The Flower Vendor (Girl with Lilies)

1941
Diego Rivera (Mexican, 1886–1957)
Oil on masonite
Norton Simon Museum, Gift of Mr. Cary Grant
© Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Rivera was among the leading North American artists of the twentieth century, best remembered for the public murals he painted throughout Mexico and the United States. He arrived at his distinctive brand of stylized naturalism after a decade in Paris (1909–1919), where he had befriended such European artists as Picasso and Duchamp and experimented with various avant-garde approaches. Pre-Columbian art of his native country, however, would present the key source for Rivera’s mature style, characterized by emphatic color, simplified forms, and a dramatic tension between flatness and three-dimensional modeling. The figure of the flower vendor formed a recurring theme in Rivera’s work, appearing both in his murals and in easel paintings like this one. The indigenous girl, kneeling before her pile of calla lilies—a flower associated with funerals and death—constitutes an ode at once to the beauty of Mexico’s native cultures and to the suffering of her native peoples.

Rivera’s The Flower Vendor (Girl with Lilies) (1941): An Icon from an Icon

When Norton Simon met and married actress Jennifer Jones, he was introduced to the Los Angeles film industry’s elite. Some of these movie stars would eventually sit on the Museum’s board, including Cary Grant, who served as a Trustee from 1979 until his death in 1986, and who donated three works to the collection, including The Flower Vendor. In 2024 Museum staff determined that the actor owned the painting as early as 1946, based on its appearance in a publicity photo from that date. Leslie Denk, Vice President of External Affairs, explores Grant’s and other Hollywood stars’ relationships with the Museum in an essay for the 2025 publication Recollections: Stories from the Norton Simon Museum.

To see the publicity photo of Grant and the Rivera, visit the exhibition Retrospect: 50 Years at the Norton Simon Museum, on view in the Focus Gallery on the Museum’s main level.