The Library of Unwritten Lives: A Portrait of Marevna Reimagined

This conceptual reworking of Diego Rivera’s  Portrait of Marevna is titled  The Library of Unwritten Lives . It is a tribute not only to Rivera’s brief connection with the Russian-French painter Marevna Vorobëv-Stebelska, but to every forgotten muse, misunderstood mind, and fragmentary self stored in the archives of art. Set inside a cathedral-like library, where books orbit through space and luminous orbs collide with ink and intention, this portrait has left the canvas—and become a myth of knowledge, abstraction, and quiet force. 

Marevna was known for her connection to the Cubists, yet never fully accepted within their masculine inner circle. Here, I don’t position her passively within Rivera’s orbit—I give her an atmosphere of her own: an intellectual cosmos where fragments of identity, story, and color float as if suspended in perpetual motion. Her form, inspired by Rivera’s bold geometric vision, stands on the left—her cubist silhouette reconstructed with paper, texture, and patterned textiles. She is a sculpture of paper and thought, both open and unreadable. 

Books spin in the air—some open, others sealed—representing Marevna’s potential, her partial erasure, her resilience. They are not just books. They are testaments. Some soar skyward. Some collapse in piles on the richly patterned floor. The central stained glass window behind her is not religious but philosophical—a luminous metaphor for the structure of knowledge, framed like a rose window of a forgotten chapel, offering no god but memory. 

Color is the engine of meaning in this piece. The entire work is enveloped in the tension between night blue and flame red—two forces constantly negotiating dominance. The background cathedral walls glow in deep indigos and starlit teal, colors that evoke solitude, intellect, and the midnight hours of a woman painting while the world sleeps. These hues are spiritual but not romantic. They carry weight, like the velvet air inside a museum. 

Interspersed within these dark blues are flashes of fiery crimson, ochre, and neon magenta—bursts of urgency, creativity, and rage. These colors are not decorative—they are Marevna’s voice. They ripple outward from the floating red pen at the right of the canvas, writing symbols into space. This pen—disembodied and electric—suggests authorship. It is both Rivera’s tool and hers, though the piece leaves us wondering whose hand now writes history. 

The books themselves shimmer in copper, gold, and bone white. Their colors represent fragments of forgotten lives, untold ideas, and incomplete conversations. Some seem burned at the edges, like censored thoughts. Others glow gently, like memories passed down by candlelight. These color choices weren’t made for aesthetic pleasure—they were chosen to mourn and honor the countless women of modernism left footnoted beneath their male counterparts. 

On the right side of the canvas, subtle cosmic purples begin to flood the space—blending with spheres of ink and fire that swirl between ladders and scattered manuscripts. These purples are not of this earth. They are symbolic of the imagination Marevna inhabited. They suggest both the mystic and the mathematical, a place where creativity dances with calculation. 

In the lower right quadrant, the textures become denser. A wooden writing desk with carved legs emerges in shadow, surrounded by soft stacks of books that feel like altars. On this desk, a surreal window opens to a different world—one where a child sketches, an angel floats, or a star implodes. These layered references to Rivera’s murals and Marevna’s own cubist work underscore the many dimensions from which one can create identity. The desk doesn’t ground the piece—it roots it in memory. 

When I created  The Library of Unwritten Lives , I was thinking about the spaces women artists were given—and the ones they carved out for themselves. Marevna, despite her brilliance, was most often labeled by her proximity to men. I imagined her not in Rivera’s shadow, but in a vault of her own power. In this reinterpretation, she is neither muse nor mistress. She is knowledge embodied. She is both the book and the author. The cubist fragments of her face are no longer broken—they are building blocks of permanence. 

Her gaze, though geometric, is steady. She stares not at the viewer, but inward, into the pages of her own unwritten life. Around her swirl echoes of Rivera’s influence, the modernist milieu, and the library of humanity’s half-remembered stories. She does not cry out. She does not need to. The room spins around her, but she remains centered—anchored by intellect and symbol. 

The composition flows like thought itself: nonlinear, abstract, yet emotionally coherent. Light bends and folds between brushstrokes and rendered forms. The viewer is not meant to see one thing, but to be moved through space—through ideas. Rivera’s formalism merges with a more fluid surrealism, allowing this piece to become a shrine for the unseen.