Painter Diego Rivera's Colorful Ties to Acapulco Rocky Casale - The Washington Post
go to original January 24, 2015

Diego Rivera in 1932. Dolores Olmedo cared for the famed artist in her Acapulco home, Casa de los Vientos, at the end of his life. (Library of Congress/Carl Van Vechten Collection)

In 1955, Mexican artist Diego Rivera traveled to Acapulco from Moscow, where he had been receiving cobalt radiotherapy treatments for cancer. Rivera came to convalesce with his largest collector and love interest at the time, Dolores Olmedo, at her vacation home, which they renamed Casa de los Vientos, or House of the Winds. Set near the top of a sea cliff overlooking the El Mirador Hotel, the house offered Rivera stunning views of Acapulco’s iconic cliff divers and front-row seats for extraordinary sunsets.

Olmedo built Rivera a large art studio on the site in 1956. It was here that he tried to capture the changing nuances of retreating daylight in a series of 25 sunset paintings. It was also here that Rivera, who died in Mexico City in 1957, produced some of the most colorful and inspired mosaic work of his long career.



Those familiar with Rivera probably know his epic murals inside Mexico City’s National Palace better than his mosaics scattered across Acapulco. Most of them are found at Casa de los Vientos, which has been maintained by the family’s aging gardener since Olmedo’s death in 2002, and was damaged by two earthquakes last year. Affixed to the white stucco walls surrounding the property and clinging to the ceilings inside Rivera’s studio, these are high-relief mosaics — meaning the mythical snakes, mermaids, corn stalks and toads they depict are three-dimensional, standing out in relief from the flat surface. Local lore describes these mosaics as an extravagant love note to Olmedo, who cared for the artist’s financial and emotional needs at the end of his life.

Until last year, Casa de los Vientos was still a private residence. That changed when Mexico’s federal government, the cultural ministry in the state of Guerrero and the Carlos Slim Foundation teamed up to buy the property, with its spacious home and studio built into a terraced cliff, for $3 million, setting it on a course to become a premier cultural center.

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