View of Toledo shows a perspective of Toledo and the Tagus River from an elevated site southeast of the city, shining among the blue intensity of the sky and river. The brushwork marks a dynamic pace, fragmenting the light on the rooftops, towers and gates, along the curvature of the arches, streets and walls, and defining indentations in the granite slopes; ocher, green, pink, sienna and gray hues predominate. The city is reflected in the river, from where diagonals begin that end in the spires of the Cathedral in the upper left corner and the Fortress on the right. In the foreground, a group of trees set a chromatic counterpoint. Below and to the left the artist's signature reads: “DIEGO M RIVERA 1912”.
Diego Rivera left for Europe in 1907 and remained there for fourteen years, with a brief interlude between 1910 to 1911 when he traveled to Mexico to participate in an exhibition of the National School of Fine Arts. The works he produced during those years show the range of his stylistic itinerary; Rivera became interested in the Spanish modernists, the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, Cezanne, Renoir, Ingres. In 1913 he began a fruitful cubistic production -important in furthering his artistic development- which he abandoned in 1917 when he began to study Cezanne in depth. To learn about and understand the European stage of Diego Rivera reference should be made to the research of the art historian Ramon Favela.[1] From him we know that the Mexican artist's participation in Parisian art circles was relatively late, and that his stay in Toledo in 1912 was a step in his gradual approach to cubism, based on the study of painting by El Greco. View of Toledo should be understood as proto-cubistic work. Its shapes follow a clear geometric intention but its space is organized by means of a Renaissance perspective with a single fixed point of view.
Diego Rivera traveled to the Castile region in the summer of 1912 accompanied by Angelina Beloff. The couple settled in Toledo, in a house near the chapel of Santo Tome where The Burial of the Count of Orgaz was on display.. The artist had visited the city a few years before with his friend the painter Angel Zarraga, who shared his fascination for the mannerist distortions of the work of El Greco. In 1912, the Toledo landscape inspired Rivera in close to a dozen paintings in which a gradual decomposition of geometric forms seen. As can be observed in View of Toledo, the visual characteristics of the urban layout of tangled streets, which must have reminded him of his native Guanajuato, allowed Rivera to move towards a more cubist awareness of the image. Favela also found compositional affinities for example in the diagonal "momentum" of the work- with the cartography View and Plan of Toledo by El Greco, which Rivera knew well. View of Toledo was one of the last paintings Rivera did in Spain, before returning to Paris in the autumn of 1912.
[1]. Favela, Ramon, Diego Rivera. The cubist years, Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum, INBA, 1984.
View of Toledo shows a perspective of Toledo and the Tagus River from an elevated site southeast of the city, shining among the blue intensity of the sky and river. The brushwork marks a dynamic pace, fragmenting the light on the rooftops, towers and gates, along the curvature of the arches, streets and walls, and defining indentations in the granite slopes; ocher, green, pink, sienna and gray hues predominate. The city is reflected in the river, from where diagonals begin that end in the spires of the Cathedral in the upper left corner and the Fortress on the right. In the foreground, a group of trees set a chromatic counterpoint. Below and to the left the artist's signature reads: “DIEGO M RIVERA 1912”.
