Source – npr.org
– Destroyed By Rockefellers, Mural Trespassed On Political Vision:
When Mexican artist Diego Rivera was commissioned in 1932 to do a mural in the middle of Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, some might have wondered whether industrialist tycoon John D. Rockefeller Jr. knew what he was getting into.
In 1934, the legendary artist’s work was chiseled off the wall.
Now, in Washington, D.C., the Mexican Cultural Institute has mounted a show that tells what happened to Rivera’s mural.
Artist Diego Rivera stands with a copy of the mural he painted at Rockefeller Center that was eventually destroyed.
A. Estrada /Courtesy of Museo Frida Kalho
“Man at the Crossroads: Diego Rivera’s Mural at Rockefeller Center,” is a whodunit tale that also illustrates the tensions between art and politics. Exhibition co-curator Susana Pliego says the Rockefeller family was aware of Rivera’s leftist politics when it commissioned the work.
“They tried to have pieces of the best artists at the time,” Pliego says. “That was why [they wanted it], because of the artistic and commercial value of his work.”
Pliego says Rivera got a three-page contract laying out exactly what management wanted.
Rivera was asked to show a man at the crossroads, looking with uncertainty but with hope and high vision to the choosing of a course leading to a new and better future.
“The theme of Rockefeller Center was ‘New Frontiers,’ so that was a very spiritual way of looking at development and art,” Pliego says. She wonders what made the Rockefellers think that Rivera’s vision would be the same as theirs.
A Difference Of Vision
“It was a bad decision for everyone, but it’s about politics,” co-curator Pablo Ortiz Monasterio says. “When you have to take a position, there is no other way out.”
Monasterio says the show illustrates the conflict between the rich, powerful family that hired Rivera and the artist’s strong political point of view.
Pliego says the original sketch for the mural — and what Rivera agreed to paint — included three men clasping hands in the middle: a soldier, a worker and peasant. “A spiritual union of all the three elements that Rivera thought man — humanity — was composed of,” she says.
“Unfortunately, what he painted was different from the sketch,” David Rockefeller Sr. told the Museum of Modern Art in 2012.
An early sketch of the mural shows how it differed from what Diego Rivera painted in Rockefeller Center.
Courtesy of Museo Frida Kahlo
The leftist artist was taunted by those who felt he had sold out, Rivera expert Linda Downs says.
“He was really provoked in New York by leftist organizations and various communist groups that challenged him for painting for Rockefeller,” she says.
Then, the World Telegram newspaper ran the headline: “Rivera Paints Scenes of Communist Activity and John D. Jr. Foots the Bill.” Pliego says Rivera then decided to add a portrait of communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to the mural.
“He sent his assistants to find a picture of Lenin because, he said, ‘If you want communism, I will paint communism,’ ” Pliego says.
On top of that, according to David Rockefeller Sr., Rivera added a panel that the family felt was an unflattering portrait of his father.
“The picture of Lenin was on the right-hand side, and on the left, a picture of [my] father drinking martinis with a harlot and various other things that were unflattering to the family and clearly inappropriate to have as the center of Rockefeller Center,” he said.
“He had these two options,” Monasterio says. “He could erase that and solve the problem, but if he didn’t, then that would be a scandal; that would be propaganda. So he himself was at the crossroads again.”
Rivera had persuaded his patrons to let him paint a fresco — paint on wet plaster instead of on canvas. That meant the work couldn’t be moved. After a flurry of letters asking Rivera to replace Lenin and the artist’s declaration that he’d rather see the work destroyed than mutilated, Rivera was fired and the work was eventually chiseled off.
A Missing Piece Of History
Downs says the piece would have been stunning had it survived.
“He had this vision of the importance of technology in the future and the hope that there would be a coming together of workers and industrialists and businessmen to further mankind in general,” Downs says. “It was a very hopeful mural.”
Pliego says the exhibition illustrates a key question: Who owns a work of art?
“For example, like Diego said in a letter,” she says, “‘If someone buys the Sistine Chapel, does he have the authority to destroy it?’ ”
The exhibition, “Man at the Crossroads: Diego Rivera’s Mural at Rockefeller Center,” reconstructs the story of the mural through reproductions of documents, letters, photographs and Rivera’s sketches. It will be on display at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C., through May 17.
Related…
Agrarian Leader Zapata – Diego Rivera (1931)
Dedicated to the slain revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) and the campesinos, or peasant farm workers, who followed him, this fresco is a copy of a detail from a larger mural cycle Rivera made in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a few years earlier. It is one of eight “portable” frescoes Rivera produced expressly for his solo exhibition at MoMA in 1931. In a studio the Museum provided him above its galleries, he worked around the clock for a month to produce paintings that, unlike traditional frescoes, were intended to be transportable. The works demonstrate Rivera’s mastery of the medium and were a critical and popular success. During its five-week run, the exhibition broke Museum attendance records and led to important public commissions from the Ford and Rockefeller families.
Rivera was the best-known and most prolific artist of the Mexican mural renaissance, which began in the 1920s in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Through government-sponsored public murals, he and other Mexican artists sought to communicate and foster national pride, and in the process they captured the public imagination in the United States as well. Rivera described the movement’s utopian ideals, stating, “For the first time in the history of monumental painting, Mexican muralism ended the focus on gods, kings, and heads of state” and “made the masses the hero of monumental art.”
Related…
Guess how Diego Rivera died???
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ms. Kahlo and Mr. Rivera, let’s just say their relationship was non-traditional. Diego was incapable of fidelity and had numerous affairs with every glamorous woman from Mexico City to New York, including Frida’s sister, Cristina. It should be said that I don’t think this makes him a bad person. He was honest about needing extramarital sex and I personally believe some people are not built for monogamy. Besides, Frida had affairs of her own with people like Leon Trotsky and Georgia O’Keefe. What’s interesting about this whole predicament is that Diego’s affairs broke Frida’s heart over and over and over again and yet she maintained that she could not love Diego for what he’s not. Of all the things Frida has taught me, this is the one lesson that has helped me the most. You have to love people for exactly what they are. You can’t say, “I love you but you have to change your clothes/taste in music/mother.” You have to love everything about them, even the stuff you don’t like. It’s all about what you’re willing to put up with. Either you can love someone despite his or her flaws or you can’t. Frida loved Diego more than anything in this universe. In a letter to him she wrote:
“I love you more than my own skin”
But the interesting thing is how Diego died. Look it up anywhere and sources will say his cause of death was cardiac arrest or heart failure, but that’s a cop out. Everybody dies of heart failure. I’m no medical expert but I’m pretty sure it’s a univeral truth that your heart arrests, then fails, then you die. SO the real question is how did Diego die?
Any guesses?
It wasn’t a heart attack from working too hard (or f*cking too hard)
It wasn’t diabetes caused by his obesity
It was…
Cancer
Of
The
PENIS! You have no idea how hard I laughed at this. I know it’s not particularly graceful to laugh about someone’s death, but it is HILARIOUS. His death certificate might as well read “killed by irony.” How do I know all this you ask? I watched a youtube video of a lecture Hayden Herrera, the most well respected Frida biographer, gave in 2009 and she mentions it toward the end. I highly recommend that you watch this lecture. Even if you think you know everything about Frida (like moi), you’ll hear some things you haven’t heard before.
But yes, cancer of the penis is how Mr. Rivera died. Apparently the doctors wanted to amputate his penis but he wouldn’t let them. He went to Russia for crazy radiation treatments instead which made him even sicker. Yep. Gooood moooorning!
Here’s the link:
http://fridatherapy.blogspot.ca/2010/10/guess-how-diego-rivera-died.html
RIELPOLITIK 