Diego Rivera

Emiliano Zapata and his Horse, 1932. Diego Rivera. Lithograph. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1933. © 2024 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) was one the leaders of the Mexican revolution that began in 1910. He served the revolution in the same way that Che Guevara served the revolutionary generation of the 1960s. This is the classic image of Zapata. The print was made more than a decade after his death in 1919 and is based on a detail of Rivera’s murals at the Palace of Cortés in Cuernavaca, a colonial city south of Mexico City, where he and his followers are armed with only farming tools. The print celebrates Zapata’s legacy as an advocate of agrarian reform. Commissioned and published by Weyhe Gallery in New York, it has become the best-known of all twentieth-century Mexican prints.