Images from the curent exhibition @ the M.C.I.
The Rockefellers didn’t mind having their noses tweaked by Rivera. He had used his paintings to skewer the Standard Oil family before including in the painting on the right.
Inside Story: Diego Rivera at Rockefeller Center
By hola | Published | No Comments
Images from the curent exhibition @ the M.C.I.
To coincide with the exhibition up now in its art gallery, the Mexican Cultural Institute held a lecture about one of the 20th century’s juicier art world scandals: The 1930s dispute between Diego Rivera and the Rockefellers over the mural commissioned for the lobby of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.
The work was titled “Man at the Crossroads.” But disagreements arose over what man and which crossroads, so to speak. Rivera’s final version featured a single worker at its center, while depicting his devoutly religious, tea-totaling patron, John D. Rockefeller Jr., drinking in a bar. But it was Rivera’s refusal to paint over the image of Soviet communist leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin got most of the press coverage at the time.
The Rockefellers ended up destroying the mural, which was painted as a fresco directly onto the wall, but only after a protracted standoff with the Mexican artist and his supporters. There were street protests, dueling newspaper stories, as well as a lively debate over the limits of public and private spheres and who ultimately owns artwork as public as a mural.
Mexican photographer Pablo Ortiz Monasterio and art historian Susana Pliego Quijano, who co-authored a book on the topic, had the good fortune to peruse a trove of historical documents including the Frida Kahlo’s impeccably-kept archive of those years.
Here are a few takeaways from the discussion:
- The Rockefellers originally considered Pablo Picasso, and Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse for the job, as well. The three were considered the greatest artists of the 20th century at the time.
- Nelson Rockefeller, the grandson of robber baron who made the family’s fortune, did most of the negotiating with Rivera. He was just 24-years-old at the time.
- By the time he landed the Rockefeller Center gig, Rivera had already traveled the world, taking an active role in many of the major 20th century social and political movements. In the Soviet Union, he was impressed by the people power. When he came to the United States, he was fascinated by the towing heavy machinery—so much so, in fact, that he included them in more than one painting. In the Rockefeller Center mural, a towering machine, for instance, is depicted as “Coatlicue,” the Aztec goddess of motherhood.
- Of course, it was a journalist who started the feud by publishing a story claiming the Rockefellers were picking up the bill for Rivera’s communist paintings.
- Before their falling out, Diego and the Rockefellers hung out together. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of JD Jr., got Rivera the commission and was one of his most important patrons.
- The Rockefellers didn’t mind having their noses tweaked by Rivera. He had used his paintings to skewer the Standard Oil family before including in the painting on the right.
- Also depicted in the Rockefeller Center mural are Charles Lindbergh, his wife and baby son, who had be killed in a 1932 kidnapping attempted gone awry.
- Could the inclusion of the Lindbergs indicate that Rivera’s anti-Americanism has been somewhat overstated? His refusal to paint out Lenin and his placement of Rockefeller Jr. drinking among a group of degenerates set the anti-capitalist tone but adding the Lindberghs on the other side of the mural in a grouping representing the good people of the world, suggests a more nuanced view of Mexico’s northern neighbors.
- In hindsight: What’s a legend without a few legendary controversies and tales of woe? Or tales of “wail” in this case. The wall the mural briefly graced came to be know as “the Wailing Wall,” in reference to all the handwringing and consternation that still has us rivetted 80 years later.
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