John Lear

2026-2027

Francois Chevalier

University of Puget Sound

“Diego Rivera Paints Revolution”: A Biography

John Lear has a PhD in History from the University of California Berkeley and is emeritus professor at the University of Puget Sound. He specializes in Latin American social and cultural history with a focus on the intersection of the working class, the left and artistic production in Mexico. His books include Chile’s Free-Market Miracle: A Second Look (1995) and Workers, Neighbors and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (2001). His most recent book is Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico (2017), in Spanish as Imaginar el proletariado (2019), a cultural history of the relations between artists and organized labor in post-revolutionary Mexico and their mutual construction of visual narratives of the working class. He has held Fulbright fellowships and teaching and research residences in Mexico City and Oaxaca, Mexico; in Granada, Spain; at the Universities of California-San Diego, Stanford and Campinas, Brazil; and at the IAS-Nantes. 

His current project is a political biography of Mexican painter Diego Rivera, under contract with Verso Books. Rivera was one of the world’s most famous painters in the 1930s, yet his political murals were often dismissed during the Cold War as crude propaganda for the global Marxist left or the nationalism of Mexico’s official, “Institutional Revolution.” The project incorporates archival research, a rich secondary literature, and close, historically informed readings of his murals to reconsider his life and art within the historical contexts of Mexico, the US, and the global left. The primary narrative follows his development during four periods: his youth and artistic training in Mexico, Spain and France; his reinvention through nationalist murals in the 1920s in post-revolutionary Mexico; his US murals of the 1930s in relation to dissident communisms and the crises of US capitalism; and the lyrical but more constrained art and domesticated politics of his last years in the early Cold War. 

“Black Lives and Comrades in Diego Rivera’s Lost New York City Mural, Portrait of America,” pending review.

“Diego Rivera: murales de historia e historias de murales, México y Estados Unidos” in Artistas Intelectuales e Ideologías Revolucionarias, editor Elissha Rashkin,  Universidad Veracruzana, forthcoming.

“Diego Rivera and Anti-Fascist Art in Mexico and the US: From Proletarian Unity to Pan-Americanism,” in Antifascism(s) in Latin America, editors Sandra Deutsch and Jorge Nállim, Cambridge University Press, 2025, 41-71.

“Diego Rivera Paints the Proletariat” and “The Red Squares of Manhattan,” for exhibition catalog Diego Rivera’s America at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2022), 162-189.