DALLAS -- A new exhibit on Diego Rivera explores a not-often-seen aspect of the Mexican artist's work -- the portraits he painted while living in Paris.

Diego Rivera: The Cubist Portraits, 1913-1917, which runs through Sept. 20 at Southern Methodist University's Meadows Museum, features 31 of Rivera's works, several of which are being exhibited publicly for the first time.

''It's like a very curious aspect of his career,'' says Sylvia Navarrette, the independent Mexican scholar who curated the exhibit.

The show explores the artist's experimentation with the highly influential, geometric style of art that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque had begun creating a few years before Rivera, most famous for his signature murals and his marriage to Frida Kahlo, arrived in France. Cubism rejects perspective, foreshortening and other traditional techniques and encourages its practitioners to create new realities through fragmentation.

''Almost all of the Cubist portraits that he did are together here,'' says Mark Roglan, director of the Meadows Museum. Rivera began to paint them in his late 20s, and some feature loved ones and friends, including artist Angelina Beloff and the child she had with Rivera, Russian novelist Ilya Ehrenburg and Mexican writer Martin Luis Guzman.

Others reflect Rivera's friendships with members of Paris' Russian emigre community, Navarrette says. ``It's like a visual diary of the community of refugees.''

The exhibit, which includes descriptions in English and Spanish, also shows viewers how Rivera's Cubist works progressed.

''He was exploring Cubism and almost goes to abstraction,'' Roglan says.

Born in Mexico in 1886, Rivera worked in Europe from 1907 to 1921, mostly in Spain and France. Abandoning Cubism in 1917 after physically assaulting an critic who disparaged the style, he returned to Mexico in 1921 and began his work with murals. He died, at 70, in 1957.

Carlos Phillips, who was sketched by Rivera as a teen and whose mother was a friend, says he always remembers the charm of the physically imposing Rivera -- who stood more than 6 feet tall and weighed about 300 pounds.

''He was very big, and he had an enormous character,'' says Phillips, now director of Mexico's Dolores Olmedo Museum, which is named for his mother and features works by Kahlo and Rivera. ``He had a way with women that you can't believe it.''

The exhibit also showcases works by friends of Rivera along with commentary from the artist's autobiography. Rivera, who came somewhat late to Cubism, said that from the beginning, he accepted Picasso's mastery.

''I readily proclaimed myself Picasso's disciple,'' he writes. ``I have always been proud that Picasso was not only my teacher but my very dear and close friend.''

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