yankee-dollar capitalists, Rockefeller and Ford. This portrait compiles testimony from Mexico's leading novelist, Carlos Fuentes ; ex-model and lover, Dolores Olmedo ; and Jose Luis Cuevas , one of the most successful of Mexico's contemporary painters. There is also extraordinary archive footage of Zapata, Trotsky and Rivera himself and, of course, the epic murals, filmed on location.