Diego's Anahuacalli (First Deluxe Edition)

CHAPA, Arturo. Diego's Anahuacalli. Mexico City: Arturo Chapa, 2008.

Folio (34 x 25 cm). Green-brown silk with blind lettering in pictorial dust jacket. 368 pp., illustrated throughout with hundreds of colour and black-and-white illustrations. Housed in a solander case bound in the same material as the cover boards with illustrations and lettering in silver. First Deluxe Edition. Text in English.

Diego Rivera was among the most restlessly ambitious artists of the twentieth century — a muralist of epic scale, a committed revolutionary, a collector of insatiable appetite. It is this last quality that gave rise to the Anahuacalli, and perhaps the most intimate monument to his inner life. From the 1940s onwards Rivera assembled one of the largest private collections of pre-Hispanic art ever gathered, ultimately running to some 60,000 pieces spanning the Aztec, Olmec, Toltec, Teotihuacan, and Zapotec cultures. To house them he designed, in collaboration with architect Juan O'Gorman, a building unlike anything else in Mexico City: a three-storey pyramid of volcanic stone from the Pedregal, its architecture drawing on the teocalli of ancient Mesoamerica while remaining unmistakably the creation of a twentieth-century artistic intelligence. Rivera did not live to see it completed — he died in 1957, and the Anahuacalli opened to the public in 1964 — but his vision survives intact, a temple in the most literal sense, designed so that the ground floor evokes the underworld and the upper levels ascend toward the celestial. This sumptuously produced monograph, published privately by Arturo Chapa and distributed in very limited numbers, is the most thorough visual and documentary record of the museum and its collection in English, and is rarely encountered in the trade.

Fine in a near fine pictorial dust jacket, in the original solander case. A pristine copy.

This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000458