JOHN ZAROBELL:  

Symbolic Landscape is a kind of strange painting for Diego Rivera. 

NARRATOR:  

Curator John Zarobell. 

ZAROBELL:  

This is an artist who’s known for a grand figurative style and trying to really forge a Mexican national identity through art. This picture, however, is frankly, surreal. The tree roots become a figure of a woman; there’s the barest suggestion of an arm, a head laying back, breasts. And one starts to think that Rivera has been looking at some paintings by Dalí and others. 

NARRATOR:  

As surreal as this landscape appears, the images do have a connection with Rivera’s biography. His daughter, Guadalupe Rivera Marin, once illuminated the story on a walk through the galleries.  

ZAROBELL:  

When we came to this painting and she saw that it is in the Surrealist room and I said, “Well, so this is a Surrealist painting.” And she said, “Well, you know, it is, but it isn’t.” At the time, Rivera was living in a mining part of Mexico, a part where there was, in fact, rock formations very much like this. And he was responding, she told me, to a story that happened at the time, a murder of a woman that was a mystery. And these various elements—the glove, the knife, the wedding ring were all part of that history. Yes, we see things that are in the world—trees, rocks, moon. We also see other things that start to emerge and that give our imagination an opportunity to reconsider the world around us and the world, certainly, of this painting.