1930
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Communist Ideology for Capitalist
Clients
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The Mexican mural movement stimulated
the integration of literary, artistic and intellectual forces in
post-revolutionary Mexico and made a major contribution to the formation
of a cultural Mecca which attracted many artists from the United States,
Europe and other Latin American countries. In the United States the works
of the "three great Mexican muralists", Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro
Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, were well-known from the 1920s, after the
publication of numerous articles and a large influx of cultural tourists
to Mexico to watch the artists at work. After many commissions for easel
works had been received, especially by Rivera from American collectors,
the latter was also commissioned to paint murals for American city
authorities.
Rivera had received repeated invitations
from his friend Ralph Stackpole to work in San Francisco. The Californian
sculptor had become acquainted with Rivera in Paris, and the friendship
deepened in 1926 when Stackpole visited Mexico. He greatly admired
Rivera's work at the Ministry of Education and at Chapingo, and had bought
some of his paintings and taken them home. One of these came as a gift
into the possession of William Gerstle, the president of the San Francisco
Art Commission. The art connoisseur was very keen for Rivera to paint a
wall in the California School of Fine Arts, and Rivera was glad to accept
the commission. When in 1929, together with other artists, he was
commissioned to decorate the new San Francisco Pacific Stock Exchange
building, Stackpole arranged for a wall to be reserved for the famous
Mexican muralist.
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1932
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Flower Festival
1925
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Las Ilusiones
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Rivera's decision to make an extended
stay in the United States was not only a response to American demand. The
situation had progressively worsened for muralists during President Calles'
term of office (1924-1928), most of them receiving no further commissions.
The following years too were marked by repression of dissenting political
voices. In 1929 the Communist Party was banned and many Communists,
including Siqueiros, were imprisoned. The result was a cultural wave of
emigration of many progressive artists and intellectuals to the United
States, where many were offered alternative opportunities for work.
At first Rivera was refused entry into
the United States because of his Communist opinions. This is scarcely
surprising: although he had ceased to be a member of the Communist Party
in 1929, as general secretary of the Anti-imperialistic League of American
Countries he had severely condemned President Herbert Hoover,
visiting Mexico in late 1928, for his Nicaraguan policy. He finally
obtained a visa through the support of his friend the insurance agent and
art collector Albert M. Bender, who had bought Rivera's work on previous
visits to Mexico, and who had contacts with influential figures. From this
time Rivera was criticized in the United States for accepting contracts
from American institutions, not only by the media, from which he attracted
anti-Communist comment, but also by envious fellow-artists in San
Francisco. The fact that the Mexican was offered projects from which they
were barred became more conspicuously evident than ever when at the end of
1930 he was allowed to exhibit the considerable number of 120 works at the
California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Only after he had finished the
commissioned murals, which were enthusiastically received not only by the
public at large but also by the press, and after Rivera had made public
appearances with his artist wife, was there a general critical change of
opinion.
From December 1930 to February 1931
Rivera painted the mural Allegory of California for the
Luncheon Club of the San Francisco Pacific Stock Exchange.
Together with his work in the Stock Exchange building it was unveiled in
March. After a holiday on the property of the Stern family in Atherton,
California, where he painted a small-size fresco in his hosts' dining
room, in April-June 1931 he completed The Making of a Fresco for the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art
Institute.
Allegory of California
1930-1931
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The Making of a Fresco
1931
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As soon as he had finished these works,
Rivera was obliged to return to Mexico to meet the president's request for
him to finish his abandoned work in the National Palace. Soon after his
return he received an offer of a large-scale exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. Following the Henri Matisse retrospective, it was
only the second one-man exhibition organized by the Museum, which had been
founded in 1929, and there was no further exhibition of comparable scope
and importance in the United States until the exhibition in commemoration
of Rivera's birth in 1986. After the main wall of the stairway of the
National Palace had been completed, the rest of the work in the Palace was
now interrupted once again; with Frida Kahlo and the well-known art dealer
Frances Flynn Paine, Rivera sailed for New York on board the steamer
Morro Castle. As a member of the powerful Mexican Arts Association,
which was financed by the Rockefeller family, Paine had made the offer of
the retrospective to Rivera in Mexico. The latter used the voyage to
complete various easel paintings after studies in his sketchbook,
predominantly variations on details of his frescoes at the Ministry of
Education. In the month remaining between his arrival in New York and the
private view, Rivera worked as if possessed on eight portable frescoes, of
which five were also versions of scenes from his Mexican murals, the other
three expressing his first impressions of New York in the Depression
years. When the retrospective opened on 23 December, 150 works had been
assembled. The overwhelmingly favourable press reviews brought 57,000
visitors to the exhibition - a considerable figure for the time.
Through the popular American world
tennis champion Helen Wills Moody, who was also an art connoisseur,
portrayed in the central female
figure of the mural Allegory of
California in San Francisco, Rivera met the leading representatives of
the Detroit Institute of Arts, Dr Edgar P. Richardson and Dr William R.
Valentiner. The two directors of the museum offered him an exhibition of
paintings and drawings in February/March 1931 and proposed to the
Institute's governing body, the Arts Commission of the City of Detroit,
that Rivera should be commissioned to paint a mural in the museum's Garden
Court. The muralist, as Richardson enthusiastically put it, had "perfected
a powerful narrative style", which made him "the only living artist who
can adequately represent the world we live in". Richardson found it
interesting that "while most painting of the present day is abstract and
introspective, an artist like Diego Rivera emerges, whose powerful and
dramatic art can give incomparable narrative form to any subject he likes.
He is a great painter and his subject-matter demands greatness."
Thanks to the support of Edsel B. Ford,
chairman of the City Arts Commission, Rivera was able to start work on
preparations for the murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts in January
1932, immediately after the New York exhibition had ended. With Frida
Kahlo he booked into a hotel situated opposite the museum. Edsel B. Ford,
son of Henry Ford and first president of the Ford Motor Company in
Detroit, had a budget of 10,000 dollars for the frescoes. The Institute's
plan for only two wall surfaces of the inner courtyard to be painted, so
as to ensure what was felt to be the appropriate artist's fee of 100
dollars per square metre painted, was rejected by Rivera when he inspected
the site. He was so inspired by the spacious wall surfaces that he agreed
without further ado to paint all four of them for the same total fee. For
he saw that the subject-matter prescribed by the Commission would allow
him to realize his dream - the creation of an epic of industry and the
machine.
In the United States the
fresco series
Detroit Industry is today considered one of the century's
outstanding achievements in monumental art. The frescoes are a synthesis
of the artist's impressions during his studies of the Ford family's
industrial plant, and especially of what he saw at the River Rouge
complex. A few months previously, the first new Ford Model V-8 had come
off the production lines, and Rivera depicted its production in these
murals. At the Ford works he became acquainted with the routines of
factory work and the grave problems that had been caused by the anti-union
policies of the period, and observed the miserable condition of the poorer
classes that had been brought about by the world economic crisis. Before
the scaffolding had even been erected in the courtyard of the museum the
artist was designing the composition of the murals in preparatory
sketches, from which he then progressed to drawings which were accepted by
the Commission. "I've had to do a lot of preparatory work," Rivera wrote
at the time to his friend Bertram D. Wolfe, "which has consisted mostly of
observation. There will be 27 frescoes, which together will form a plastic
and thematic unity. I am hoping that this series will be the most complete
of my works; I feel the same excitement towards the industrial material of
this place as I did towards rural material when I went back to Mexico ten
years ago."
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1933
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The mural series on the four walls around the courtyard incorporates an
iconography of the points of the compass, and where the walls mark off the
limits of the cosmos, space is extended by the mural paintings.
Together with the decoration of the Chapingo Chapel, this is the only
opportunity that Rivera had to design a set of frescoes of comparable
completeness to that of the Renaissance spatial designs of the Arena or
Sistine Chapels; all his other murals are on separate walls or aligned
groups of walls. He began work in July 1932 on the east wall opposite the
main entrance. These murals represent the origins of human life and of
technology. The infant depicted is often seen as the son of Diego and
Frida lost in a miscarriage while they were in Detroit, and here
immortalized as a symbol of the cycle of nature. On the west wall, through
which the inner courtyard is reached, the new technologies of air and
water are depicted. In the most advanced technical achievement of the
time, the aeroplane, man's triumph over nature is represented. On the one
hand peaceful use of technology is shown in the manufacture of a passenger
aircraft in process in the aeronautical department of the Ford company, on
the other its misuse in a warplane. Rivera not only pursues the theme of
duality in the grisaille central area of the wall, where the coexistence
of nature and technology, life and death is symbolized, illuminated by the
star of human hope and striving, but makes it the main theme of this
entire series.
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Detroit Industry or
Man and Machine
1932-1933
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Detroit Industry or
Man and Machine
1932-1933
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Detroit Industry or
Man and Machine
1932-1933
North Wall
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Detroit Industry or
Man and Machine
1932-1933
South Wall
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On each of the north and
south walls two androgynous guardian figures sit enthroned above the
achievements and also the misuse of industry, pharmacy, medicine and
science in Detroit. They represent the four races that make up the
workforce of North America, and hold the mineral resources of coal, iron,
chalk and sand in their hands - the four basic ingredients in production
of the steel needed for automobile manufacture. In the main areas of each
of the north and south walls the different stages in production of the
Ford Model V-8 car are shown: motor manufacture on the one wall and the
bodywork assembly line on the other. For the figures of the workers in the
foreground on the north wall Rivera used portraits of his assistants and
of Ford workers.
Aztec Coatlicue
figure, c. 1487-1521
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In the murals of
these two walls Rivera once again draws on various artistic models.
The compression of space, the representation of simultaneous events,
the breaking up of forms into basic geometric elements, are clearly
derived from the compositional method of Cubism. The massive
creations of pre-Columbian sculpture served as models for the
gigantic machinery. The whole composition of these murals, the
subdivision of each wall into main and subsidiary fields, the
inclusion of portraits of donor figures, the depiction of the
vaccination of a child in the manner of a Christian motif - all this
refers back to Italian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting;
the relief-like, monochrome, grisaille frieze running along the
bottom of each main wall area is reminiscent of tympanum sculpture
in medieval churches. Overall, Rivera creates a new aesthetic for
the steel age.
While Rivera was still working on
Detroit Industry, he was commissioned to paint a mural in the
main corridor of the lobby of the as yet unfinished RCA building,
known as the Rockefeller Center, in New York, and in 1933,
continuing the leading theme of the Detroit frescoes, he painted
Man at the Crossroads, "Looking with Hope and High Vision to
the Choosing of a New and Better Future", as the commissioning
committee worded the theme. The Mexican artist's murals had already
provoked controversy in the United States; now in New York the
political position he expressed in the new fresco was to cause a
major confrontation.
Overall design for the mural begun in
the RCA Building,
New York and destroyed before completion
Man at the Crossroads, Looking with Hope and High Vision
to the Choosing of a New and Better Future, 1932.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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In Detroit critics had claimed to find
blasphemous, pornographic and Communist elements in his work, and held it
against him that he had admitted the raw world of industry into the
sublime world of culture. The safety of his work had been in question, and
physical attacks on it had been threatened, until eventually Edsel B.
Ford had made a public statement in support of Rivera. This was not to
happen in New York when a showdown occurred over the mural at the
Rockefeller Center, in which Rivera expressed his views on the evils of
capitalism and the positive aspects of socialism. Only the previous month,
April 1933, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of John D. Rockefeller, viewing
the work while it was being painted, had praised Rivera's depiction of the
Moscow May Day celebrations and bought the sketchbook containing
preparatory drawings for it. However, a portrait of Lenin with other
Communist ideologues now suddenly appeared in the mural as representatives
of the new society; it had not been shown in the preparatory drawing
approved by the commissioning committee. This drew bitter reactions from
the conservative press and contrasting expressions of support for the
artist from the progressive organizations of New York. The brothers Nelson
and John D. Rockefeller, as the client's representatives, got in touch
with the artist. Rivera refused their request to paint out the portrait.
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The unfinished mural was covered early
in May; the artist was paid off and released from his obligation. So ended
the capitalist world's patronage of the Mexican, and he returned in
disappointment to his home country.
In February 1934 the mural was wholly
destroyed, but in the same year Rivera received the opportunity to paint
an almost identical version of the planned New York mural, entitled
Man, Controller of the Universe, in the Palace of Fine
Arts (Palacio de Bellas Artes) in Mexico City,
the first in a series of works by the leading figures of the "Renaissance
of Mexican mural painting" commissioned by the Mexican government.
In the course of his four-year sojourn
in the north, Rivera had become one of the most famous artists in the
United States, as celebrated by the intellectual left and the artistic
community as he was despised by the conservatives and industrialists. The
destruction of his mural was the destruction of the illusion that he had
found in the United States a country of clients who would allow him to
make free artistic use of his political views.
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Man, Controller of the Universe
or Man in theTime Machine
1934
Palacio de Bella Artes,
Mexico City
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Man, Controller of the Universe
or Man in theTime Machine (detail)
1934
Palacio de Bella Artes,
Mexico City
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Man, Controller of the Universe
or Man in theTime Machine (detail)
1934
Palacio de Bella Artes,
Mexico City
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Man, Controller of the Universe
or Man in theTime Machine (detail)
1934
Palacio de Bella Artes,
Mexico City
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Man, Controller of the Universe
or Man in theTime Machine (detail)
1934
Palacio de Bella Artes,
Mexico City
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Man, Controller of the Universe
or Man in theTime Machine (detail)
Lenin and Trotsky
1934
Palacio de Bella Artes,
Mexico City
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