Diego Rivera mural in Detroit
I traveled to Detroit over the weekend to judge a student cooking contest and walked right into one of the greatest works executed by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.
At the height of the Great Depression, Detroit’s fine arts commission, then headed by Edsel Ford, son of Henry Ford and president of Ford Motor Company, hired Rivera to decorate the walls of the central courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Arts. Friends had suggested the institute as one way I might spend a Sunday afternoon, but never mentioned the Rivera installation, considered by many to be his finest work.
It was an appropriate find: The student cooking competition I would judge on Monday was part of “Taking Root,” an annual confab of healthy school food and farm to school advocates from around the country. Rivera, besides being an artist and avowed Trotskyite, firmly believed that technological progress needed to embrace its roots in biology and a healthy ecosystem. The allegorical panels he painted depicting Detroit’s automobile industry begin with a human embryo encapsulated in the root of a sugar beet plant.
Auto assembly in Rivera mural
I’ve seen many of Rivera’s murals in Mexico. He used the traditional fresco technique, meaning he painted water colors on wet plaster. He spent months researching Detroit’s automobile and chemical industries, visiting various factories and fabrication plants. The Ford “Rouge” assembly plant was, at the time, the biggest industrial complex in the world.
Rivera and wife Frida Kahlo took up residence in a hotel near the museum. Kahlo while in Detroit would suffer a miscarriage, inspiring some of her greatest feminist works on canvass.
Painting the murals was a huge production involving numerous assistants who ground the pigments used in Rivera’s paints by hand, measured the humidity level in the museum constantly, and mixed the plaster. Rivera painted from huge, life-size “cartoons,” or drawings, of the panels that were pinned to the walls to guide him. Some 50 years after Rivera completed the murals, the original drawings were found hidden away in a dusty attic.
Self-portrait in a mural panel
Rivera believed in technology’s potential to lift the standard of living for all people, but he also warned of its destructive capabilities. In the Detroit murals, he depicted the construction of passenger planes side-by-side with war planes. In one panel, he painted himself looking rather glum next to the square-jawed industrialist who’s eyes are firmly fixed on a capitalistic future. Rivera used traditional native American beliefs as well as classical European artistic themes to convey meaning and create a sense of harmony in the murals.
Detroit Institute of Art
Detroit as a city is a shadow of its former self. But its Institute of Art still houses one of the largest municipally-owned art colections in the country. It’s a fine museum. The building was designed by Paul Cret, who also was responsible for the Pan American Union Building here in the District of Columbia, now known as the Organization of American States. If you do visit the Diego Rivera murals, be sure to ask for the audio tour, which explains each panel and how the murals were painted in great detail.
Soon after Rivera finished the murals in 1933, they were attacked in the press for being vulgar and heretical toward the Catholic church. Rivera went on to execute a similarly controversial work at Rockefeller Center in New York. That mural was destroyed by the building’s rental agents afer Rivera refused to remove a depiction of Lenin.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
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