Last week we saw Diego Rivera paint a series of murals for the Detroit Institute of Art that celebrated the workers and the industry of the city. It was 1932 and the Great Depression was devastating the country’s economy. Hoping for some good press, the President of the Ford Motor Company put up the money for the murals.
In 2011, critic Peter Schjeldahl called Rivera “a shaper of popular imagination” of his day, who deserved to be ranked alongside people like Walt Disney and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce. “A time of industrial grandeur and disruption craved geniuses who would flatter its pride and mediate its passions,” Schjeldahl wrote. “A sense of Rivera’s potential, as a good-will ambassador at large, explains the complaisance of [wealthy individuals like Ford] who must reasonably have expected that he could be bought.” Not a good assumption. Rivera could not be paid to paint something he didn’t believe in.
Even before the murals opened to the public there were whispers about them being inappropriate for an American public space. The weekend after the museum officially unveiled the work, over 10,000 people came to see it. From the multi-racial makeup of the workforce to a panel that showed a baby being vaccinated, people condemned the murals as sacrilegious, pornographic, and, because they showed factory workers, communist.
Less than a week later, a Detroit councilman introduced a resolution demanding they be scrubbed off the walls. The Detroit News called them “foolishly vulgar” and “a slander to Detroit workingmen.” The Detroit Free Press called them “decadent art” that could not be taken seriously. When, as a result of all this, threats to the murals began to be phoned in, factory workers volunteered to stand guard over them. Rivera loved that.
“What I did not understand,” he himself said later, “was that certain people in Detroit were looking for a pretext to attack me and my mural.” Rivera himself came to regard the 27 panels of the mural as the finest of his career
In 2014 the Secretary of the Interior and the National Park Service designated the murals as a national historic landmark. The NPS describes the murals as “one of the country's finest, modern monumental artworks devoted to industry.” Often considered to be the most complex artworks devoted to American Industry, the Detroit Industry mural cycle depicts the city's manufacturing base and labor force”
Rivera’s mural weathered the McCarthy era with a sign that defended them as art while opining that the artist’s politics were “detestable.” It may be worth a look at how art navigated those difficult waters next time.
