The curators have taken him at his word, editing out his more gimmicky efforts, emptying out the museum and turning it into a spare, unhurried tour of his art.
That helps explain why most of the 60-minute work takes place in the empty rooms that the museum has yet to restore.
But the MAXXI would open empty, partly because the museum has not yet acquired nearly enough contemporary art to fill the vast gallery spaces (it won't be a fully functioning museum until next spring, at the earliest).
Rivera also enjoyed working late into the night in a makeshift studio with no heat (heat would have made the paint dry too quickly) in an empty gallery at the museum.
In the six weeks leading up to his retrospective, Rivera and his assistants worked feverishly on these portable murals in an empty gallery of the museum that had been converted into a temporary studio.
For instance, the Barbican version made use of the curved wall of the exhibition space, while the MoMA iteration is in a much larger area, housed in a structure that was built specifically to house the installation in an empty lot beside the museum.
Which is how I found myself on the top of a scaffold 60 feet in the air in the perfect midnight quiet of the empty museum, squinting at the words "Cerca Trova".
Since 2013, The Metropolitan Museum's senior social media manager, Taylor Newby, has hosted the "empty" museum series through the hashtag #emptymet.
"We've joined the Ellsworth Kelly exhibit," the choreographer Dean Moss said, laughing, his voice sounding strange in the empty museum as he described how the Mylar prop had gotten wedged there during a rehearsal.
Over the last several weeks, the artist leaked the news that his show would not just include every single work he had ever made, but that he would dangle it all from the top of the Guggenheim's rotunda, leaving the rest of the museum empty.
