Thoughts That Cure Radically: Diego Rivera ‘Murals for the Museum of Modern Art’ Museum of Modern Art

In 1931 the Museum of Modern Art hosted its second solo exhibition (after Henri Matisse) for the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Unable to move his large frescos from their perches in Mexico, San Francisco and Moscow, Rivera instead painted a series of eight portable cement slab murals in Midtown Manhattan. Reunited at MOMA are five of the eight murals in an exhibition curated by Leah Dickerman, who had recently organized the ‘Bauhaus: Workshop of Modernity’ survey in 2009. Just as the Bauhaus artists had an anti-war and utopian undertone that jived well with the left’s disillusionment with Obama’s handling of the Afghan offensive, so Rivera’s murals speak to our own economic anxieties. Rivera tapped into the mood of the Depression through his depiction of down-on-its luck New York, as well as his usual indigenous Mexican themes. Rivera, an avowed communist who had run afoul of the Party in Moscow and Mexico, felt no compunction about taking a commission from the super-rich Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the founding member of the Museum. In addition to the five murals displayed are several large cartoon drawings, smaller sketchbooks and related ephemera that help flesh out the picture of Rivera’s time in New York. Explored in Rivera’s murals are his usual themes of power and the oppressed envisioned in Manichean binaries. Compositionally elegant, up close his paintings displays the inherent weakness of the fresco technique. Made by combining pigment to a quick drying lime binder, fresco once applied to a wall becomes as hard as cement and equally unmovable. Fresco, meant to be seen far off (in a chapel or on the top of a ceiling), up close the colors appear pasty and washed out. Rivera’s color and paint handling flattens his actors—already verging on the caricature—into an otherwise well balanced composition. Unfortunately, Rivera’s technique heightens his underlying weakness as an artist. While topical and compelling, Rivera’s murals fail to convince as artistic and revolutionary stratagems. Never meeting a person who did not play to type (the earth goddess peasant, the charismatic revolutionary, the big bad capitalist), Rivera’s murals too often fall flat into shallow space and shallower emotional resonance. Several of the large cartoon drawings (drawings sized to the dimensions of the final painting) become in the end, cartoon-like in their theatricality. Too often the forms move towards generalities, the elision standing for the particular utterance. Rivera, who missed the Mexican Revolution while producing second rate Cubist paintings in Paris, harangues the viewers with his politics. Instead of dooming him to obscurity, his politics have made him instead into something worse, a populist who is all too popular.

Diego Rivera

Electric Power, 1931–32

Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanized-steel framework

58 1/16 x 94 1/8" (147.5 x 239 cm)

Private collection, Mexico


	Diego Rivera Frozen Assets, 1931–32 Fresco on reinforced cement in a galvanized-steel framework 94 1/8 x 74 3/16" (239 x 188.5 cm) Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico


	Diego Rivera Indian Warrior, 1931 Fresco on reinforced cement in a metal framework 41 x 52 1/2 x 3" (104.1 x 133.4 x 7.6 cm)


	Diego Rivera Agrarian Leader Zapata, 1931 Fresco on reinforced cement in galvanized-steel framework 7' 9 3/4" x 6' 2" (238.1 x 188 cm) Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund