Art attack Action Speaks! examines the collision between Marxist art and American capitalism BY TE-PING CHEN

In 1932, billionaire John D. Rockefeller offered popular Mexican artist Diego Rivera a contract to paint the lobby of New York City’s Rockefeller Center. It was an incongruous pairing from the start— an ardent Marxist muralist commissioned to adorn an edifice symbolizing the power of the American economy — so perhaps it’s no surprise that it ultimately proved explosive.

As his 63-foot-long tribute to the 20th-century possibilities of Man At the Crossroads neared completion, Rivera inserted the unauthorized figure of Vladimir Lenin leading a May Day parade. The anti-capitalist message sparked official outrage in the papers: Rockefeller was livid, but Rivera adamantly refused to alter the image. In the dead of a winter’s night, workmen carrying axes were sent to destroy the offending mural. Rivera never worked in the US again.

On Tuesday, October 11 from 5:30-7 pm, this event will be the focus of the second installment of the annual Action Speaks! discussion series at AS220, 115 Empire Street, Providence. The forum, a collaboration between AS220, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities (the Phoenix is a cosponsor), examines "underappreciated days that changed America," with a particular focus this year on the meaning of "the commons" and issues of public ownership. A related documentary, chronicling the history of the WPA-funded Federal Theatre Project, will be broadcast Monday, October 10 at 9 pm on RI PBS, Channel 36.

The panel features Paul Buhle, senior lecturer at Brown University and author of Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World; Julia Bryan-Wilson, assistant professor of contemporary art and visual culture at RISD; and Anthony Lee, associate professor of modern and contemporary art at Mount Holyoke College, author of Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics and San Francisco’s Public Murals (University of California Press, 1999).

Lee spoke with the Phoenix from his office in Massachusetts last week.

Much of your work focuses on "decoding" the visual by connecting it with social and political history. What combined popular and political currents within US society led to the 1934 destruction of Rivera’s mural?

Things get destroyed because they get too dangerous. 1934 was a really bad year in America. A lot of people were out of work, labor unions were organizing and becoming quite violent; the Communist Party was gaining more ground than it ever had in this country. And then there was Rivera painting in such a way that somehow he was activating the sensibilities of all these groups, and giving them form in high culture. It didn’t help that the mural was by an immigrant — not just an immigrant, but a Mexican, a self-proclaimed Marxist. It didn’t help that it was painted in the middle of Rockefeller Plaza, the great brand-new ode to capitalism. But still, [officials] could have swallowed all of that if the mural didn’t activate the sensibilities of people who were angry. Whether or not these people would actually rise up and protest, that threat — that provocation that this mural represented — led in part to the mural’s destruction.

How did Rivera’s privately commissioned work differ from the art he created for public spaces?

Rivera’s drawings, oil paintings, and pastels are very different from his public work. They’re often indulging in Mexicanidad, a celebration of all things Mexican, an important movement in the 20th century. It could mean drawing peasants, or celebrating landscapes, or picturing folk or artisanal customs. After the Mexican Revolution, celebrating Mexicanness was an important large-scale cultural project, and Rivera was fully a part of that. But with several exceptions, for one reason or another, it never really found his way into his large-scale mural projects in this country.

Rivera gained access to the public through the patronage of the wealthy. How do you view the relationship between radical artists and their well-endowed patrons?

A patron’s ambitions for art are always one thing, but how those ambitions are translated and how art is received by its’ viewers is another. What’s great about the 1930s is that radical politics take hold of art’s reception, and so many patrons’ ambitions go awry. In Rivera’s case, Rockefeller was really miffed that the muralist didn’t follow through on sketches, and instead painted overtly Marxist imagery. Rockefeller didn’t want to compromise. He was a guy who was accustomed to having his own way, and this other uncompromising guy showed up — a Mexican, no less — who promised to paint one thing, and then went and painted something entirely different. The two men did not end up having a good relationship.

What if anything was there about Rivera as an artist that made his work particularly threatening?

In the 1930s, much of what was thought of as modern art was really European-leaning. The Museum of Modern Art was only recently founded at that point, with a collection built upon European works of art. Then all of a sudden here’s this Mexican, someone whose work didn’t jibe with what many in the art world thought modernism should be. It made it easy for Rockefeller to dismiss and destroy Rivera’s work. God forbid, if Picasso had painted that mural, they would never have destroyed it! Or if Matisse had painted it? Never. Those artists fit into an understanding of the bohemianism and radicalness implicit in European modernism that people could not abide in a Mexican.

What are the origins of public art in the United States, and how has its role evolved over time?

There has always been space for the public presentation of art, objects with largely symbolic purposes that are meant to stand testimony to something official. State architecture is a form of public art — even the layout of Washington, DC, is a form of public art. It’s when these objects became more than simple testimony that the nature of public art changed. The current debate over the rebuilding of the Twin Towers is a case in point: no one can settle on the design, and no one can agree on what the buildings should be about. These memorials have become receptacles for much larger heated political debates. When there’s actually argument and debate over what these things represent, when other people step onstage and claim those objects for their own, public art makes a huge shift. That’s the grand moment of the 1930s.

You mention the rebuilding of the Twin Towers. If a contemporary muralist was commissioned to paint in one of the new edifices, what images do you think modern officials would be inclined to suppress?

I don’t know if there is a single image that would do it. In the 1930s, it was the specter of communism. Today — I suppose, anything to do with the increasing coloring of our population, or our increasing transnational sensibility. One of the unspoken but very palpable assumptions on the part of conservatives is that there’s a core set of American values . . . and yet everyone, or at least most thoughtful people, realizes that’s not so. America isn’t simple and neat. There are competing understandings of loyalty, allegiance, community, and collectivity at work; there are fractured and multiple allegiances going on at once. This has always been threatening — difference has never been easily accommodated in a monolithic vision of Americanism — particularly since September 11, when "American" is as much an evil word as it is a good word. It’s no longer possible to hold onto a monolithic vision of Americanism, as some conservative officials would like to believe. Suppressing that knowledge might be one of their last feeble acts.

Te-Ping Chen can be reached at teping.chen@gmail.com.